Lester held up a hand. “We don’t have any market research, Kettlewell, because we don’t have a business-manager on the team anymore. Perry’s been taking that over as well as his regular work, and he’s been working himself sick for you. We’re flying by the seat of our pants here because you haven’t sent us a pilot.”“You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?” Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Suzanne very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough.Kettlewell noticed. “Get out,” he said. “I want to talk with these two alone.”“No,” Suzanne said. “That’s not our deal. I get to document everything.That’sthe deal.”Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry’s desk and collapsed into it.“Put the notebook away, Suzanne, please?”She silently shook her head at him. He locked eyes with her for a moment, then nodded curtly. She resumed writing.“Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It’s about ten, fifteen percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by sixty percent or more.”“They’re going to short us because they don’t like what we’ve done here?” Perry said. “Christ, that’s ridiculous!”Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. “No, Perry, no. They’re doing it because they can’t figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there’s not enough of them. We’ve only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so ninety percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects—the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we’ve got are little projects.”“So it’s not our fault then, is it?” Lester said. Perry was staring out the window.“No, it’s not your fault, but this doesn’t help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe.”“Calm down, Landon,” Perry said. “Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?”Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. “Go ahead.”“There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities.”Suzanne nodded. “They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs.”“There’s something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited—think of how a homeless person can’t take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn’t have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too—they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any UN SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It’s what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it’s there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can’t buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time—why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money—”Kettlewell held up a hand. “I like the theory. It’s a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?”“We’re it,” Perry said. “This place, right here. There’s no numbers to prove what I’m saying is right because everyone who knows it’s right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we’re allowed to do this—right here we can prove it. We’ve got the capital in our account, we’re profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company.”Suzanne was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan’s leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning.Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Suzanne was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at.Francis took the news calmly. “Sound business strategy. Basically, it’s what I’ve been telling you to do all along, so I’m bound to like it.”It took a couple weeks to hive off the Home Aware stuff to some of the other Kodacell business-units. Perry flew a bunch, spending days in Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan overseeing the retooling efforts that would let him focus on his new project.By the time he got back, Lester had retooled their own workspace, converting it to four functional areas: communications, shelter, food and entertainment. “They were Francis’s idea,” he said. Francis’s gimpy leg was bothering him more and more, but he’d overseen the work from a rolling ergonomic office-chair. “It’s his version of the hierarchy of needs—stuff he knows for sure we can sell.”It was the first time the boys had launched something new without knowing what it was, where they’d started with a niche and decided to fill it instead of starting with an idea and looking for a niche for it.“You’re going to underestimate the research time,” Francis said during one of their flip-chart brainstorms, where they had been covering sheet after sheet with ideas for products they could build. “Everyone underestimates research time. Deciding what to make is always harder than making it.” He’d been drinking less since he’d gotten involved in the retooling effort, waking earlier, bossing around his young-blood posse to get him paper, bricks, Tinkertoys.He was right. Suzanne steadily recorded the weeks ticking by as the four competing labs focus-grouped, designed, tested and scrapped all manner of “tchotchkes for tramps,” as Freddy had dubbed it in a spiraling series of ever-more-bilious columns. But the press was mostly positive: camera crews liked to come by and shoot the compound. One time, the pretty black reporter from the night of the fire came by and said very nice things during her standup. Her name was Maria and she was happy to talk shop with Suzanne, endlessly fascinated by a “real” journalist who’d gone permanently slumming on the Internet.“The problem is that all this stuff is too specialized, it has too many prerequisites,” Perry said, staring at a waterproof, cement-impregnated bag that could be filled with a hose, allowed to dry, and used as a self-contained room. “This thing is great for refugees, but it’s too one-size-fits all for squatters. They have to be able to heavily customize everything they use to fit into really specialized niches.”More squatters had arrived to take up residence with them—families, friends, a couple of dodgy drifters—and a third story was going onto the buildings in the camp. They were even more Dr Seussian than the first round, idiosyncratic structures that had to be built light to avoid crushing the floors below them, hanging out over the narrow streets, corkscrewing like vines seeking sun.He kept staring, and would have been staring still had he not heard the sirens. Three blue-and-white Broward County sheriff’s cars were racing down the access road into their dead mall, sirens howling, lights blazing.They screeched to a halt at the shantytown’s edge and their doors flew open. Four cops moved quickly into the shantytown, while two more worked the radios, sheltering by the cars.“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. He ran for the door, but Suzanne grabbed him.“Don’t run toward armed cops,” she said. “Don’t do anything that looks threatening. Slow down, Perry.”He took a couple deep breaths. Then he looked around his lab for a while, frantically muttering, “Where the fuck did I put it?”“Use Home Aware,” she said. He shook his head, grimaced, went to a keyboard and typed MEGAPHONE. One of the lab-drawers started to throb with a white glow.He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window.“ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?”The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop.“SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.”“WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?”The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third.Perry ran for the door and Suzanne chased after him, trying to stop him. The cops at the cars were talking intently into their radios, though it was impossible to know if they were talking to their comrades in the shantytown or to their headquarters. Perry burst out of the factory door and there was another shot and he spun around, staggered back a step, and fell down like a sack of grain. There was blood around his head. Suzanne stuck her hand in her mouth to stifle a scream and stood helplessly in the doorway of the workshop, just a few paces from Perry.Lester came up behind her and firmly moved her aside. He lumbered deliberately and slowly and fearlessly to Perry’s side, knelt beside him, touched him gently. His face was grey. Perry thrashed softly and Suzanne let out a sound like a cry, then remembered herself and took out her camera and began to shoot and shoot and shoot: the cops, Lester with Perry like a tragic Pieta, the shantytowners running back and forth screaming. Snap of the cops getting out of their cars, guns in hands, snap of them fanning out around the shantytown, snap of them coming closer and closer, snap of a cop pointing his gun at Lester, ordering him away from Perry, snap of a cop approaching her.“It’s live,” she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. “Going out live to my blog. Daily readership half a million. They’re watching you now, every move. Do you understand?”The officer said, “Put the camera down, ma’am.”She held the camera. “I can’t quote the First Amendment from memory, not exactly, but I know it well enough that I’m not moving this camera. It’s live, you understand—every move is going out live, right now.”The officer stepped back, turned his head, muttered in his mic.“There’s an ambulance coming,” he said. “Your friend was shot with a nonlethal rubber bullet.”“He’s bleeding from the head,” Lester said. “From the eye.”Suzanne shuddered.Ambulance sirens in the distance. Lester stroked Perry’s hair. Suzanne took a step back and panned it over Perry’s ruined face, bloody and swollen. The rubber bullet must have taken him either right in the eye or just over it.“Perry Mason Gibbons was unarmed and posed no threat to Sheriff’s Deputy Badge Number 5724—” she zoomed in on it—“when he was shot with a rubber bullet in the eye. He is unconscious and bloody on the ground in front of the workshop where he has worked quietly and unassumingly to invent and manufacture new technologies.”The cop knew when to cut his losses. He turned aside and walked back into the shantytown, leaving Suzanne to turn her camera on Perry, on the EMTs who evacced him to the ambulance, on the three injured shantytowners who were on the ambulance with him, on the corpse they wheeled out on his own gurney, one of the newcomers to the shantytown, a man she didn’t recognize.They operated on Perry all that night, gingerly tweezing fragments of bone from his shattered left orbit out of his eye and face. Some had floated to the back of the socket and posed a special risk of brain damage, the doctor explained into her camera.Lester was a rock, sitting silently in the waiting room, talking calmly and firmly with the cops and over the phone to Kettlewell and the specially impaneled board-room full of Kodacell lawyers who wanted to micromanage this. Rat-Toothed Freddy filed a column in which he called her a “grandstanding bint,” and accused Kodacell of harboring dangerous fugitives. He’d dug up the fact that one of the newcomers to the shantytown—not the one they’d killed, that was a bystander—was wanted for holding up a liquor-store with a corkscrew the year before.Lester unscrewed his earphone and scrubbed at his eyes. Impulsively, she leaned over and gave him a hug. He stiffened up at first but then relaxed and enfolded her in his huge, warm arms. She could barely make her arms meet around his broad, soft back—it was like hugging a giant loaf of bread. She squeezed tighter and he did too. He was a good hugger.“You holding in there, kiddo?” she said.“Yeah,” he murmured into her neck. “No.” He squeezed tighter. “As well as I need to, anyway.”The doctor pried them apart to tell them that the EEG and fMRI were both negative for any brain-damage, and that they’d managed to salvage the eye, probably. Kodacell was springing for all the care he needed, cash money, no dorking around with the fucking HMO, so the doctors had put him through every machine on the premises in a series of farcically expensive tests.“I hope they sue the cops for the costs,” the doctor said. She was Pakistani or Bangladeshi, with a faint accent, and very pretty even with the dark circles under her eyes. “I read your columns,” she said, shaking Suzanne’s hand. “I admire the work you do,” she said, shaking Lester’s hand. “I was born in Delhi. We were squatters who were given a deed to our home and then evicted because we couldn’t pay the taxes. We had to build again, in the rains, outside of the city, and then again when we were evicted again.”She had two brothers who were working for startups like Kodacell’s, but run by other firms: one was backed by McDonald’s, the other by the AFL-CIO’s investment arm. Suzanne did a little interview with her about her brothers’ projects—a bike-helmet that had been algorithmically evolved for minimum weight and maximum protection; a smart skylight that deformed itself to follow light based on simple phototropic controllers. The brother working on bike-helmets was riding a tiger and could barely keep up with orders; he was consuming about half of the operational capacity of the McDonald’s network and climbing fast.Lester joined in, digging on the details. He’d been following the skylights in blogs and on a list or two, and he’d heard of the doctor’s brother, which really tweaked her, she was visibly proud of her family.“But your work is most important. Things for the homeless. We get them in here sometimes, hurt, off the ambulances. We usually turn them away again. The ones who sell off the highway medians and at the traffic lights.” Suzanne had seen them, selling homemade cookies, oranges, flowers, newspapers, plasticky toys, sad or beautiful handicrafts. She had a carved coconut covered in intricate scrimshaw that she’d bought from a little girl who was all skin and bones except for her malnourished pot-belly.“They get hit by cars?”“Yes,” the doctor said. “Deliberately, too. Or beaten up.”Perry was moved out of the operating theater to a recovery room and then to a private room and by then they were ready to collapse, though there was so much email in response to her posts that she ended up pounding on her computer’s keyboard all the way home as Lester drove them, squeezing the bridge of his nose to stay awake. She didn’t even take her clothes off before collapsing into bed.“They need the tools to make any other tools,” is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They’d shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn’t going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he’d looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate.“They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it.” He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the three-d printer and scanner setups. “I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves.”Francis shifted in his seat. “What are they supposed to do with those?”“Everything,” Perry said, his eye glinting. “Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids’ toys—if it’s in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fuckingfish. No top-down ’solutions’ driven by ’market research’”—his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm—“the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny.”They put up the sign that night: AUTHOR OF YOUR OWN DESTINY, hung over the workshop door. Suzanne trailed after Perry transcribing the rants that spilled out of his mouth as he explained it to Lester and Francis, and then to Kettlewell when he called, and then to the pretty young black lady from the TV who by now had figured out that there was a real story in her backyard, then to an NPR man on the phone, and then to a CNN crew who drove in from Miami and filmed the shantytown and the workshop like Japanese tourists at Disney World, never having ventured into the skanky, failed strip-mall suburbs just outside of town.Francis had a protege who had a real dab touch with the 3-D printers. The manufacturer, Lester’s former employer, had been out of business for two years by then, so all the service on the machines had to be done on the premises. Francis’s protege—the one who claimed his mother had pushed his father under a bus, his name was Jason—watched Lester work on recalcitrant machines silently for a couple days, then started to hand him the tool he needed next without having to be asked. Then he diagnosed a problem that had stumped Lester all morning. Then he suggested an improvement to the feedstock pump that increased the mean time between failures by a couple hours.“No, man, no, not like that,” Jason said to one of the small gang of boys he was bossing. “Gently, or you’ll snap it off.” The boy snapped it off and Jason pulled another replacement part out of a tub and said, “See, likethis,” and snapped it on. The small gang of boys regarded him with something like awe.“How come no girls?” Suzanne said as she interviewed him while he took a smoke-break. Perry had banned cigarettes from all indoor workshops, nominally to keep flames away from the various industrial chemicals and such, but really just to encourage the shantytowners to give up the habit that they couldn’t afford anyway. He’d also leaned on the shantytowners who’d opened up small shops in their houses to keep cigs out of the town, without a lot of success.“Girls aren’t interested in this stuff, lady.”“You think?” There was a time when she would have objected, but it was better to let these guys say it out loud, hear themselves say it.“No. Maybe where you come from, OK? Don’t know. But here girls are different. They do good in school but when they have babies they’re done. I mean, hey, it’s not like I don’twantgirls in the team, they’d be great. I love girls. They fuckin’work, you know. No bullshit, no screwing around. But I know every girl in this place and none of ’em are even interested, OK?”Suzanne cocked one eyebrow just a little and Jason shifted uncomfortably. He scratched his bare midriff and shuffled. “I do, all of them. Why would they? One girl, a roomful of boys, it’d be gross. They’d act like jerks. There’s no way we’d get anything done.”Suzanne lifted her eyebrow one hair higher. He squirmed harder.“So all right, that’s not their fault. But I got enough work, all right? Too much to do without spending time on that. It’s not like any girls haveaskedto join up. I’m not keeping them out.”Suzanne jotted a couple of notes, keeping perfectly mum.“Well, I’d like to have them in the workshop, OK? Maybe I should ask some of them if they’d come. Shit, if I can teach these apes, I can teach a girl. They’re smart. Girls’d make this place a little better to work in. Lots of them trying to support their families, so they need the money, too.”There was a girl there by the afternoon. The next day, there were two more. They seemed like quick studies, despite their youth and their lip-gloss. Suzanne approved.Lester stayed long enough to see the first prototype printer-printers running, then he lit out with a duffel bag jammed into the back of his modded Smart car. “Where are you going?” Suzanne said as Perry looked on gloomily. “I’ll come and visit you. I want to follow your story.” Truth be told, she was sorry to see him go, very sorry. He was such a rock, such an anchor for Perry’s new crazy pirate energy and for the madness around them. He hadn’t given much notice (not to her—Perry didn’t seem that surprised).“I can’t really talk about it,” he said. “Nondisclosure.”“So it’s a new job,” she said. “You’re going to work for Tjan?” Tjan’s Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the eastern seaboard, ten in the midwest and was rumored to have twice as many in Eastern Europe.He grinned. “Oh, Suzanne, don’t try to journalist me.” He reached out and hugged her in a cloud of her father’s cologne. “You’re fantastic, you know that? No, I’m not going to a job. It’s a thing that’s an amazing opportunity, you know?”She didn’t, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him.Perry and she went out for dinner in Miami the next night with a PhD candidate from Pepperdine’s B-school, eating at the same deco patio that she’d dined at with Tjan. Perry wore a white shirt open to reveal his tangle of wiry chest hair and the waitress couldn’t keep her eyes off of him. He had a permanent squint now, and a scar that made his eyebrow into a series of small hills.“I was just in Greensboro, Miss,” the PhD candidate said. He was in his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small goatee. “I used to spend summers there with my grandpa.” He talked fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. “There wasn’tanythingleft there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven, shit, they’d even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it’saliveagain, it’s buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They’re doing the dumbest things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that yodel like hillbillies.”“I’d buy a tooled-leather laptop case,” Perry said, swilling a sweaty bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy scalp.“The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which it hasn’t been in like a hundred years. If you’re not inventing stuff, you’re keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It’s like a tiny, distributed gold rush.”“Or like the New Deal,” Suzanne said. That was how she’d come to invite him down, after she’d read his paper coining the term New Work to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt’s public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression.“Yeah, exactly, exactly! I’ve got research that shows that one in five Americans is employed in the New Work industry. Twenty percent!”Perry’s lazy eye opened a little wider. “No way,” he said.“Way,” the PhD candidate said. He finished his caipirinha and shook the crushed ice at a passing waiter, who nodded and ambled to the bar to get him a fresh one. “You should get on the road and write about some of these guys,” he said to Suzanne. “They need some ink, some phosphors. They’re pulling up stakes and moving to the small towns their parents came from, or to abandoned suburbs, and justdoing it. Bravest fucking thing you’ve seen in your life.”The PhD candidate stayed out the week, and went home with a suitcase full of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer that could print out all of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer.Lester emailed her from wherever it was he’d gone, and told her about the lovely time he was having. It made her miss him sharply. Perry was hardly ever around for her now, buried in his work, buried with the kids from the shantytown and with Francis. She looked over her last month’s blogs and realized that she’d been turning in variations on the same theme for all that time. She knew it was time to pack a duffel bag of her own and go see the bravest fucking thing she’d seen in her life.“Bye, Perry,” she said, stopping by his workbench. He looked up at her and saw the bag and his funny eyebrow wobbled.“Leaving for good?” he said. He sounded unexpectedly bitter.“No!” she said. “No! Just a couple weeks. Going to get the rest of the story. But I’ll be back, count on it.”He grunted and slumped. He was looking a lot older now, and beaten down. His hair, growing out, was half grey, and he’d gotten gaunt, his cheekbones and forehead springing out of his face. On impulse, she gave him a hug like the ones she’d shared with Lester. He returned it woodenly at first, then with genuine warmth. “I will be back, you know,” she said. “You’ve got plenty to do here, anyway.”“Yeah,” he said. “Course I do.”She kissed him firmly on the cheek and stepped out the door and into her car and drove to Miami International.Tjan met her at Logan and took her bag. “I’m surprised you had the time to meet me,” she said. The months had been good to him, slimming down his pot-belly and putting a twinkle in his eye.“I’ve got a good organization,” he said, as they motored away toward Rhode Island, through strip-mall suburbs and past boarded-up chain restaurants. Everywhere there were signs of industry: workshops in old storefronts, roadside stands selling disposable music players, digital whoopee cushions, and so forth. “I barely have to put in an appearance.”Tjan yawned hugely and constantly. “Jet-lag,” he apologized. “Got back from Russia a couple days ago.”“Did you see your kids?” she said. “How’s business there?”“I saw my kids,” he said, and grinned. “They’re amazing, you know that? Good kids, unbelievably smart. Real little operators. The older one, Lyenitchka, is running a baby-sitting service—not baby-sitting herself, you see, but recruiting other kids to do the sitting for her while she skims a management fee and runs the quality control.”“She’s your daughter all right,” she said. “So tell me everything about the Westinghouse projects.”She’d been following them, of course, lots of different little startups, each with its own blogs and such. But Tjan was quite fearless about taking her through their profits and losses and taking notes on it all kept her busy until she reached her hotel. Tjan dropped her off and promised to pick her up the next morning for a VIP tour of the best of his teams, and she went to check in.She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. “Suzanne bloody Church! What are you doing here, love?”The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy.“Hey, Freddy,” she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, and he swallowed and smiled wetly. “Nice to see you.”“Fantastic to see you, too! I’m here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you’re here for, too?”“No,” she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn’t planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. “Well, nice to see you.”“Oh, do stay for a drink,” he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark’s smile. “Come on—they have a free cocktail hour in this place. I’ll have to report you to the journalist’s union if you turn down a free drink.”“I don’t think ’bloggers’ have to worry about the journalist’s union,” she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn’t get the message. He still didn’t. He laughed instead.“Oh, love, I’m sure they’ll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith.”“Good night, Freddy,” was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth.“OK, good night,” he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped.“Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, meanspirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn’t piss on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the fuck out of my way before I kick your tiny little testicles up through the roof of your reeking mouth.”She said it quietly, but the desk-clerks behind her overheard it anyway and giggled. Freddy’s smile only wobbled, but then returned, broader than ever.“Well said,” he said and gave her a single golf-clap. “Sleep well, Suzanne.”She boiled all the way to her room and when she came over hungry, she ordered in room service, not wanting to take the chance that Rat-Toothed Freddy would still be in the lobby.Tjan met her as she was finishing her coffee in the breakfast room. She hadn’t seen Freddy yet.“I’ve got five projects slated for you to visit today,” Tjan said, sliding into the booth beside her. Funnily now that he was in the cold northeast, he was dressing like a Floridian in blue jeans and a Hawai’ian barkcloth shirt with a bright spatter of pineapples and Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. Back in Florida, he’d favored unflattering nylon slacks and white shirts with ironed collars.The projects were fascinating and familiar. The cultural differences that distinguished New England New Work from Florida New Work were small but telling: a lot more woodcraft, in a part of the country where many people had grown up in their grandfathers’ woodworking shops. A little more unreflexive kitsch, like the homely kittens and puppies that marched around the reactive, waterproof, smash-proof screens integrated into a bio-monitoring crib.At the fourth site, she was ambushed by a flying hug. Tjan laughed as she nearly went down under the weight of a strong, young woman who flung her arms around Suzanne’s neck. “Holycrapit’s good to see you!”Suzanne untangled herself and got a look at her hugger. She had short mousy hair, twinkling blue eyes, and was dressed in overalls and a pretty flowered blouse, scuffed work boots and stained and torn work-gloves. “Uh...” she said, then it clicked. “Fiona?”“Yeah! Didn’t Tjan tell you I was here?” The last time she’d seen this woman, she was weeping over pizza and getting ready to give up on life. Now she was practically vibrating.“Uh, no,” she said, shooting a look at Tjan, who was smiling like the Buddha and pretending to inspect a pair of shoes with gyroscopically stabilized retractable wheels in the heels.“I’ve been here for months! I went back to Oregon, like you told me to, and then I saw a recruiting ad for Westinghouse and I sent them my CV and then I got a videoconference interview and then, bam, I was on an airplane to Rhode Island!”Suzanne blinked.Itold you to go back to Oregon? Well, maybe she had. That was a lifetime ago.The workshop was another dead mall, this one a horseshoe of storefronts separated by flimsy gyprock. The Westinghousers had cut through the walls with drywall knives to join all the stores together. The air was permeated with the familiar Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave tang of three-d printers. The parking lot was given over to some larger apparatus and a fantastical children’s jungle-gym in the shape of a baroque, spired pirate fortress, with elegantly curved turrets, corkscrew sky-bridges, and flying buttresses crusted over with ornate, grotesque gargoyles. Children swarmed over it like ants, screeching with pleasure.“Well, you’re looking really good, Fiona,” Suzanne said.Still not great with people, she thought. Fiona, though, was indeed looking good, and beaming. She wasn’t wearing the crust of cosmetics and hair-care products she’d affected in the corporate Silicon Valley world. She glowed pink.“Suzanne,” Fiona said, getting serious now, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. “I can’t thank you enough for this. This has saved my life. It gave me something to live for. For the first time in my life, I am doing something I’m proud of. I go to bed every night thankful and happy that I ended up here. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you.”Suzanne tried not to squirm. Fiona gave her another long hug. “It’s all your doing,” Suzanne said at last. “I just told you about it. You’ve made this happen for you, OK?”“OK,” Fiona said, “but I still wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I love you, Suzanne.”Ick. Suzanne gave her another perfunctory hug and got the hell out of Dodge.“What’s with the jungle-gym?” It really had been something, fun and Martian-looking.“That’s the big one,” Tjan said with a big grin. “Most people don’t even notice it, they think it’s daycare or something. Well, that’s how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so that the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically: now it’s a self-modifying jungle-gym. The kids love it. It is the crack cocaine of jungle-gyms, though we won’t be using that in the marketing copy, of course.”“Of course,” Suzanne said drily. She’d automatically reached for her notepad and started writing when Tjan started talking. Now, reviewing her notes, she knew that she was going to have to go back and get some photos of this. She asked Tjan about it.“The robots go all night, you know. Not much sleep if you do that.”No going back to the hotel to see Freddy, what a pity. “I’ll grab a couple blankets from the hotel to keep warm,” she said.“Oh, you needn’t,” he said. “That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It’s pretty gorgeous, if you ask me.”They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Suzanne ensconced herself at someone’s vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on email before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket amid a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters’ roar.Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn’t have much by way of hands at their ends. “We just use rare-earth magnets,” Fiona said. “Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars.”Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together withsnicksounds that were audible over the whine of their motors.Suzanne switched on her camera’s night-vision mode and got shooting. “Where did you get all these robots?”Tjan grinned. “It’s an open design—the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There’s a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren’t proprietary enough and they were worried that they’d have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though.”The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, shifting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch.“Can I go out and have a look?” she said. “I mean, is it safe?”“Sure,” Fiona said. “Of course! Our robots won’t harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction.”“Still, try to stay out of their way,” Tjan said. “Some of that stuff they’re moving around is heavy.”So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off.Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Standing there amid the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she’d arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity’s creations had evolved past their inventors.She was going to have to do alotof writing before bed.Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she passed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy.She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams.Another three weeks of this stuff and she’d get to go home—Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling.It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn’t been her idea, she’d been dragged back by impassioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who’d rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them.The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disassembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts’ interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams with their latest bail-out and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they’d won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew.Lester emailed her and said that he’d seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he’d be in town too?They ate at Devil’s Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades’ worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Devil’s Night was the pre-Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings, and all of Brush Park had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs.Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement, and glass to preserve the look of a burned out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way glass that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below.Suzanne showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decades since she’d left. She was flustered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread.When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn’t there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days’ stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton shirt underneath. He was beaming at her.“Suzanne,” he said.Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. “Lester?” she said, wonderingly.He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands.When he let go of her, he laughed again. “Oh, Suzanne, I couldnothave asked for any better reaction than this.Thank you.” They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he.“Lester?” she said again.“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders.”Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Suzanne picked one at random. So did Lester.“So,” he said, patting his washboard tummy. “You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?”“Can I take notes?” Suzanne said, pulling out her pad.“Oh by all means,” he said. “I got a discount on my treatments on the basis that you would end up taking notes.”The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn’t want to pay US prices for crowns. The treatment hadn’t originated there: The electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that the body burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still.But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks.“Is that safe?” she said.“Everyone asks that,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, it’s safe if they’re monitoring you and standing by with lots of diagnostic equipment. But if you’re willing to take slower losses, you can go on a way less intensive regime that won’t require supervision. This stuff is the next big grey-market pharma gold. They’re violating all kinds of pharma patents, of course, but that’s what Cuba and Canada are for, right? Inside of a year, every fat person in America is going to have a bottle of pills in his pocket, and inside of two years, there won’t be any fat people.”She shook her head. “You look... Lester, you lookincredible. I’m so proud of you.”He ducked his head. He really did look amazing. Dropping the weight had taken off ten years, and between that and the haircut and the new clothes, he was practically unrecognizable.“Does Perry know?”“Yeah,” Lester said. “I talked it over with him before I opted for it. Tjan had mentioned it in passing, it was a business his ex-wife was tangled up with through her mafiyeh connections, and once I had researched it online and talked to some people who’d had the treatment, including a couple MDs, I decided to just do it.”It had cost nearly everything he’d made from Kodacell, but it was a small price to pay. He insisted on getting dinner.Afterward, they strolled through the fragrant evening down Woodward Avenue, past the deco skyscrapers and the plowed fields and community gardens, their livestock pens making soft animal noises.“It’s wonderful to see you again, Lester,” she said truthfully. She’d really missed him, even though his participation on her message boards had hardly let up (though it had started coming in at weird hours, something explained by the fact that he’d been in Russia). Walking alongside of him, smelling his smell, seeing him only out of the corner of her eye, it was like nothing had changed.“It’s great to see you again too.” Tentatively, he took her hand in his big paw. His hand was warm but not sweaty, and she realized it had been a long time since anyone had held her hand. Heart pounding, she gave his hand a squeeze.Their conversation and their walk rambled on, with no outward acknowledgment of the contact of hand on hand, but her hand squeezed his softly now and again, or he squeezed hers, and then they were at her hotel.How did that happen?she asked herself.But then they were having a nightcap, and then he was in the elevator with her and then he was at the door of her room, and the blood was roaring in her ears as she stuck her credit-card in the reader to open it.Wait, she tried to say.Lester, hang on a second,is what she tried to say, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. He stepped through the door with her, then said, “Uh, I need to use the bathroom.”With relief, she directed him to the small water closet. The room was basic—now that she was her own boss, she wasn’t springing for Crowne Plazas and Hiltons, this was practically a coffin—and there was nowhere to sit except the bed. Her laptop was open and there was a lot of email in her inbox, but for once, she didn’t care. She was keenly attuned to the water noises coming from behind the door, each new sound making her jump a little. What was he doing in there, inserting a fucking diaphragm?She heard him work the latch on the door and she put on her best smile. Her stomach was full of butterflies. He smiled back and sat down on the bed next to her, taking her hand again. His hand was moist from being washed, and a little slippery. She didn’t mind. Wordlessly, she put her head on his barrel chest. His heart was racing, and so was hers.Gradually, they leaned back, until they were side by side on the bed, her head still on his chest. Moving like she was in a dream, she lifted her head from his chest and stared into his eyes. They were wide and scared. She kissed him, softly. His lips were trembling and unyielding. She kissed him more insistently, running her hands over his chest and shoulders, putting one leg over him. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. He wasn’t bad, but he was scared or nervous and all jittery.She kissed his throat, breathing in the smell, savoring the rough texture of his three-day beard. Tentatively, he put his hands on her back, stroked her, worked gradually towards her bottom. Then he stopped.“What’s wrong?” she said, propping herself up on her forearms, still straddling him.She saw that there were tears in his eyes.“Lester? What’s wrong?”He opened his mouth and then shut it. Tears slid off his face into his ears. She blotted them with a corner of hotel-pillow.She stroked his hair. “Lester?”He gave out a choked sob and pushed her away. He sat up and put his face in his hands. His back heaved. She stroked his shoulders tentatively.Finally, he seemed to get himself under control. He sniffled.“I have to go,” he said.“Lester, what’swrong?”“I can’t do this,” he said. “I...”“Just tell me,” she said. “Whatever it is, tell me.”“You didn’t want me before.” He said it simply without accusation, but it stung like he’d slapped her in the face.“Oh, Lester,” she said, moving to hug him, but he pushed her away.“I have to go,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He was tall, though he’d never seemed it before, but oh, he was tall, six foot four or taller. He filled the room. His eyes were red and swollen, but he put on a smile for her. “Thanks, Suzanne. It was really good to see you again. I’ll see you in Florida.”She stood up and moved quickly to him, stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him fiercely. He hugged her back and she kissed him on the cheek.“I’ll see you in Florida,” she said.And then he was gone. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for tears, but they didn’t come. So she picked up her laptop and started to work through her mountain of email.When she saw him again, he was coming down the drive leading to the shantytown and the factory. She was having tea in the tea-room that had opened in a corkscrew spire high above the rest of the shantytown. The lady who operated it called herself Mrs Torrence, and she was exquisitely antique but by no means frail, and when she worked the ropes on her dumbwaiter to bring up supplies from the loading area on the ground, her biceps stood at attention like Popeye’s. There was a rumor that Mrs Torrence used to be a man, or still was, under her skirts, but Suzanne didn’t pay attention to it.Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of Ewoks listening to C3PO.“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their three-d printer project.“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to beeasy. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for a meth lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.Suzanne took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks at a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.The response was amazing. Every TV news-crew in the greater Miami area made a pilgrimage to their factory to film Lester working in a tight t-shirt over a three-d printer, wrangling huge vats of epoxy-mix goop in the sun with sweat beading over his big, straining biceps.Her message boards exploded. It seemed that a heretofore unsuspected contingent of her growing readership was substantially obese. And they had friends. Lester eventually gave up on posting, just so he could get some work done. They had the printers to the point where they could turn out new printers, but the whole system was temperamental and needed careful nursing. Lester was more interested in what people had to say on the engineering message-boards than chatting with the fatties.The fatties were skeptical and hopeful in equal measures. The big fight was over whether there was anything to this, whether Lester would keep the weight off, whether the new skinny Lester was really Lester, whether he’d undergone surgery or had his stomach stapled. America’s wallets had been cleaned out by so many snake-oil peddlers with a “cure” for obesity that no one could believe what they saw, no matter how much they wanted to.Lord, but it was bringing in the readers, not to mention the advertising dollars. The clearing price for a thousand weight-loss ads targeted to affluent, obese English-speakers was over fifty bucks, as compared with her customary CPM of three bucks a thou. Inside of a week, she’d made enough to buy a car. It was weird being her own circulation and ad-sales department, but it wasn’t as hard as she’d worried it might be—and it was intensely satisfying to have such a nose-to-tail understanding of the economics of her production.“You should go,” Lester told her as she clicked him through her earnings spreadsheet. “Jesus, this is insane. You know that these fatties actually follow me around on the net now, asking me questions in message boards about engineering? The board moderators are asking me to post under an assumed name. Madame, your public has spoken. There is a dire need for your skills in St Petersburg. Go. They have chandeliers in the subways and caviar on tap. All the blini you can eat. Bear steaks.”She shook her head and slurped at the tea he’d brought her. “You’re joking. It’s all mafiyeh there. Scary stuff. Besides, I’m covering this beat right now, New Work.”“New Work isn’t going anywhere, Suzanne. We’ll be here when you get back. And this story is one that needs your touch. They’re micro-entrepreneurs solving post-industrial problems. It’s the same story you’ve been covering here, but with a different angle. Take that money and buy yourself a business-class ticket to St Petersburg and spend a couple weeks on the job. You’ll clean up. They could use the publicity, too—someone to go and drill down on which clinics are legit and which ones are clip-joints. You’re perfect for the gig.”“I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. Taking big chances had gotten her this far and it would take her farther, she knew. The world was your oyster if you could stomach a little risk.“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hell yeah. You’re totally right, Lester.”“Zasterovyeh!”“What you said!”“It’s cheers,” he said. “You’ll need to know that if you’re going to make time in Petrograd. Let me go send some email and get you set up. You book a ticket.”And just like that she was off to Russia. Lester insisted that she buy a business-class ticket, and she discovered to her bemusement that British Airways had about three classes above business, presumably with even more exclusive classes reserved to royalty and peers of the realm. She luxuriated in fourteen hours of reclining seats and warm peanuts and in-flight connectivity, running a brief videoconference with Lester just because she could. Tjan had sent her a guide to the hotels and she’d opted for the Pribaltiyskaya, a crumbling Stalin-era four-star of spectacular, Vegasesque dimensions. The facade revealed the tragedy of the USSR’s unrequited love-affair with concrete, as did the cracks running up the walls of the lobby.They checked her into the hotel with the nosiest questionnaire ever, a two-pager on government stationary that demanded to know her profession, employer, city of birth, details of family, and so forth. An American businessman next to her at the check-in counter saw her puzzling over it. “Just make stuff up,” he said. “I always write that I come from 123 Fake Street, Anytown, California, and that I work as a professional paper-hanger. They don’t check on it, except maybe the mob when they’re figuring out who to mug. First time in Russia?”“It shows, huh?”“You get used to it,” he said. “I come here every month on business. You just need to understand that if it seems ridiculous and too bad to be true, it is. They have lots of rules here, but no one follows ’em. Just ignore any unreasonable request and you’ll fit right in.”“That’s good advice,” she said. He was middle-aged, but so was she, and he had nice eyes and no wedding ring.“Get a whole night’s sleep, don’t drink the so-called ’champagne’ and don’t change money on the streets. Did you bring melatonin and modafinil?”She stared blankly at him. “Drugs?”“Sure. One tonight to sleep, one in the morning to wake up, and do it again tomorrow and you’ll be un-lagged. No booze or caffeine, either, not for the first couple days. Melatonin’s over the counter, even in the States, and modafinil’s practically legal. I have extra, here.” He dug in his travel bag and came up with some generic Walgreens bottles.“That’s OK,” she said, handing her credit card to a pretty young clerk. “Thanks, though.”He shook his head. “It’s your funeral,” he said. “Jet-lag is way worse for you than this stuff. It’s over the counter stateside. I don’t leave home without it. Anyway, I’m in room 1422. If it’s two in the morning and you’re staring at the ceiling and regretting it, call me and I’ll send some down.”Was he hitting on her? Christ, she was so tired, she could barely see straight. There was no way she was going to need any help getting to sleep. She thanked him again and rolled her suitcase across the cavernous lobby with its gigantic chandeliers and to the elevators.But sleep didn’t come. The network connection cost a fortune—something she hadn’t seen in years—and the number of worms and probes bouncing off her firewall was astronomical. The connection was slow and frustrating. Come 2AM, she was, indeed, staring at the ceiling.Would you take drugs offered by a stranger in a hotel lobby? They were in aWalgreens bottlefor chrissakes. How bad could they be? She picked up the house-phone on the chipped bedstand and punched his hotel room.“Lo?”“Oh Christ, I woke you up,” she said. “I’m sorry.”“’Sok. Lady from check-in, right? Gimme your room number, I’ll send up a melatonin now and a modafinil for the morning. No sweatski.”“Uh,” she hadn’t thought about giving a strange man her room number. In for a penny, in for a pound. “2813,” she said. “Thanks.”“Geoff,” he said. “It’s Geoff. New York—upper West Side. Work in health products.”“Suzanne,” she said. “Florida, lately. I’m a writer.”“Good night, Suzanne. Pills are en route.”“Good night, Geoff. Thanks.”“Tip the porter a euro, or a couple bucks. Don’t bother with rubles.”“Oh,” she said. It had been a long time since her last visit overseas. She’d forgotten how much minutiae was involved.He hung up. She put on a robe and waited. The porter took about fifteen minutes, and handed her a little envelope with two pills in it. He was about fifteen, with a bad mustache and bad skin, and bad teeth that he displayed when she handed him a couple of dollar bills.A minute later, she was back on the phone.“Which one is which?”“Little white one is melatonin. That’s for now. My bad.”She saw him again in the breakfast room, loading a plate with hard-boiled eggs, potato pancakes, the ubiquitous caviar, salami, and cheeses. In his other hand he balanced a vat of porridge with strawberry jam and enough dried fruit to keep a parrot zoo happy for a month.“How do you keep your girlish figure if you eat like that?” she said, settling down at his table.“Ah, that’s a professional matter,” he said. “And I make it a point never to discuss bizniz before I’ve had two cups of coffee.” He poured himself a cup of decaf. “This is number two.”She picked her way through her cornflakes and fruit salad. “I always feel like I don’t get my money’s worth out of buffet breakfasts,” she said.“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make up for you.” He pounded his coffee and poured another cup. “Humanity returns,” he said, rubbing his thighs. “Marthter, the creature waketh!” he said in high Igor.She laughed.“You are really into, uh,substances, aren’t you?” she said.“I am a firm believer in better living through chemistry,” he said. He pounded another coffee. “Ahhh. Coffee and modafinil are an amazing combo.”She’d taken hers that morning when the alarm got her up. She’d been so tired that it actually made her feel nauseated to climb out of bed, but the modafinil was getting her going. She knew a little about the drug, and figured that if the TSA approved it for use by commercial pilots, it couldn’t be that bad for you.“So, my girlish figure. I work for a firm that has partners here in Petersburg who work on cutting-edge pharma products, including some stuff the FDA is dragging its heels on, despite widespread acceptance in many nations, this one included. One of these is a pill that overclocks your metabolism. I’ve been on it for a year now, and even though I am a stone calorie freak and pack away five or six thousand calories a day, I don’t gain an ounce. I actually have to remember to eat enough so that my ribs don’t start showing.”Suzanne watched him gobble another thousand calories. “Is it healthy?”“Compared to what? Being fat? Yes. Running ten miles a day and eating a balanced diet of organic fruit and nuts? No. But when the average American gets the majority of her calories from soda-pop, ’healthy’ is a pretty loaded term.”It reminded her of that talk with Lester, a lifetime ago in the IHOP. Slowly, she found herself telling him about Lester’s story.“Wait a second, you’re SuzanneChurch? New Work Church? San Jose Mercury News Church?”She blushed. “You can’tpossiblyhave heard of me,” she said.He rolled his eyes. “Sure. I shoulder-surfed your name off the check-in form and did a background check on you last night just so I could chat you up over breakfast.”It was a joke, but it gave her a funny, creeped-out feeling. “You’re kidding?”“I’m kidding. I’ve been reading you for freakingyears. I followed Lester’s story in detail. Professional interest. You’re the voice of our generation, woman. I’d be a philistine if I didn’t read your column.”“You’re not making me any less embarrassed, you know.” It took an effort of will to keep from squirming.He laughed hard enough to attract stares. “All right, Ididspend the night googling you. Better?”“If that’s the alternative, I’ll take famous, I suppose,” she said.“You’re here writing about the weight loss clinics, then?”“Yes,” she said. It wasn’t a secret, but she hadn’t actually gone out of her way to mention it. After all, there might not be any kind of story after all. And somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that she didn’t want to tip off some well-funded newsroom to send out its own investigative team and get her scoop.“That is fantastic,” he said. “That’s just, wow, that’s the best news I’ve had all year. You taking an interest in our stuff, it’s going to really push it over the edge. You’d think that selling weight-loss to Americans would be easy, but not if it involves any kind of travel: 80 percent of those lazy insular fucks don’t even have passports. Ha. Don’t quote that. Ha.”“Ha,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Look, how about this, we’ll meet in the lobby around nine, after dinner, for a cup of coffee and an interview?” She had gone from intrigued to flattered to creeped-out with this guy, and besides, she had her first clinic visit scheduled for ten and it was coming up on nine and who knew what a Russian rush-hour looked like?“Oh. OK. But you’ve got to let me schedule you for a visit to some of our clinics and plants—just to see what a professional shop we run here. No gold-teeth-shiny-suit places like you’d get if you just picked the top Google AdWord. Really American-standard places, better even, Scandinavian-standard, a lot of our doctors come over from Sweden and Denmark to get out from under the socialist medicine systems there. They run a tight ship, ya shore, you betcha,” he delivered this last in a broad Swedish bork-bork-bork.
Lester held up a hand. “We don’t have any market research, Kettlewell, because we don’t have a business-manager on the team anymore. Perry’s been taking that over as well as his regular work, and he’s been working himself sick for you. We’re flying by the seat of our pants here because you haven’t sent us a pilot.”
“You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?” Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Suzanne very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough.
Kettlewell noticed. “Get out,” he said. “I want to talk with these two alone.”
“No,” Suzanne said. “That’s not our deal. I get to document everything.That’sthe deal.”
Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry’s desk and collapsed into it.
“Put the notebook away, Suzanne, please?”
She silently shook her head at him. He locked eyes with her for a moment, then nodded curtly. She resumed writing.
“Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It’s about ten, fifteen percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by sixty percent or more.”
“They’re going to short us because they don’t like what we’ve done here?” Perry said. “Christ, that’s ridiculous!”
Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. “No, Perry, no. They’re doing it because they can’t figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there’s not enough of them. We’ve only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so ninety percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects—the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we’ve got are little projects.”
“So it’s not our fault then, is it?” Lester said. Perry was staring out the window.
“No, it’s not your fault, but this doesn’t help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe.”
“Calm down, Landon,” Perry said. “Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?”
Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. “Go ahead.”
“There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities.”
Suzanne nodded. “They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs.”
“There’s something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited—think of how a homeless person can’t take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn’t have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too—they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any UN SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It’s what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it’s there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can’t buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time—why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money—”
Kettlewell held up a hand. “I like the theory. It’s a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?”
“We’re it,” Perry said. “This place, right here. There’s no numbers to prove what I’m saying is right because everyone who knows it’s right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we’re allowed to do this—right here we can prove it. We’ve got the capital in our account, we’re profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company.”
Suzanne was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan’s leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning.
Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Suzanne was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at.
Francis took the news calmly. “Sound business strategy. Basically, it’s what I’ve been telling you to do all along, so I’m bound to like it.”
It took a couple weeks to hive off the Home Aware stuff to some of the other Kodacell business-units. Perry flew a bunch, spending days in Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan overseeing the retooling efforts that would let him focus on his new project.
By the time he got back, Lester had retooled their own workspace, converting it to four functional areas: communications, shelter, food and entertainment. “They were Francis’s idea,” he said. Francis’s gimpy leg was bothering him more and more, but he’d overseen the work from a rolling ergonomic office-chair. “It’s his version of the hierarchy of needs—stuff he knows for sure we can sell.”
It was the first time the boys had launched something new without knowing what it was, where they’d started with a niche and decided to fill it instead of starting with an idea and looking for a niche for it.
“You’re going to underestimate the research time,” Francis said during one of their flip-chart brainstorms, where they had been covering sheet after sheet with ideas for products they could build. “Everyone underestimates research time. Deciding what to make is always harder than making it.” He’d been drinking less since he’d gotten involved in the retooling effort, waking earlier, bossing around his young-blood posse to get him paper, bricks, Tinkertoys.
He was right. Suzanne steadily recorded the weeks ticking by as the four competing labs focus-grouped, designed, tested and scrapped all manner of “tchotchkes for tramps,” as Freddy had dubbed it in a spiraling series of ever-more-bilious columns. But the press was mostly positive: camera crews liked to come by and shoot the compound. One time, the pretty black reporter from the night of the fire came by and said very nice things during her standup. Her name was Maria and she was happy to talk shop with Suzanne, endlessly fascinated by a “real” journalist who’d gone permanently slumming on the Internet.
“The problem is that all this stuff is too specialized, it has too many prerequisites,” Perry said, staring at a waterproof, cement-impregnated bag that could be filled with a hose, allowed to dry, and used as a self-contained room. “This thing is great for refugees, but it’s too one-size-fits all for squatters. They have to be able to heavily customize everything they use to fit into really specialized niches.”
More squatters had arrived to take up residence with them—families, friends, a couple of dodgy drifters—and a third story was going onto the buildings in the camp. They were even more Dr Seussian than the first round, idiosyncratic structures that had to be built light to avoid crushing the floors below them, hanging out over the narrow streets, corkscrewing like vines seeking sun.
He kept staring, and would have been staring still had he not heard the sirens. Three blue-and-white Broward County sheriff’s cars were racing down the access road into their dead mall, sirens howling, lights blazing.
They screeched to a halt at the shantytown’s edge and their doors flew open. Four cops moved quickly into the shantytown, while two more worked the radios, sheltering by the cars.
“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. He ran for the door, but Suzanne grabbed him.
“Don’t run toward armed cops,” she said. “Don’t do anything that looks threatening. Slow down, Perry.”
He took a couple deep breaths. Then he looked around his lab for a while, frantically muttering, “Where the fuck did I put it?”
“Use Home Aware,” she said. He shook his head, grimaced, went to a keyboard and typed MEGAPHONE. One of the lab-drawers started to throb with a white glow.
He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window.
“ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?”
The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop.
“SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.”
“WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?”
The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third.
Perry ran for the door and Suzanne chased after him, trying to stop him. The cops at the cars were talking intently into their radios, though it was impossible to know if they were talking to their comrades in the shantytown or to their headquarters. Perry burst out of the factory door and there was another shot and he spun around, staggered back a step, and fell down like a sack of grain. There was blood around his head. Suzanne stuck her hand in her mouth to stifle a scream and stood helplessly in the doorway of the workshop, just a few paces from Perry.
Lester came up behind her and firmly moved her aside. He lumbered deliberately and slowly and fearlessly to Perry’s side, knelt beside him, touched him gently. His face was grey. Perry thrashed softly and Suzanne let out a sound like a cry, then remembered herself and took out her camera and began to shoot and shoot and shoot: the cops, Lester with Perry like a tragic Pieta, the shantytowners running back and forth screaming. Snap of the cops getting out of their cars, guns in hands, snap of them fanning out around the shantytown, snap of them coming closer and closer, snap of a cop pointing his gun at Lester, ordering him away from Perry, snap of a cop approaching her.
“It’s live,” she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. “Going out live to my blog. Daily readership half a million. They’re watching you now, every move. Do you understand?”
The officer said, “Put the camera down, ma’am.”
She held the camera. “I can’t quote the First Amendment from memory, not exactly, but I know it well enough that I’m not moving this camera. It’s live, you understand—every move is going out live, right now.”
The officer stepped back, turned his head, muttered in his mic.
“There’s an ambulance coming,” he said. “Your friend was shot with a nonlethal rubber bullet.”
“He’s bleeding from the head,” Lester said. “From the eye.”
Suzanne shuddered.
Ambulance sirens in the distance. Lester stroked Perry’s hair. Suzanne took a step back and panned it over Perry’s ruined face, bloody and swollen. The rubber bullet must have taken him either right in the eye or just over it.
“Perry Mason Gibbons was unarmed and posed no threat to Sheriff’s Deputy Badge Number 5724—” she zoomed in on it—“when he was shot with a rubber bullet in the eye. He is unconscious and bloody on the ground in front of the workshop where he has worked quietly and unassumingly to invent and manufacture new technologies.”
The cop knew when to cut his losses. He turned aside and walked back into the shantytown, leaving Suzanne to turn her camera on Perry, on the EMTs who evacced him to the ambulance, on the three injured shantytowners who were on the ambulance with him, on the corpse they wheeled out on his own gurney, one of the newcomers to the shantytown, a man she didn’t recognize.
They operated on Perry all that night, gingerly tweezing fragments of bone from his shattered left orbit out of his eye and face. Some had floated to the back of the socket and posed a special risk of brain damage, the doctor explained into her camera.
Lester was a rock, sitting silently in the waiting room, talking calmly and firmly with the cops and over the phone to Kettlewell and the specially impaneled board-room full of Kodacell lawyers who wanted to micromanage this. Rat-Toothed Freddy filed a column in which he called her a “grandstanding bint,” and accused Kodacell of harboring dangerous fugitives. He’d dug up the fact that one of the newcomers to the shantytown—not the one they’d killed, that was a bystander—was wanted for holding up a liquor-store with a corkscrew the year before.
Lester unscrewed his earphone and scrubbed at his eyes. Impulsively, she leaned over and gave him a hug. He stiffened up at first but then relaxed and enfolded her in his huge, warm arms. She could barely make her arms meet around his broad, soft back—it was like hugging a giant loaf of bread. She squeezed tighter and he did too. He was a good hugger.
“You holding in there, kiddo?” she said.
“Yeah,” he murmured into her neck. “No.” He squeezed tighter. “As well as I need to, anyway.”
The doctor pried them apart to tell them that the EEG and fMRI were both negative for any brain-damage, and that they’d managed to salvage the eye, probably. Kodacell was springing for all the care he needed, cash money, no dorking around with the fucking HMO, so the doctors had put him through every machine on the premises in a series of farcically expensive tests.
“I hope they sue the cops for the costs,” the doctor said. She was Pakistani or Bangladeshi, with a faint accent, and very pretty even with the dark circles under her eyes. “I read your columns,” she said, shaking Suzanne’s hand. “I admire the work you do,” she said, shaking Lester’s hand. “I was born in Delhi. We were squatters who were given a deed to our home and then evicted because we couldn’t pay the taxes. We had to build again, in the rains, outside of the city, and then again when we were evicted again.”
She had two brothers who were working for startups like Kodacell’s, but run by other firms: one was backed by McDonald’s, the other by the AFL-CIO’s investment arm. Suzanne did a little interview with her about her brothers’ projects—a bike-helmet that had been algorithmically evolved for minimum weight and maximum protection; a smart skylight that deformed itself to follow light based on simple phototropic controllers. The brother working on bike-helmets was riding a tiger and could barely keep up with orders; he was consuming about half of the operational capacity of the McDonald’s network and climbing fast.
Lester joined in, digging on the details. He’d been following the skylights in blogs and on a list or two, and he’d heard of the doctor’s brother, which really tweaked her, she was visibly proud of her family.
“But your work is most important. Things for the homeless. We get them in here sometimes, hurt, off the ambulances. We usually turn them away again. The ones who sell off the highway medians and at the traffic lights.” Suzanne had seen them, selling homemade cookies, oranges, flowers, newspapers, plasticky toys, sad or beautiful handicrafts. She had a carved coconut covered in intricate scrimshaw that she’d bought from a little girl who was all skin and bones except for her malnourished pot-belly.
“They get hit by cars?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Deliberately, too. Or beaten up.”
Perry was moved out of the operating theater to a recovery room and then to a private room and by then they were ready to collapse, though there was so much email in response to her posts that she ended up pounding on her computer’s keyboard all the way home as Lester drove them, squeezing the bridge of his nose to stay awake. She didn’t even take her clothes off before collapsing into bed.
“They need the tools to make any other tools,” is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They’d shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn’t going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he’d looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate.
“They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it.” He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the three-d printer and scanner setups. “I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves.”
Francis shifted in his seat. “What are they supposed to do with those?”
“Everything,” Perry said, his eye glinting. “Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids’ toys—if it’s in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fuckingfish. No top-down ’solutions’ driven by ’market research’”—his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm—“the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny.”
They put up the sign that night: AUTHOR OF YOUR OWN DESTINY, hung over the workshop door. Suzanne trailed after Perry transcribing the rants that spilled out of his mouth as he explained it to Lester and Francis, and then to Kettlewell when he called, and then to the pretty young black lady from the TV who by now had figured out that there was a real story in her backyard, then to an NPR man on the phone, and then to a CNN crew who drove in from Miami and filmed the shantytown and the workshop like Japanese tourists at Disney World, never having ventured into the skanky, failed strip-mall suburbs just outside of town.
Francis had a protege who had a real dab touch with the 3-D printers. The manufacturer, Lester’s former employer, had been out of business for two years by then, so all the service on the machines had to be done on the premises. Francis’s protege—the one who claimed his mother had pushed his father under a bus, his name was Jason—watched Lester work on recalcitrant machines silently for a couple days, then started to hand him the tool he needed next without having to be asked. Then he diagnosed a problem that had stumped Lester all morning. Then he suggested an improvement to the feedstock pump that increased the mean time between failures by a couple hours.
“No, man, no, not like that,” Jason said to one of the small gang of boys he was bossing. “Gently, or you’ll snap it off.” The boy snapped it off and Jason pulled another replacement part out of a tub and said, “See, likethis,” and snapped it on. The small gang of boys regarded him with something like awe.
“How come no girls?” Suzanne said as she interviewed him while he took a smoke-break. Perry had banned cigarettes from all indoor workshops, nominally to keep flames away from the various industrial chemicals and such, but really just to encourage the shantytowners to give up the habit that they couldn’t afford anyway. He’d also leaned on the shantytowners who’d opened up small shops in their houses to keep cigs out of the town, without a lot of success.
“Girls aren’t interested in this stuff, lady.”
“You think?” There was a time when she would have objected, but it was better to let these guys say it out loud, hear themselves say it.
“No. Maybe where you come from, OK? Don’t know. But here girls are different. They do good in school but when they have babies they’re done. I mean, hey, it’s not like I don’twantgirls in the team, they’d be great. I love girls. They fuckin’work, you know. No bullshit, no screwing around. But I know every girl in this place and none of ’em are even interested, OK?”
Suzanne cocked one eyebrow just a little and Jason shifted uncomfortably. He scratched his bare midriff and shuffled. “I do, all of them. Why would they? One girl, a roomful of boys, it’d be gross. They’d act like jerks. There’s no way we’d get anything done.”
Suzanne lifted her eyebrow one hair higher. He squirmed harder.
“So all right, that’s not their fault. But I got enough work, all right? Too much to do without spending time on that. It’s not like any girls haveaskedto join up. I’m not keeping them out.”
Suzanne jotted a couple of notes, keeping perfectly mum.
“Well, I’d like to have them in the workshop, OK? Maybe I should ask some of them if they’d come. Shit, if I can teach these apes, I can teach a girl. They’re smart. Girls’d make this place a little better to work in. Lots of them trying to support their families, so they need the money, too.”
There was a girl there by the afternoon. The next day, there were two more. They seemed like quick studies, despite their youth and their lip-gloss. Suzanne approved.
Lester stayed long enough to see the first prototype printer-printers running, then he lit out with a duffel bag jammed into the back of his modded Smart car. “Where are you going?” Suzanne said as Perry looked on gloomily. “I’ll come and visit you. I want to follow your story.” Truth be told, she was sorry to see him go, very sorry. He was such a rock, such an anchor for Perry’s new crazy pirate energy and for the madness around them. He hadn’t given much notice (not to her—Perry didn’t seem that surprised).
“I can’t really talk about it,” he said. “Nondisclosure.”
“So it’s a new job,” she said. “You’re going to work for Tjan?” Tjan’s Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the eastern seaboard, ten in the midwest and was rumored to have twice as many in Eastern Europe.
He grinned. “Oh, Suzanne, don’t try to journalist me.” He reached out and hugged her in a cloud of her father’s cologne. “You’re fantastic, you know that? No, I’m not going to a job. It’s a thing that’s an amazing opportunity, you know?”
She didn’t, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him.
Perry and she went out for dinner in Miami the next night with a PhD candidate from Pepperdine’s B-school, eating at the same deco patio that she’d dined at with Tjan. Perry wore a white shirt open to reveal his tangle of wiry chest hair and the waitress couldn’t keep her eyes off of him. He had a permanent squint now, and a scar that made his eyebrow into a series of small hills.
“I was just in Greensboro, Miss,” the PhD candidate said. He was in his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small goatee. “I used to spend summers there with my grandpa.” He talked fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. “There wasn’tanythingleft there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven, shit, they’d even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it’saliveagain, it’s buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They’re doing the dumbest things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that yodel like hillbillies.”
“I’d buy a tooled-leather laptop case,” Perry said, swilling a sweaty bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy scalp.
“The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which it hasn’t been in like a hundred years. If you’re not inventing stuff, you’re keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It’s like a tiny, distributed gold rush.”
“Or like the New Deal,” Suzanne said. That was how she’d come to invite him down, after she’d read his paper coining the term New Work to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt’s public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression.
“Yeah, exactly, exactly! I’ve got research that shows that one in five Americans is employed in the New Work industry. Twenty percent!”
Perry’s lazy eye opened a little wider. “No way,” he said.
“Way,” the PhD candidate said. He finished his caipirinha and shook the crushed ice at a passing waiter, who nodded and ambled to the bar to get him a fresh one. “You should get on the road and write about some of these guys,” he said to Suzanne. “They need some ink, some phosphors. They’re pulling up stakes and moving to the small towns their parents came from, or to abandoned suburbs, and justdoing it. Bravest fucking thing you’ve seen in your life.”
The PhD candidate stayed out the week, and went home with a suitcase full of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer that could print out all of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer.
Lester emailed her from wherever it was he’d gone, and told her about the lovely time he was having. It made her miss him sharply. Perry was hardly ever around for her now, buried in his work, buried with the kids from the shantytown and with Francis. She looked over her last month’s blogs and realized that she’d been turning in variations on the same theme for all that time. She knew it was time to pack a duffel bag of her own and go see the bravest fucking thing she’d seen in her life.
“Bye, Perry,” she said, stopping by his workbench. He looked up at her and saw the bag and his funny eyebrow wobbled.
“Leaving for good?” he said. He sounded unexpectedly bitter.
“No!” she said. “No! Just a couple weeks. Going to get the rest of the story. But I’ll be back, count on it.”
He grunted and slumped. He was looking a lot older now, and beaten down. His hair, growing out, was half grey, and he’d gotten gaunt, his cheekbones and forehead springing out of his face. On impulse, she gave him a hug like the ones she’d shared with Lester. He returned it woodenly at first, then with genuine warmth. “I will be back, you know,” she said. “You’ve got plenty to do here, anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Course I do.”
She kissed him firmly on the cheek and stepped out the door and into her car and drove to Miami International.
Tjan met her at Logan and took her bag. “I’m surprised you had the time to meet me,” she said. The months had been good to him, slimming down his pot-belly and putting a twinkle in his eye.
“I’ve got a good organization,” he said, as they motored away toward Rhode Island, through strip-mall suburbs and past boarded-up chain restaurants. Everywhere there were signs of industry: workshops in old storefronts, roadside stands selling disposable music players, digital whoopee cushions, and so forth. “I barely have to put in an appearance.”
Tjan yawned hugely and constantly. “Jet-lag,” he apologized. “Got back from Russia a couple days ago.”
“Did you see your kids?” she said. “How’s business there?”
“I saw my kids,” he said, and grinned. “They’re amazing, you know that? Good kids, unbelievably smart. Real little operators. The older one, Lyenitchka, is running a baby-sitting service—not baby-sitting herself, you see, but recruiting other kids to do the sitting for her while she skims a management fee and runs the quality control.”
“She’s your daughter all right,” she said. “So tell me everything about the Westinghouse projects.”
She’d been following them, of course, lots of different little startups, each with its own blogs and such. But Tjan was quite fearless about taking her through their profits and losses and taking notes on it all kept her busy until she reached her hotel. Tjan dropped her off and promised to pick her up the next morning for a VIP tour of the best of his teams, and she went to check in.
She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. “Suzanne bloody Church! What are you doing here, love?”
The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy.
“Hey, Freddy,” she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, and he swallowed and smiled wetly. “Nice to see you.”
“Fantastic to see you, too! I’m here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you’re here for, too?”
“No,” she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn’t planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. “Well, nice to see you.”
“Oh, do stay for a drink,” he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark’s smile. “Come on—they have a free cocktail hour in this place. I’ll have to report you to the journalist’s union if you turn down a free drink.”
“I don’t think ’bloggers’ have to worry about the journalist’s union,” she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn’t get the message. He still didn’t. He laughed instead.
“Oh, love, I’m sure they’ll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith.”
“Good night, Freddy,” was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth.
“OK, good night,” he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped.
“Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, meanspirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn’t piss on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the fuck out of my way before I kick your tiny little testicles up through the roof of your reeking mouth.”
She said it quietly, but the desk-clerks behind her overheard it anyway and giggled. Freddy’s smile only wobbled, but then returned, broader than ever.
“Well said,” he said and gave her a single golf-clap. “Sleep well, Suzanne.”
She boiled all the way to her room and when she came over hungry, she ordered in room service, not wanting to take the chance that Rat-Toothed Freddy would still be in the lobby.
Tjan met her as she was finishing her coffee in the breakfast room. She hadn’t seen Freddy yet.
“I’ve got five projects slated for you to visit today,” Tjan said, sliding into the booth beside her. Funnily now that he was in the cold northeast, he was dressing like a Floridian in blue jeans and a Hawai’ian barkcloth shirt with a bright spatter of pineapples and Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. Back in Florida, he’d favored unflattering nylon slacks and white shirts with ironed collars.
The projects were fascinating and familiar. The cultural differences that distinguished New England New Work from Florida New Work were small but telling: a lot more woodcraft, in a part of the country where many people had grown up in their grandfathers’ woodworking shops. A little more unreflexive kitsch, like the homely kittens and puppies that marched around the reactive, waterproof, smash-proof screens integrated into a bio-monitoring crib.
At the fourth site, she was ambushed by a flying hug. Tjan laughed as she nearly went down under the weight of a strong, young woman who flung her arms around Suzanne’s neck. “Holycrapit’s good to see you!”
Suzanne untangled herself and got a look at her hugger. She had short mousy hair, twinkling blue eyes, and was dressed in overalls and a pretty flowered blouse, scuffed work boots and stained and torn work-gloves. “Uh...” she said, then it clicked. “Fiona?”
“Yeah! Didn’t Tjan tell you I was here?” The last time she’d seen this woman, she was weeping over pizza and getting ready to give up on life. Now she was practically vibrating.
“Uh, no,” she said, shooting a look at Tjan, who was smiling like the Buddha and pretending to inspect a pair of shoes with gyroscopically stabilized retractable wheels in the heels.
“I’ve been here for months! I went back to Oregon, like you told me to, and then I saw a recruiting ad for Westinghouse and I sent them my CV and then I got a videoconference interview and then, bam, I was on an airplane to Rhode Island!”
Suzanne blinked.Itold you to go back to Oregon? Well, maybe she had. That was a lifetime ago.
The workshop was another dead mall, this one a horseshoe of storefronts separated by flimsy gyprock. The Westinghousers had cut through the walls with drywall knives to join all the stores together. The air was permeated with the familiar Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave tang of three-d printers. The parking lot was given over to some larger apparatus and a fantastical children’s jungle-gym in the shape of a baroque, spired pirate fortress, with elegantly curved turrets, corkscrew sky-bridges, and flying buttresses crusted over with ornate, grotesque gargoyles. Children swarmed over it like ants, screeching with pleasure.
“Well, you’re looking really good, Fiona,” Suzanne said.Still not great with people, she thought. Fiona, though, was indeed looking good, and beaming. She wasn’t wearing the crust of cosmetics and hair-care products she’d affected in the corporate Silicon Valley world. She glowed pink.
“Suzanne,” Fiona said, getting serious now, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. “I can’t thank you enough for this. This has saved my life. It gave me something to live for. For the first time in my life, I am doing something I’m proud of. I go to bed every night thankful and happy that I ended up here. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you.”
Suzanne tried not to squirm. Fiona gave her another long hug. “It’s all your doing,” Suzanne said at last. “I just told you about it. You’ve made this happen for you, OK?”
“OK,” Fiona said, “but I still wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I love you, Suzanne.”
Ick. Suzanne gave her another perfunctory hug and got the hell out of Dodge.
“What’s with the jungle-gym?” It really had been something, fun and Martian-looking.
“That’s the big one,” Tjan said with a big grin. “Most people don’t even notice it, they think it’s daycare or something. Well, that’s how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so that the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically: now it’s a self-modifying jungle-gym. The kids love it. It is the crack cocaine of jungle-gyms, though we won’t be using that in the marketing copy, of course.”
“Of course,” Suzanne said drily. She’d automatically reached for her notepad and started writing when Tjan started talking. Now, reviewing her notes, she knew that she was going to have to go back and get some photos of this. She asked Tjan about it.
“The robots go all night, you know. Not much sleep if you do that.”
No going back to the hotel to see Freddy, what a pity. “I’ll grab a couple blankets from the hotel to keep warm,” she said.
“Oh, you needn’t,” he said. “That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It’s pretty gorgeous, if you ask me.”
They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Suzanne ensconced herself at someone’s vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on email before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket amid a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters’ roar.
Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn’t have much by way of hands at their ends. “We just use rare-earth magnets,” Fiona said. “Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars.”
Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together withsnicksounds that were audible over the whine of their motors.
Suzanne switched on her camera’s night-vision mode and got shooting. “Where did you get all these robots?”
Tjan grinned. “It’s an open design—the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There’s a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren’t proprietary enough and they were worried that they’d have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though.”
The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, shifting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch.
“Can I go out and have a look?” she said. “I mean, is it safe?”
“Sure,” Fiona said. “Of course! Our robots won’t harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction.”
“Still, try to stay out of their way,” Tjan said. “Some of that stuff they’re moving around is heavy.”
So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off.
Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Standing there amid the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she’d arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity’s creations had evolved past their inventors.
She was going to have to do alotof writing before bed.
Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she passed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy.
She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams.
Another three weeks of this stuff and she’d get to go home—Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling.
It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn’t been her idea, she’d been dragged back by impassioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who’d rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them.
The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disassembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts’ interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams with their latest bail-out and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they’d won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew.
Lester emailed her and said that he’d seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he’d be in town too?
They ate at Devil’s Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades’ worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Devil’s Night was the pre-Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings, and all of Brush Park had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs.
Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement, and glass to preserve the look of a burned out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way glass that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below.
Suzanne showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decades since she’d left. She was flustered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread.
When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn’t there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days’ stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton shirt underneath. He was beaming at her.
“Suzanne,” he said.
Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. “Lester?” she said, wonderingly.
He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands.
When he let go of her, he laughed again. “Oh, Suzanne, I couldnothave asked for any better reaction than this.Thank you.” They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he.
“Lester?” she said again.
“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders.”
Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Suzanne picked one at random. So did Lester.
“So,” he said, patting his washboard tummy. “You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?”
“Can I take notes?” Suzanne said, pulling out her pad.
“Oh by all means,” he said. “I got a discount on my treatments on the basis that you would end up taking notes.”
The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn’t want to pay US prices for crowns. The treatment hadn’t originated there: The electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that the body burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still.
But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks.
“Is that safe?” she said.
“Everyone asks that,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, it’s safe if they’re monitoring you and standing by with lots of diagnostic equipment. But if you’re willing to take slower losses, you can go on a way less intensive regime that won’t require supervision. This stuff is the next big grey-market pharma gold. They’re violating all kinds of pharma patents, of course, but that’s what Cuba and Canada are for, right? Inside of a year, every fat person in America is going to have a bottle of pills in his pocket, and inside of two years, there won’t be any fat people.”
She shook her head. “You look... Lester, you lookincredible. I’m so proud of you.”
He ducked his head. He really did look amazing. Dropping the weight had taken off ten years, and between that and the haircut and the new clothes, he was practically unrecognizable.
“Does Perry know?”
“Yeah,” Lester said. “I talked it over with him before I opted for it. Tjan had mentioned it in passing, it was a business his ex-wife was tangled up with through her mafiyeh connections, and once I had researched it online and talked to some people who’d had the treatment, including a couple MDs, I decided to just do it.”
It had cost nearly everything he’d made from Kodacell, but it was a small price to pay. He insisted on getting dinner.
Afterward, they strolled through the fragrant evening down Woodward Avenue, past the deco skyscrapers and the plowed fields and community gardens, their livestock pens making soft animal noises.
“It’s wonderful to see you again, Lester,” she said truthfully. She’d really missed him, even though his participation on her message boards had hardly let up (though it had started coming in at weird hours, something explained by the fact that he’d been in Russia). Walking alongside of him, smelling his smell, seeing him only out of the corner of her eye, it was like nothing had changed.
“It’s great to see you again too.” Tentatively, he took her hand in his big paw. His hand was warm but not sweaty, and she realized it had been a long time since anyone had held her hand. Heart pounding, she gave his hand a squeeze.
Their conversation and their walk rambled on, with no outward acknowledgment of the contact of hand on hand, but her hand squeezed his softly now and again, or he squeezed hers, and then they were at her hotel.How did that happen?she asked herself.
But then they were having a nightcap, and then he was in the elevator with her and then he was at the door of her room, and the blood was roaring in her ears as she stuck her credit-card in the reader to open it.
Wait, she tried to say.Lester, hang on a second,is what she tried to say, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. He stepped through the door with her, then said, “Uh, I need to use the bathroom.”
With relief, she directed him to the small water closet. The room was basic—now that she was her own boss, she wasn’t springing for Crowne Plazas and Hiltons, this was practically a coffin—and there was nowhere to sit except the bed. Her laptop was open and there was a lot of email in her inbox, but for once, she didn’t care. She was keenly attuned to the water noises coming from behind the door, each new sound making her jump a little. What was he doing in there, inserting a fucking diaphragm?
She heard him work the latch on the door and she put on her best smile. Her stomach was full of butterflies. He smiled back and sat down on the bed next to her, taking her hand again. His hand was moist from being washed, and a little slippery. She didn’t mind. Wordlessly, she put her head on his barrel chest. His heart was racing, and so was hers.
Gradually, they leaned back, until they were side by side on the bed, her head still on his chest. Moving like she was in a dream, she lifted her head from his chest and stared into his eyes. They were wide and scared. She kissed him, softly. His lips were trembling and unyielding. She kissed him more insistently, running her hands over his chest and shoulders, putting one leg over him. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. He wasn’t bad, but he was scared or nervous and all jittery.
She kissed his throat, breathing in the smell, savoring the rough texture of his three-day beard. Tentatively, he put his hands on her back, stroked her, worked gradually towards her bottom. Then he stopped.
“What’s wrong?” she said, propping herself up on her forearms, still straddling him.
She saw that there were tears in his eyes.
“Lester? What’s wrong?”
He opened his mouth and then shut it. Tears slid off his face into his ears. She blotted them with a corner of hotel-pillow.
She stroked his hair. “Lester?”
He gave out a choked sob and pushed her away. He sat up and put his face in his hands. His back heaved. She stroked his shoulders tentatively.
Finally, he seemed to get himself under control. He sniffled.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Lester, what’swrong?”
“I can’t do this,” he said. “I...”
“Just tell me,” she said. “Whatever it is, tell me.”
“You didn’t want me before.” He said it simply without accusation, but it stung like he’d slapped her in the face.
“Oh, Lester,” she said, moving to hug him, but he pushed her away.
“I have to go,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He was tall, though he’d never seemed it before, but oh, he was tall, six foot four or taller. He filled the room. His eyes were red and swollen, but he put on a smile for her. “Thanks, Suzanne. It was really good to see you again. I’ll see you in Florida.”
She stood up and moved quickly to him, stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him fiercely. He hugged her back and she kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll see you in Florida,” she said.
And then he was gone. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for tears, but they didn’t come. So she picked up her laptop and started to work through her mountain of email.
When she saw him again, he was coming down the drive leading to the shantytown and the factory. She was having tea in the tea-room that had opened in a corkscrew spire high above the rest of the shantytown. The lady who operated it called herself Mrs Torrence, and she was exquisitely antique but by no means frail, and when she worked the ropes on her dumbwaiter to bring up supplies from the loading area on the ground, her biceps stood at attention like Popeye’s. There was a rumor that Mrs Torrence used to be a man, or still was, under her skirts, but Suzanne didn’t pay attention to it.
Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.
She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.
Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of Ewoks listening to C3PO.
“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their three-d printer project.
“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to beeasy. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for a meth lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”
Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.
Suzanne took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks at a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.
The response was amazing. Every TV news-crew in the greater Miami area made a pilgrimage to their factory to film Lester working in a tight t-shirt over a three-d printer, wrangling huge vats of epoxy-mix goop in the sun with sweat beading over his big, straining biceps.
Her message boards exploded. It seemed that a heretofore unsuspected contingent of her growing readership was substantially obese. And they had friends. Lester eventually gave up on posting, just so he could get some work done. They had the printers to the point where they could turn out new printers, but the whole system was temperamental and needed careful nursing. Lester was more interested in what people had to say on the engineering message-boards than chatting with the fatties.
The fatties were skeptical and hopeful in equal measures. The big fight was over whether there was anything to this, whether Lester would keep the weight off, whether the new skinny Lester was really Lester, whether he’d undergone surgery or had his stomach stapled. America’s wallets had been cleaned out by so many snake-oil peddlers with a “cure” for obesity that no one could believe what they saw, no matter how much they wanted to.
Lord, but it was bringing in the readers, not to mention the advertising dollars. The clearing price for a thousand weight-loss ads targeted to affluent, obese English-speakers was over fifty bucks, as compared with her customary CPM of three bucks a thou. Inside of a week, she’d made enough to buy a car. It was weird being her own circulation and ad-sales department, but it wasn’t as hard as she’d worried it might be—and it was intensely satisfying to have such a nose-to-tail understanding of the economics of her production.
“You should go,” Lester told her as she clicked him through her earnings spreadsheet. “Jesus, this is insane. You know that these fatties actually follow me around on the net now, asking me questions in message boards about engineering? The board moderators are asking me to post under an assumed name. Madame, your public has spoken. There is a dire need for your skills in St Petersburg. Go. They have chandeliers in the subways and caviar on tap. All the blini you can eat. Bear steaks.”
She shook her head and slurped at the tea he’d brought her. “You’re joking. It’s all mafiyeh there. Scary stuff. Besides, I’m covering this beat right now, New Work.”
“New Work isn’t going anywhere, Suzanne. We’ll be here when you get back. And this story is one that needs your touch. They’re micro-entrepreneurs solving post-industrial problems. It’s the same story you’ve been covering here, but with a different angle. Take that money and buy yourself a business-class ticket to St Petersburg and spend a couple weeks on the job. You’ll clean up. They could use the publicity, too—someone to go and drill down on which clinics are legit and which ones are clip-joints. You’re perfect for the gig.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. Taking big chances had gotten her this far and it would take her farther, she knew. The world was your oyster if you could stomach a little risk.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hell yeah. You’re totally right, Lester.”
“Zasterovyeh!”
“What you said!”
“It’s cheers,” he said. “You’ll need to know that if you’re going to make time in Petrograd. Let me go send some email and get you set up. You book a ticket.”
And just like that she was off to Russia. Lester insisted that she buy a business-class ticket, and she discovered to her bemusement that British Airways had about three classes above business, presumably with even more exclusive classes reserved to royalty and peers of the realm. She luxuriated in fourteen hours of reclining seats and warm peanuts and in-flight connectivity, running a brief videoconference with Lester just because she could. Tjan had sent her a guide to the hotels and she’d opted for the Pribaltiyskaya, a crumbling Stalin-era four-star of spectacular, Vegasesque dimensions. The facade revealed the tragedy of the USSR’s unrequited love-affair with concrete, as did the cracks running up the walls of the lobby.
They checked her into the hotel with the nosiest questionnaire ever, a two-pager on government stationary that demanded to know her profession, employer, city of birth, details of family, and so forth. An American businessman next to her at the check-in counter saw her puzzling over it. “Just make stuff up,” he said. “I always write that I come from 123 Fake Street, Anytown, California, and that I work as a professional paper-hanger. They don’t check on it, except maybe the mob when they’re figuring out who to mug. First time in Russia?”
“It shows, huh?”
“You get used to it,” he said. “I come here every month on business. You just need to understand that if it seems ridiculous and too bad to be true, it is. They have lots of rules here, but no one follows ’em. Just ignore any unreasonable request and you’ll fit right in.”
“That’s good advice,” she said. He was middle-aged, but so was she, and he had nice eyes and no wedding ring.
“Get a whole night’s sleep, don’t drink the so-called ’champagne’ and don’t change money on the streets. Did you bring melatonin and modafinil?”
She stared blankly at him. “Drugs?”
“Sure. One tonight to sleep, one in the morning to wake up, and do it again tomorrow and you’ll be un-lagged. No booze or caffeine, either, not for the first couple days. Melatonin’s over the counter, even in the States, and modafinil’s practically legal. I have extra, here.” He dug in his travel bag and came up with some generic Walgreens bottles.
“That’s OK,” she said, handing her credit card to a pretty young clerk. “Thanks, though.”
He shook his head. “It’s your funeral,” he said. “Jet-lag is way worse for you than this stuff. It’s over the counter stateside. I don’t leave home without it. Anyway, I’m in room 1422. If it’s two in the morning and you’re staring at the ceiling and regretting it, call me and I’ll send some down.”
Was he hitting on her? Christ, she was so tired, she could barely see straight. There was no way she was going to need any help getting to sleep. She thanked him again and rolled her suitcase across the cavernous lobby with its gigantic chandeliers and to the elevators.
But sleep didn’t come. The network connection cost a fortune—something she hadn’t seen in years—and the number of worms and probes bouncing off her firewall was astronomical. The connection was slow and frustrating. Come 2AM, she was, indeed, staring at the ceiling.
Would you take drugs offered by a stranger in a hotel lobby? They were in aWalgreens bottlefor chrissakes. How bad could they be? She picked up the house-phone on the chipped bedstand and punched his hotel room.
“Lo?”
“Oh Christ, I woke you up,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“’Sok. Lady from check-in, right? Gimme your room number, I’ll send up a melatonin now and a modafinil for the morning. No sweatski.”
“Uh,” she hadn’t thought about giving a strange man her room number. In for a penny, in for a pound. “2813,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Geoff,” he said. “It’s Geoff. New York—upper West Side. Work in health products.”
“Suzanne,” she said. “Florida, lately. I’m a writer.”
“Good night, Suzanne. Pills are en route.”
“Good night, Geoff. Thanks.”
“Tip the porter a euro, or a couple bucks. Don’t bother with rubles.”
“Oh,” she said. It had been a long time since her last visit overseas. She’d forgotten how much minutiae was involved.
He hung up. She put on a robe and waited. The porter took about fifteen minutes, and handed her a little envelope with two pills in it. He was about fifteen, with a bad mustache and bad skin, and bad teeth that he displayed when she handed him a couple of dollar bills.
A minute later, she was back on the phone.
“Which one is which?”
“Little white one is melatonin. That’s for now. My bad.”
She saw him again in the breakfast room, loading a plate with hard-boiled eggs, potato pancakes, the ubiquitous caviar, salami, and cheeses. In his other hand he balanced a vat of porridge with strawberry jam and enough dried fruit to keep a parrot zoo happy for a month.
“How do you keep your girlish figure if you eat like that?” she said, settling down at his table.
“Ah, that’s a professional matter,” he said. “And I make it a point never to discuss bizniz before I’ve had two cups of coffee.” He poured himself a cup of decaf. “This is number two.”
She picked her way through her cornflakes and fruit salad. “I always feel like I don’t get my money’s worth out of buffet breakfasts,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make up for you.” He pounded his coffee and poured another cup. “Humanity returns,” he said, rubbing his thighs. “Marthter, the creature waketh!” he said in high Igor.
She laughed.
“You are really into, uh,substances, aren’t you?” she said.
“I am a firm believer in better living through chemistry,” he said. He pounded another coffee. “Ahhh. Coffee and modafinil are an amazing combo.”
She’d taken hers that morning when the alarm got her up. She’d been so tired that it actually made her feel nauseated to climb out of bed, but the modafinil was getting her going. She knew a little about the drug, and figured that if the TSA approved it for use by commercial pilots, it couldn’t be that bad for you.
“So, my girlish figure. I work for a firm that has partners here in Petersburg who work on cutting-edge pharma products, including some stuff the FDA is dragging its heels on, despite widespread acceptance in many nations, this one included. One of these is a pill that overclocks your metabolism. I’ve been on it for a year now, and even though I am a stone calorie freak and pack away five or six thousand calories a day, I don’t gain an ounce. I actually have to remember to eat enough so that my ribs don’t start showing.”
Suzanne watched him gobble another thousand calories. “Is it healthy?”
“Compared to what? Being fat? Yes. Running ten miles a day and eating a balanced diet of organic fruit and nuts? No. But when the average American gets the majority of her calories from soda-pop, ’healthy’ is a pretty loaded term.”
It reminded her of that talk with Lester, a lifetime ago in the IHOP. Slowly, she found herself telling him about Lester’s story.
“Wait a second, you’re SuzanneChurch? New Work Church? San Jose Mercury News Church?”
She blushed. “You can’tpossiblyhave heard of me,” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “Sure. I shoulder-surfed your name off the check-in form and did a background check on you last night just so I could chat you up over breakfast.”
It was a joke, but it gave her a funny, creeped-out feeling. “You’re kidding?”
“I’m kidding. I’ve been reading you for freakingyears. I followed Lester’s story in detail. Professional interest. You’re the voice of our generation, woman. I’d be a philistine if I didn’t read your column.”
“You’re not making me any less embarrassed, you know.” It took an effort of will to keep from squirming.
He laughed hard enough to attract stares. “All right, Ididspend the night googling you. Better?”
“If that’s the alternative, I’ll take famous, I suppose,” she said.
“You’re here writing about the weight loss clinics, then?”
“Yes,” she said. It wasn’t a secret, but she hadn’t actually gone out of her way to mention it. After all, there might not be any kind of story after all. And somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that she didn’t want to tip off some well-funded newsroom to send out its own investigative team and get her scoop.
“That is fantastic,” he said. “That’s just, wow, that’s the best news I’ve had all year. You taking an interest in our stuff, it’s going to really push it over the edge. You’d think that selling weight-loss to Americans would be easy, but not if it involves any kind of travel: 80 percent of those lazy insular fucks don’t even have passports. Ha. Don’t quote that. Ha.”
“Ha,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Look, how about this, we’ll meet in the lobby around nine, after dinner, for a cup of coffee and an interview?” She had gone from intrigued to flattered to creeped-out with this guy, and besides, she had her first clinic visit scheduled for ten and it was coming up on nine and who knew what a Russian rush-hour looked like?
“Oh. OK. But you’ve got to let me schedule you for a visit to some of our clinics and plants—just to see what a professional shop we run here. No gold-teeth-shiny-suit places like you’d get if you just picked the top Google AdWord. Really American-standard places, better even, Scandinavian-standard, a lot of our doctors come over from Sweden and Denmark to get out from under the socialist medicine systems there. They run a tight ship, ya shore, you betcha,” he delivered this last in a broad Swedish bork-bork-bork.