PART IIISammy had filled a cooler and stuck it in the back-seat of his car the night before, programmed his coffee-maker, and when his alarm roused him at 3AM, he hit the road. First he guzzled his thermos of lethal coffee, then reached around in back for bottles of icy distilled water. He kept the windows rolled down and breathed in the swampy, cool morning air, the most promising air of the Florida day, before it all turned to steam and sizzle.He didn’t bother looking for truck-stops when he needed to piss, just pulled over on the turnpike’s side and let fly. Why not? At that hour, it was just him and the truckers and the tourists with morning flights.He reached Miami ahead of schedule and had a diner-breakfast big enough to kill a lesser man, a real fatkins affair. He got back on the road groaning from the chow and made it to the old Wal-Mart just as the merchants were setting up their market on the roadside.When he’d done the Boston ride, he’d been discouraged that they’d kept on with their Who-ville Xmas even though he’d grinched away all their fun, but this time he was expecting something like this. Watching these guys sell souvenirs at the funeral for the ride made him feel pretty good this time around: their disloyalty had to be a real morale-killer for those ride-operators.The cops were getting twitchy, which made him grin. Twitchy cops were a key ingredient for bad trouble. He reached behind him and pulled an iced coffee from the cooler and cracked it, listening to the hiss as the embedded CO2 cartridge forced bubbles through it.Now here came a suit. He looked like a genuine mighty morphin’ power broker, which made Sammy worry, because a guy like that hadn’t figured into his plans, but look at that; he was having a huge fight with the eyebrow guy and now the eyebrow guy was running away from him.Getting the lawyers to agree to spring the budget to file in every location where there was a ride had been tricky. Sammy had had to fudge a little on his research, claim that they were bringing in real money, tie it to the drop in numbers in Florida, and generally do a song and dance, but it was all worth it. These guys clearly didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.Now eyebrow man was headed for the cop-cars and the entrance, and there, oh yes, there it was. Five cars’ worth of goths, lugging bags full of some kind of home-made or scavenged horror-memorabilia, pulling up short at the entrance.They piled out of their cars and started milling around, asking questions. Some approached the cops, who seemed in no mood to chat. The body-language could be read at 150 feet:Goth: But officer, I wanna get on this riiiiiide.Cop: You sicken me.Goth: All around me is gloom, gloom. Why can’t I go on my riiiiiide?Cop: I would like to arrest you and lock you up for being a weird, sexually ambiguous melodramatic who’s dumb enough to hang around out of doors, all in black, inFlorida.Goth: Can I take your picture? I’m gonna put it on my blog and then everyone will know what a meanie you are.Cop: Yap yap yap, little bitch. You go on photographing me and mouthing off, see how long it is before you’re in cuffs in the back of this car.Scumbag street-vendors: Ha ha ha, look at these goth kids mouthing off to the law, that cop must have minuscule testicles!Cop: Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.Eyebrow guy: Um, can everyone just be nice? I’d prefer that this all not go up in flames.Scumbags, goths: Hurr hurr hurr, shuttup, look at those dumb cops, ahahaha.Cops: Grrrr.Eyebrow: Oh, shit.Four more cars pulled up. Now the shoulder was getting really crowded and freeway traffic was slowing to a crawl.More goths piled out. Family cars approached the snarl, slowed, then sped up again, not wanting to risk the craziness. Maybe some of them would get on the fucking turnpike and drive up to Orlando, where the real fun was.The four-lane road was down to about a lane and a half, and milling crowds from the shantytown and the arriving cars were clogging what remained of the thoroughfare. Now goths were parking their cars way back at the intersection and walking over, carrying the objects they’d planned to sacrifice to the ride and smoking clove cigarettes.Sammy saw Death Waits before Death Waits turned his head, and so Sammy had time to duck down before he was spotted. He giggled to himself and chugged his coffee, crouched down below the window.The situation was heating up now. Lots of people were asking questions of the cops. People trying to drive through got shouted at by the people in the road. Sometimes a goth would slam a fist down on a hood and there’d be a little bit of back and forth. It was a powder-keg, and Sammy decided to touch it off.He swung his car out into the road and hit the horn and revved his engine, driving through the crowd just a hair faster than was safe. People slapped his car as it went by and he just leaned on the horn, ploughing through, scattering people who knocked over vendors’ tables and stepped on their wares.In his rear-view, he saw the chaos begin. Someone threw a punch, someone slipped, someone knocked over a table of infringing merch. Wa-hoo! Party time!He hit the next left, then pointed his car at the freeway. He reached back and snagged another can of coffee and went to work on it. As the can hissed open, he couldn’t help himself: he chuckled. Then he laughed—a full, loud belly-laugh.Perry watched it happen as though it were all a dream: The crowds thickening. The cops getting out of their cars and putting their hands on their belts. A distant siren. More people milling around, hanging out in the middle of the road, like idiots,idiots. Then that jerk in the car—what the hell was he thinking, he was going to kill someone!And then it all exploded. There was a knot of fighting bodies over by the tables, and the knot was getting bigger. The cops were running for them, batons out, pepper-spray out. Perry shouted something, but he couldn’t hear himself. In a second the crowd noises had gone from friendly to an angry roar.Perry spotted Suzanne watching it all through the viewfinder on her phone, presumably streaming it live, then shouted again, an unheard warning, as a combatant behind her swung wide and clocked her in the head. She went down and he charged for her.He’d just reached her when a noise went off that dropped him to his knees. It was their antipersonnel sound-cannon, which meant that Lester was around here somewhere. The sound was a physical thing, it made his bowels loose and made his head ring like a gong. Thought was impossible. Everything was impossible except curling up and wrapping your hands around your head.Painfully, he raised his head and opened his eyes. All around him, people were on their knees. The cops, though, had put giant industrial earmuffs on, the kind of thing you saw jackhammer operators wearing. They were moving rapidly toward... Lester who was in a pickup truck with the AP horn stuck in the cargo bed, wired into the cigarette lighter. They had guns drawn and Lester was looking at them wide-eyed, hands in the air.Their mouths were moving, but whatever they were saying was inaudible. Perry took his phone out of his pocket and aimed it at them. He couldn’t move without spooking them and possibly knocking himself out from the sound, but he could rodneyking them as they advanced on Lester. He could practically read Lester’s thoughts:If I move to switch this off, they’ll shoot me dead.The cops closed on Lester and then the sour old male cop was up in the bed and he had Lester by the collar, throwing him to the ground, pointing his gun. His partner moved quickly and efficiently around the bed, eventually figuring out how to unplug the horn. The silence rang in his head. He couldn’t hear anything except a dog-whistle whine from his abused eardrums. Around him, people moved sluggishly, painfully.He got to his feet as quick as he could and drunk-walked to the truck. Lester was already in plastic cuffs and leg-restraints, and the big, dead-eyed cop was watching an armored police bus roll toward them in the eerie silence of their collective deafness.Perry managed to switch his phone over to streaming, so that it was uploading everything instead of recording it locally. He faded back behind some of the cars for cover and kept rolling as the riot bus disgorged a flying squadron of helmeted cops who began to methodically and savagely grab, cuff, and toss the groaning crowd lying flat on the ground. He wanted to add narration, but he didn’t trust himself to whisper, since he couldn’t hear his own voice.A hand came down on his shoulder and he jumped, squeaked, and fell into a defensive pose, waiting for the truncheon to hit him, but it was Suzanne, grim faced, pointing her own phone. She had a laminated press-pass out in her free hand and was holding it up beside her head like a talisman. She pointed off down the road, where some of the goth kids who’d just been arriving when things went down were more ambulatory, having been somewhat shielded from the noise. They were running and being chased by cops. She made a little scooting gesture and Perry understood that she meant he should be following them, getting the video. He sucked in a big breath and nodded once and set off. She gave his hand a firm squeeze and he felt that her palms were slick with sweat.He kept low and moved slow, keeping the viewfinder up so that he could keep the melee in shot. He hoped like hell that someone watching this online would spring for his bail.Miraculously, he reached the outlier skirmish without being spotted. He recorded the cops taking the goths down, cuffing them, and hooding one kid who was thrashing like a fish on a hook. It seemed that he would never be spotted. He crept forward, slowly, slowly, trying to feel invisible and unnoticed, trying to project it.It worked. He was getting incredible footage. He was practically on top of the cops before anyone noticed him. Then there was a shout and a hand grabbed for his phone and the spell was broken. Suddenly his heart was thundering, his pulse pounding in his ears.He turned on his heel and ran. A mad giggle welled up in his chest. His phone was still streaming, presumably showing wild, nauseous shots of the landscape swinging past as he pumped his arm. He was headed for the ride, for the rear entrance, where he knew he could take cover. He felt the footsteps thud behind him, dimly heard the shouts—but his temporary deafness drowned out the words.He had his fob out before he reached the doors and he badged in, banging the fob over the touch-plate an instant before slamming into the crash-bar and the doors swung open. He waited in agitation for the doors to hiss shut slowly after him and then it was the gloom of the inside of the ride, dark in his sun-adjusted eyesight.It was only when the doors shivered behind him that he realized what he’d just done. They’d break in and come and get him, and in the process, they’d destroy the ride, for spite. His eyes were adjusting to the gloom now and he made out the familiar/unfamiliar shapes of the dioramas, now black and lacy with goth memorabilia. This place gave him calm and joy. He would keep them from destroying it.He set his phone down on the floor, propped against a plaster skull so that the doorway was in the shot. He walked to the door and shouted as loud as he could, his voice inaudible in his own ears. “I’m coming out now!” he shouted. “I’m opening the doors!”He waited for a two-count, then reached for the lock. He turned it and let the door crash open as two cops in riot-visors came through, pepper-spray at the fore. He was down on the ground, writhing and clawing at his face in an instant, and the phone caught it all.All Perry wanted was for someone to cut the plastic cuffs off so he could scrub at his eyes, though he knew that would only make it worse. The riot-bus sounded like an orgy, moaning and groaning with dozens of voices every time the bus jounced over a pothole.Perry was on the floor of the bus, next to a kid—judging from the voice—who cursed steadily the whole way along. One hard jounce made their heads connect and they both cussed, then apologized to one another, then laughed a little.“My name’s Perry.” His voice sounded like he was underwater, but he could hear. The pepper spray seemed to have cleared out his sinuses and given him back some of his hearing.“I’m Death Waits.” He said it without any drama. Perry wasn’t sure if he’d heard right. He supposed he had. Goth kids.“Nice to meet you.”“Likewise.” Their heads were banged together again. They laughed and cursed.“Christ my face hurts,” Perry said.“I’m not surprised. You look like a tomato.”“You can see?”“Lucky me, yup. I got a pretty good couple of whacks on the back and shoulders once I was down, but no gas.”“Lucky you all right.”“I’m more pissed that I lost the tombstone I brought down. It was a real rarity, and it was hard to get, too. I bet it got tromped.”“Tombstone, huh?”“From the Graveyard Walk at Disney. They tore it down last week.”“And you were bringing it to add it to the ride?”“Sure—that’s where it belongs.”Perry’s face still burned, but the pain was lessening. Before it had been like his face was on fire. Now it was like a million fire ants biting him. He tried to put it out of his mind by concentrating on the pain in his wrists where the plastic straps were cutting into him.“Why?”There was a long silence. “Has to go somewhere. Better there than in a vault or in the trash.”“How about selling it to a collector?”“You know, it never occurred to me. It means too much to go to a collector.”“The tombstone means too much?”“I know it sounds stupid, but it’s true. You heard that Disney’s tearing out all the goth stuff? Fantasyland meant a lot to some of us.”“You didn’t feel like it was, what, co-opting you?”“Dude, you can buy goth clothes at a chain of mall-stores. We’re all over the mainstream/non-mainstream fight. If Disney wants to put together a goth homeland, that’s all right with me. And that ride, it was the best place to remember it. You know that it got copied over every night to other rides around the country? So all the people who loved the old Disney could be part of the memorial, even if they couldn’t come to Florida. We had the idea last week and everyone loved it.”“So you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?”“Your ride?”“Well, I built it.”“No fucking way.”“Way.” He smiled and that made his face hurt.“Dude, that is the coolest thing ever. You built that? How did—How do you become the kind of person who can build one of those things? I’m out of work and trying to figure out what to do next.”“Well, you could join one of the co-ops that’s building the other rides.”“Sure, I guess. But I want to be the kind of person who invents the idea of making something like that. Did you get an electrical engineering degree or something?”“Just picked it up as I went along. You could do the same, I’m sure. But hang on a sec—you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?”“Well, yeah. But it was stuff they’d torn down.”Perry’s eyes streamed. This couldn’t be a coincidence, stuff from Disney rides showing up in his ride and the cops turning up to enforce a court order Disney got. But he couldn’t blame this kid, who sounded like a real puppy-dog.“Wait, you don’t think the cops were there because—”“Probably. No hard feelings though. I might have done the same in your shoes.”“Oh shit, I amso sorry. I didn’t think it through atall, I can see that now. Of course they’d come after you. They must totally hate you. I used to work there, they just hate anything that takes a Florida tourist dollar. It’s why they built the monorail extension to Orlando airport—to make sure that from the moment you get off the plane, you don’t spend a nickel on anything that they don’t sell you. I used to think it was cool, because they built such great stuff, but then they went after the new Fantasyland—”“You can’t be a citizen of a themepark,” Perry said.The kid barked a laugh. “Man, how true isthat? You’ve nailed it, pal.”Perry managed to crack an eye, painfully, and catch a blurry look at the kid: a black Edward Scissorhands dandelion clock of hair, eyeliner, frock-coat—but a baby-face with cheeks you could probably see from the back of his head. About as threatening as a Smurf. Perry felt a sudden, delayed rush of anger. Howdarethey beat up kids like this “Death Waits”—all he wanted to do was ride a goddamned ride! He wasn’t a criminal, wasn’t out rolling old ladies or releasing malicious bioorganisms on the beach!The bus turned a sharp corner and their heads banged together again. They groaned and then the doors were being opened and Perry squeezed his eyes shut again.Rough hands seized him and marched him into the station house. The crowd susurrations were liquid in his screwed-up ears. He couldn’t smell or see, either. He felt like he was in some kind of terrible sensory deprivation nightmare, and it made him jerky, so whenever a hand took him and guided him to another station in the check-in process (his wallet lifted from his pocket, his cheek swabbed, his fingers pressed against a fingerprint scanner) he flinched involuntarily. The hands grew rougher and more insistent. At one point, someone peeled open his swollen eyelid, a feeling like being stabbed in the eye, and his retina was scanned. He screamed and heard laughter, distant through his throbbing eardrums.It galvanized him. He forced his eyes open, glaring at the cops around him. Mostly they were Florida crackers, middle-aged guys with dead-eyed expressions of impersonal malevolence. There was a tiny smattering of brown faces and women’s faces, but they were but a sprinkling when compared to the dominant somatype of Florida law.The next time someone grabbed him to shove him towards the next station on this quest, he jerked his arm away and sat down. He’d seen protestors do this before, and knew that it was hard to move a sitting man expeditiously or with dignity. Hands seized him by the arms, and he flailed until he was free, remaining firmly seated. The laughter was turning to anger now. Beside him, someone else sat. Death Waits, looking white-faced and round-eyed. More people hit the floor. A billy-club was shoved under his arm, which was then twisted into an agonizing position. He was suddenly ready to give up the fight and go along, but he couldn’t get to his feet fast enough. With a sickeningcrack, his arm broke. He had a moment’s lucid awareness that a bone had broken in his body, and then the pain was on him and he choked out a shout, then a louder one, and then everything went dark.As it turned out, his prison infirmary time didn’t last long at all. Kettlewell had faded fast from the riot, headed back to the guesthouse and got the lawyers on the phone. He’d shown them the stream off of Perry’s phone and they were in front of a judge before Perry reached the jail.Perry was led out of the infirmary with his arm in a sling. His face was still painfully swollen, and he’d managed to turn an ankle as well. At least his hearing was coming back.Kettlewell took Perry’s good arm and gave him a soulful hug that embarrassed him. Kettlewell led him outside, to where a big cab was waiting. In it were the family Kettlewell, Lester, and Suzanne. Lester had a couple bandages taped to his face and when Suzanne smiled, he saw her lips were stained red and one of her front teeth had been knocked out.He managed a brave smile. “Looks like you guys got the full treatment, huh?”Suzanne squeezed his hand. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.” Ada and Pascal looked goggle-eyed at them. Ada was popping Korean lotus-bean walnut cakes into her mouth from a greasy paper bag, and she offered them silently to Perry, who took one just to be polite, but found after the first bite that he wasn’t really hungry after all.Kettlewell and Perry fought about what to do next, but Kettlewell prevailed. He took them to a private doctor who photographed them and examined them and x-rayed them, documenting everything while Ada Kettlewell played camera-woman with her phone, videoing it all.“I don’t think suing the police is going to help, Landon,” Perry said. Suzanne nodded vigorously. The three victims were in paper examining gowns, and the Kettlewells were still in street clothes, which gave them a real advantage in the self-confidence department.“It’ll help if we cash out a big settlement—it’ll bankroll our defense against the Disney trademark claims. IP lawyers charge more than God per hour. I got the injunction lifted, but we’re still going to have to go to court, and that’s not going to be cheap.”It needled Perry—he didn’t like the idea of being embroiled in the legal system in the first place, and while he could grudgingly admit a certain elegance in using cash settlements from the law to fund their defense in court, the whole business made him squirm.Eva sat down beside him. “I can tell this sucks for you, Perry.” Ada whispered the wordsucksand giggled, and Eva rolled her eyes. “But there’s fifty people wedidn’tbail out in there, who are all of them going to have to figure out their own way through the legal system. You can’t run a business if your customers risk a solid beating and jail time just for showing up.”I don’t want to run a business,he thought, but he knew that was petulant. He was the man with the roll of bills down his pants. “There are fifty people still in the slam?”Kettlewell nodded. Suzanne had her camera out and she was recording. It had been a long time since Perry had really felt the camera’s eye on him. It was one thing to be recorded by some friends for remembrance, but now Suzanne’s camera seemed like the gaze of posterity. He needed to rise to it, he knew.“Let’s get them out. All of them.”Kettlewell raised his eyebrows. “And how do you plan on doing that?”“We’ll charge it to the business,” Perry said. Lester chuckled and gave him a thump on the back. “It’s a legit expense—these are ourcustomersafter all.”Kettlewell shook his head at all of them, then he left the doctor’s office. He already had his phone stuck to his head and was talking with the lawyer before he got out of earshot.Perry and Lester and Suzanne and Eva exchanged mischievous glances, grinning with unexpected delight. Pascal, riding on Eva’s hip, woke up and started crying and Eva handed him to Lester while she went for the diaper bag.“Here we go again,” Lester said, wrinkling his nose and holding the wailing Pascal at arm’s length.Suzanne got it all with her phone, then she flipped it shut and gave Lester a hard kiss on the cheek.“Fatherhood would suit you,” she said.He went bright red. “Don’t you get any ideas,” he said. Suzanne laughed and skipped away, looking all of ten.Perry felt huge. Larger than life. The adventure was beginning anew, with these good people whom he loved like family. He had the work and the people, and who needed anything more.It was a feeling that lasted all the way back to the ride.But then he surveyed the ride itself and found it in utter ruins, far worse than it had been left when he’d been dragged out of it. Every single exhibit was smashed, strewn here and there.He couldn’t believe it. He brought up the clean-up lights, flooding the place, and then he saw what he’d missed at first: the smashed exhibits were not smashed exhibits—they werereplicasof smashed exhibits. At every ride in the country, police had gone in smashing, and every other ride in the country had faithfully reproduced the damage, dutiful printers churning out replica detritus and dutiful robots placing it with micrometer precision.He began to laugh and couldn’t stop. Lester came in and immediately got the joke and laughed along with him. They managed to stop laughing just long enough to explain it to Suzanne and Kettlewell, who didn’t find it nearly as funny as they did. Suzanne took pictures.Finally he got down to business, opening the change-log and rolling the ride back through the “revisions” to its unsmashed state. It would take the robots a long time to set everything right again, but at least he didn’t have to oversee it.Instead, he tracked down as many of the market-stall vendors as he could locate in the shantytown and made sure they were all right—they were, though they’d lost some inventory. He comped them all a month’s rent and made sure they knew that steps were being taken to keep it from happening again. He knew that they could make nearly as much money selling from a roadside or online, and he wanted to keep them happy. Besides, it wasn’t their fault.He was exhausted and his arm was really starting to gripe him. He found himself stopping in the street every few steps to rub his eyes and force himself on. Francis came on him when he was like that, leaning against the prefab concrete wall of one of the tall, twisty shanties, and he took Perry’s car-keys away and drove him home. Perry was in too much of a state by the time he got there to think about how Francis would get back—he was already lying in bed before it occurred to him that the old man with the gimpy leg probably walked the ten miles home.He woke up later that night to sex noises from Lester’s room and he recognized Suzanne’s voice. Later, he woke again to hear the tail end of another argument between Lester and Suzanne, and then Suzanne storming out of the apartment.Oh, goody, he thought. He lay on his back, trying to find sleep again—the clock said 3AM—and found thoughts of Hilda drifting unbidden into his mind.It was silly—they’d only spent one night together, and he had to admit that as great as the sex had been, he’d had better with the fatkins gymnasts you could pick up down on South Beach. She was too young for him. She lived inWisconsin. But there were touches in the ride that had originated with her instantiation—he looked over the logs every now and then—and he found himself contemplating them with sentimental smiles.He fell asleep again and only woke when he rolled over on his bad arm and yelped himself awake. The smell of waffles, bacon and eggs was strong in the apartment. He couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to shower with his cast on, so he pulled on a pair of shorts and let himself into the living room.Lester was at the stove, cooking up half a pig and pouring maple batter into the waffle-iron. He waved a spatula at him and pointed out at the terrace. Perry stepped out and saw Suzanne and Tjan and Tjan’s little kids—what were their names? Lyenitchka and the little boy? Man, the whole family was here.“Your arm is broken,” Lyenitchka said, pointing at him.Perry nodded gravely. “That’s true. Want to sign my cast?” He was pretty sure that he had a grease-pencil that would mark the surface, though the hospital had sworn that it would shed dirt, ink and anything else he threw at it.She nodded vigorously. Tjan looked him over and gave a little wave, then Perry went back into the living room and asked his computer to find the grease-pencil.“Thought you’d be busy in Boston,” he said, while Lyenitchka painstakingly spelled out her name, going over the letters to get them to show up dark—the cast surface really didn’t want to suck up any tint.“Boston came out OK. We had lawyers on tap at the start and the vibe was cool. I incorporated there, so it was easier than you guys had it. But some of the others were hit bad, like San Francisco and Madison.”“Madison?” Perry was alarmed by how alarmed he sounded.“Mass arrests. The cops there are real hard-cases, with all this antipersonnel gear left over from the stem-cell riots.”Perry jerked and spoiled Lyenitchka’s writing. He patted her head and set his arm back down where she could get at it. He groaned.“They’re mostly still in. We’re trying to get them bailed out, but the judge at the arraignment set bail pretty high.”“I’ll post it,” Perry said. “I can put up my savings or something...”Tjan looked uncomfortable. “Perry, there are 250 people in the lockup in Wisconsin. Some of them are going to skip out, it’s nearly a certainty. If you bail them all out, you’ll go broke. I mean, it’s good to see you and I’m sorry you got hurt and all respect, but don’t be an idiot.”Perry felt himself go belligerent. His hands went into fists and his broken wing protested. That brought him back to reality. He forced himself to smile.“There’s a girl in Madison, I want to make sure she’s OK.”Tjan and Suzanne stared at him for a second. Then Lester clapped him across the back from behind him, startling him and making him squeak. “Big fella!” he crowed. “I should have known.”Perry gave him a mock glare. “Youhave no right to sayanythingon this score.” He darted a glance at Suzanne and saw that she was blushing. Tjan took this in and nodded, as though his suspicions had just been confirmed.“Fair enough,” Tjan said. “Let’s make some inquiries about the young lady. What’s her name?”“Hilda Hammersen.”Tjan’s eyebrows shot up. “HildaHammersen? From the mailing lists?ThatHilda?”Hilda was the queen of the mailing lists—brash, quick, and argumentative, but never the kind of person who started flamewars. Hilda’s arguments were hot and fast, and she always won. Perry had watched her admiringly from the sidelines, only weighing in occasionally, but he seemed to remember now that she’d taken Tjan to the cleaners once on an issue of protocol resolution.“That’s the one,” Perry said.“I always pictured her as being about fifty, with a machete between her teeth,” Lester said. “No offense.”“Lyenitchka, go get my phone from my bed-stand,” Perry said, patting the girl on the shoulder. When she got back he went through his photos of Hilda with them.Lester made a wolf-whistle and Suzanne punched him in the shoulder and took the phone away.“She’s very pretty,” Suzanne said, disapprovingly. “And very young.”“Oh yes, dating younger people issosleazy,” Lester said with a chuckle. Suzanne squirmed and even Perry had to laugh.“Guys, here it is. I need to spring Hilda, and we need to do something about all those customers and supporters and so on who went to jail today. We need to fight all the injunctions—all of them—and prevent them from recurring.”“And we need to eat breakfast, which is ready,” Lester said, gesturing at the table behind him, which was stacked high with waffles, sausages, eggs, toast, and pitchers of juice and carafes of coffee.Lyenitchka and Sasha looked at each other and ran to the table, taking seats next to one another. The adults followed and soon they were eating. Perry managed a waffle and a sausage, but then he went off to his room. Hilda was in the slam in Madison, and who the hell knew what the antipersonnel stuff the Madison cops used had done to her. He just wanted to get on a fucking plane andgo there.Halfway through his shower, he knew that that was what he was going to do. He packed a shoulder-bag, took a couple more painkillers, and walked out into the living room.“Guys, I’m going to Madison. I’ll be back in a day or two. We’ll work everything out over the phone, OK?”Lester and Suzanne came over to him. “You going to be OK, buddy?” Lester said.“I’ll be fine,” he said.“We can spring her from here,” Tjan said. “We have the Internet, you know.”“I know,” Perry said. “You do that, OK? And tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can.”The security at the airport went bonkers over him. The perfect storm: a fresh arrest, a suspicious cast, and a ticket bought with cash. He missed the first two flights to Chicago, but by mid-afternoon he was landing at O’Hare and submitting to an interim screening procedure before boarding for Madison. His phone rang in the middle of the screening, and the wrinkly old TSA goon-lady primly informed him that he might as well get that since once the phone rings, they have to start the procedure over again.“Tjan,” he said.“They can’t spring her today. Tomorrow, though.”He closed his eyes and shut out the TSA goon. She had a huge bouffant of copper hair, and a midwesterner’s sense of proportionality when it came to eye-shadow and rouge. She was the kind of woman who could call you “honey” and make it sound like “Islamofascist faggot.”“Why not, Tjan?”There was a pause. “She’s in the infirmary and they won’t release her until tomorrow.”“Infirmary.”“Nothing serious—she took a knock on the head and they want to hold her for observation.”He pictured a copper’s electrified billy-club coming down on shining blond hair and felt like throwing up.“Perry? Buddy. She’s OK, really. I had our lawyer visit her in the prison infirmary and she swears she looks great. The lawyer’s name is Candice—take a cab to her office from the airport. OK?”“Why is she in the prison infirmary, Tjan? Why can’t she be moved to a real hospital?”“It’s just a liability thing. The police don’t want to risk the suit if she goes complicated on them between hospitals.”“Jesus.”“Seriously, she’s fine. We’ve got a good lawyer on the scene.”But Perry had a bad feeling. The TSA goon picked up on it and gave him a little bit of extra attention. Acting nervous or agitated in an airport was a one-way ticket to a cavity search.But then he was lifting off and headed for Madison, and though the time crawled on the one-hour flight, it was, after all, only an hour. He even napped briefly, though a sky marshall woke him shortly after for a random bag-search. His fellow passengers—badly dressed midwesterners and a couple of hipster students—all turned their bags out in the cramped cabin and then got back in their seats for the landing.Perry had meant to phone in a car reservation at O’Hare, but the extra search had eaten up the time he’d allocated for it, and now all the rental counters were sold out. Reluctantly, he got into a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the office of the lawyers that Tjan had hired.The cabbie was a young African kid with a shaved head. He had a dent in one temple and more dents in one of his wrists, visible as he let his long hands drape over the steering wheel.“I know where it is,” he said when Perry gave him the address. “That lawyer, she is very good. She helped me with the Homeland Security.”The kid was young, 21 or 22, with a studious air, despite his old injuries. He reminded Perry of the shantytowners, people who didn’t always get medical attention for their ailments, people who were often missing a tooth or two, who had mysterious lumps from badly-set bones or scars or funny eyebrows like his. The midwesterners on the plane had been flawless as action-figures, but Perry’s friends and this African kid looked like something carved out of coal and chalk.Perry was one big jitter from the trip and the coffee and the pills for his arm, but he found himself drawn into conversation as they whizzed past the fields and malls, the factories and office-parks.“I’m from Gulu, in Uganda. There has been civil war there for thirty five years. I studied chemical engineering through the African Virtual University wiki-program, and qualified for a Chavez scholarship here in Madison.” His accent was light but exotic, the African rolling of the Rs, the British-sounding vowel-shifts. “But the Homeland Security didn’t want to renew my visa last year. They said I had financial irregularities. I was paypalling to a friend in Kampala who withdrew it in shillings and sent it to my family in giros. Homeland Security said that I wasmoney laundering. I thought I’d be sent away or put in prison, but Ms Candice wrote them a letter and they vanished.” He snapped his long, knuckly fingers for emphasis.“Jesus. Well, that’s good. She’s going to help me get my girlfriend out of jail.” Perry realized he’d just called Hilda his girlfriend, which would be news to her, but there it was.“You don’t need to worry. She’ll get your friend free.”Perry nodded and tried to close his eyes and relax. He couldn’t. What the hell had happened to the world. It had seemed so exciting when his father was bringing home new shapes he’d spun off his CAD/CAM rig. When Perry had started to trade designs with people, to effortlessly find people on the net who wanted to collaborate with him and vice-versa. When Perry had started a business making cool art out of free junk and selling it off an Internet connection that was likewise free.Free, free, free. No need to talk to a government, or grovel for a curator, or put up with an agent or a boss. He’d just assumed all along that he’d end up living in a world where all those parasites and bullies and middlemen would just blow away in the wind.But they’d all found jobs in the new world. They weren’t needed anymore, but that didn’t mean that they went away. Now they were wanding him in airports and suing him for trademark infringement and busting his girlfriend and breaking his arm and giving hassle to this poor African kid who’d taught himself to be an engineer with a ferchrissakeswiki.He dry-swallowed another pain-killer and then remembered that taking the pills meant he wouldn’t be able to get a drink, which he could sure as shit use.“My name’s Perry,” he said.“Richard,” the driver said. “We’re almost there, Perry. I wish you the very best of luck.”“You too,” he said. The driver shook his hand warmly after getting his luggage out of the trunk, a limp handshake by North American standards, but gentle and friendly nonetheless. His dented wrist flexed oddly as the half-knit bones there moved.The lawyer’s office was not what Perry was expecting. It looked like someone’s living room, with a couple of overstuffed sofas, a dozing cat, and the lawyer, Candice, who was a young-looking woman in her mid-twenties. She dressed in jeans and an oversized UW sweatshirt, with a laptop perched on one knee. She had a friendly, open face, framed with lots of curly brown hair.“You must be Perry,” she said, setting the laptop down and giving him an unexpected hug. “That was from Hilda. I saw her a couple hours ago. She was very adamant that I pass it on to you.”“Nice to meet you, he said, accepting a cup of tea from an insulated jug on a cardboard side-board. “Hilda is all right?”“Sit down,” the lawyer said.Perry’s stomach turned a somersault. “Hilda’s all right?”“Sit.”Perry sat.“She was gassed with a neurotoxin that has given her a temporary but severe form of Parkinson’s disease. Normally it just renders people immobile, but one in a million has a reaction like this. It’s just bad luck that Hilda was one of them.”“She wasgassed?”“They all were. There was a hell of a fight, as I understand it. It really looks like it was the cops’ fault. Someone told them that there were printed guns in the ride-location and they used extreme and disproportionate force.”“I see,” Perry said. His blood whooshed in his ears. Printed guns? No frigging way. Sure, ray-guns in some of the exhibits. But nothing that fired anything. He felt tears begin to stream down his face. The lawyer moved to his sofa and put her arm around his shoulders.“She’s going to be fine,” Candice said. “The Parkinson’s is rare, but it goes away in 100 percent of the the cases where it occurs. What this means is that we’ve got an amazing chance of taking a huge bite out of the local law that we can use to fund future defense. Tjan told me that that’s the strategy and I think it’s sound. Plus the harder we hit the law today, the more reluctant they’ll be to rush off half-cocked the next time someone trumps up a BS trademark claim. It could be much worse, Perry. There’s a kid who lost an eye to a rubber bullet.”Perry fisted the tears away. “Let’s go get her,” he said.“They say she shouldn’t be moved,” Candice said.“What does our doctor say?”“I phoned a couple MDs this afternoon and got conflicting stories. Everyone agrees that not moving her is safer than moving her, though. The only disagreement is about how dangerous it would be to move her.”“Let’s go see her, then.”“That we can do.”Perry had trouble with the search at the prison hospital. His cast and their scanners didn’t get along and they couldn’t be satisfied with a hand search. For a couple minutes it looked like he was going to be kept out, but Candice—who had changed into a power-suit before they left the office—put on a stern voice and demanded to speak to the duty sergeant, and then to his commanding officer, and in ten minutes, they were on the hospital ward, where the metal-railed beds had prisoners handcuffed to them.“Hilda?” She looked sunken and sick, her face slack and her jaw askew. Her eyes opened and rolled crazily, they focused on him. Her body shook through two waves of tremors before she was able to raise a shaking hand toward him, trailing IV tubes. She was trying to say his name, but it wouldn’t come out, just a series of plosive Ps.But then he took her hand and felt its fine warmth, the calluses he remembered from all those months ago, and he felt better. Actually better. Felt some peace for the first time in a long time.“Hello, Hilda,” he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt, and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands, burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move on his.They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but they hadn’t taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed wasn’t the right place to make pronouncements of love.“I love you,” he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. “I love you, Hilda.”She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he dared. Candice came back and stood by them.“They think that she’ll be better in the morning. She’s already much better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep’s the only thing for it. They’ve got her mildly sedated, too.”Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their night together, and he stroked her cheek.“I’ll stay here,” he said.“I don’t think that they’re going to let you do that, Perry. This is a prison, not a hospital.”“I’ll stay here,” he said again. “Just make it happen, OK? We’re going to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That’s got to give us some leverage. I’ll stay here.”She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of painkillers. They’d have painkillers here.Candice went away, and then, a while later, she came back. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll come and get you in the morning.”“Thanks,” he said. Then he thought that he should say something more, and he turned around, but the lawyer had gone.He fell asleep holding Hilda’s hand with his good hand, and woke up with an unbelievable pain in his broken arm and couldn’t find a nurse. He bit down on the pain and spent a long watch that night staring at Hilda, thinking of all she meant to him and how weird it was that she meant so much when they’d had so brief a moment together. They hadn’t let him bring his phone in, or he’d have taken a thousand pictures of her face in repose. He nodded off again.He woke when she did, stirring in her bed. Her movements were still weak and feeble, but they lacked the uncontrolled tremors of the night before. He leaned in for a kiss, not caring about his sour breath or hers.“Good morning,” he said.“Morning, gorgeous,” she said, and took him in a soft, sleepy hug.Candice sprung them and took them across town to her doctor, a young man who took great care in examining Hilda, explaining patiently which fluids he was drawing and which tests he planned on running on them. Perry had noticed that midwesterners came in two flavors: big Scandinavian Aryans with giant shoulders and easy smiles, and exchange students and immigrants in varying shades of brown, who looked hurt and bent alongside of the natives—looked like the people he knew from back home, people who didn’t have ready access to medical care or good nutrition in their formative years.The doctor was Vietnamese, but he was at least a couple generations in, judging by his accent, and he had the same midwestern smile and seemed big and bulky compared with the Vietnamese people Perry knew in Florida. He watched the man peer intently at a screen after taping some electrodes to Hilda’s head, and felt like he’d come to some land of Norse giants.The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice’s car and cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn’t until Perry got back with her to her apartment—every stick of furniture made from clever cardboard—and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch his phone on again.He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with sexy cowgirls printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers, lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent bleats.“Shit,” he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going on.A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with overreacting cops.Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down.“Right, what’s the game-plan?”“How should I know?” Perry said. He could hear the whine in his voice. “I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal defenses, but Disney’s denial-of-service attacking us in the courtroom. They’re also getting all this destruction dealt to us by the cops.”“You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let’s break this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them, then call up the troops and let them know what’s going on. I’ll get a conference call set up while we chat.”She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put down her laptop and rest, but she wasn’t having any of it.And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces: incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together scrapbooks of the carnage wrought.It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and Kettlewell in.“Perry, do you think it’s a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan to respond to them?”Hilda shook her head and put a hand on Perry’s good arm to calm him down before he answered Kettlewell. “That’s how we do it over on our side. Their side is all about secrecy. Our side trades the advantage of surprise for the advantage of openness. You watch—by tonight we’ll have by-laws drafted, press-releases, exhaustive documentation. You watch.”On the screen, Lester’s face suddenly hove into view, fish-eye distorted by his proximity to the lens. Hilda gave an amused squeak and pulled back.“So that’s Yoko, huh?” Lester said, grinning. “Cute! Listen guys, don’t let these suits talk you out of what you’re doing. This is the right thing. I’m on all the message boards and stuff and they’re all champing to do something for real.”“Yoko?” Hilda said. She raised an adorable eyebrow.“Just a figure of speech,” Lester said. “I’m Lester. You must be Hilda. Perry’s told us practically nothing about you, which is probably a sign of something or other.”Hilda regarded Perry with mock coolness. “Oh really?”“Lester,” Perry said. “I love you like a brother. Shut the fuck up already.”Lester made a little whipping motion. Suddenly he was gone from the picture, and they saw Suzanne pulling him away by one ear. Hilda snorted. “I like her,” she said. Suzanne gave them a wave and Tjan and Kettlewell came back into frame.They made their goodbyes and hung up. Now Hilda and Perry were alone, together, in her bedroom, laptops shut, day done—though it was hardly gone noon—and the silence stretched.“Thanks for coming, Perry,” she said.“I—” He broke off. He didn’t know what to say. They had only known each other for a day, only had a one-night stand. She probably thought that he was a giant creep. “I was worried.” he said. “Um. You should probably rest up some more, right?”He got up and headed for the door.“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.“Figured I’d let you rest,” he said with a half-shrug.“Get in this bed this instant, young man,” she said, slapping the bed beside her. “And get those stinky clothes off before you do—I won’t have you getting my sheets all covered in your travel-grime.”He felt the foolish grin spread across his face and he skinned out of his clothes as fast as he could with his cast on.They didn’t leave the house until suppertime, freshly showered (she’d been a delightful help in scrubbing those spots where the cast impeded access) and changed. Perry took a painkiller after the shower, which kicked in as they went out the door, and the autumn evening was crisp and sharp.They got as far as the corner before the man approached them. “Perry Gibbons, isn’t it?” He had an English accent, and a little pot-belly, and a big white bubble-jacket and a scarf wound round his throat.“That’s right,” Perry said. He looked at the guy. “Do I know you?”“No, I don’t think so. But I’ve followed you in the press. Quite remarkable.”“Thanks,” Perry said. Being recognized—how weird was that. Cool that it happened in front of Hilda. “This is Hilda,” he said. She took the man’s hand, and he grinned, showing two long rat-like front teeth.“Fred,” he said. “What an absolute delight running into you out here of all places. What are you doing in town?”“Just visiting with friends,” Perry said.“Wasn’t there some kind of dust-up at your place in Florida? I saw what they did to the ride here, what a bloody mess.”“Yeah,” Perry said. He pointed at his casted arm. “Seemed like a good time to get out of Dodge.”Hilda said, “We’re getting some dinner, if you’d like to come along.”“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”“No, it’s no sweat, we’ve got a whole bunch of people associated with the ride meeting us. You’d be more than welcome.”“Goodness, thatishospitable of you. How can I refuse?”Luke and Ernie were there with their girlfriends, and there were more kids, midwestern and healthy even if they weren’t necessarily all Scandic, some Vietnamese kids, some Hmong, some desis descended from the H1B diaspora. They had a gigantic meal in a student place that was heavy on the potatoes and beers the size of your head, which Perry resisted for a couple hours until he figured that he’d metabolized most of the painkiller and then started in, getting just short of roaring drunk. He told them war stories, told them about Death Waits, told them about the co-op and the plan to fight back.“That just doesn’t sound right to me,” said a friend of Luke’s, a law-school grad student who had been bending Perry’s ear all night with stories from his law-clinic work defending university students from music-industry lawsuits. “I mean, sure, go after the cops because they roughed you guys up, but how much money do the cops have? You gotta target some fat cash, and for that you want to go after Disney. Abuse of trademark, abuse of process, something like that. The standard’s pretty high, but if you can get a judgement, the money is incredible. You could take them to the cleaners.”Perry looked blearily at him. He was young, like all of them, but he had a good rhetorical style that Perry recognized as something born of real confidence. He knew his stuff, or thought he did. He had a strawberry mark on his high forehead that looked like a map of a distant island, and Perry thought that the mark probably threw off the kid’s opponents. “So we sue Disney and five years from now we cash in—how does that help us now?”The kid nodded. “I hoped you’d ask me that. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Here’s what you need to do, dude, here’s the fucking thing.” The room had grown silent. Everyone leaned closer. Fred poured Perry another beer from the pitcher in the middle of the table. “Here’s how you do it. You raise investment capital for it. There’s a ton of money in this, a ton. Disney’s got deep pockets and you’ve got a great case.“But like you say, it’ll take ten, fifteen years to get the money out of them. And it’ll cost a mil in legal fees on the way. So what you do is, you create an investment syndicate. You can maybe get thirty million out of Disney, plus whatever the jury awards in punitives, and if you keep half of it, you can deliver a fifteen-x return on investment. So go find a millionaire and borrow sixteen million, and turn the defense over to him.”Perry was dumbstruck. “You’re joking. How can that possibly work?”“It’s how patent lawsuits work! Some dickhead engineer gets a bogus patent for his doomed startup, and as they’re sinking into the mud, some venture capitalist comes and buys the company up just so it can go around and threaten other companies with real businesses for violating the patent. They ask for sums just below what it would cost to get the US Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate the patent, and everyone ponies up. Venture capitalism is the major source of funding for commercial lawsuits these days.”Fred laughed and clapped. “Brilliant! Perry, that’s just brilliant. Are you going to do it?”Perry looked at the table, doodling in the puddles of beer with a fingertip. “I just want to get back to making stuff, you know. This is nuts. Devoting ten years of my life to suing someone?”“You don’t have to do the suing. That’s the point. You outsource that. You get the money; someone else does the business stuff.” Hilda put her arm around his shoulders. “Give the suits something to occupy themselves with—otherwise they get antsy and stir up trouble.”Perry and Hilda laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Fred and the others joined in, and Perry scrawled a drunken note to Tjan and Kettlewell with the info. The party broke up not long after, amid much chortling and snorting, and they staggered home. Fred gave Perry a warm handshake and treated Hilda to a lingering, sloppy hug until she pushed him off, laughing even harder.“All right then,” Perry said, “home again home again.”Hilda gave his groin a friendly honk and then made a dash for it, and he gave chase.PHOTO: A Drunken Perry Gibbons Gets a How’s Your Father From Ride-Bride Hilda HammersenMADISON, WI: Say you managed to inspire some kind of “movement” of techno-utopians who built a network of amusement park rides that guide their visitors through an illustrated history of the last dotcom bubble.Say that your merry band of unwashed polyamorous info-hippies was overtaken by jackbooted thugs from one of the dinosauric media empires of yesteryear, whose legal machinations resulted in nationwide raids, beatings, gassings, and the total shutdown of your “movement.”What would you do? Sue? Call a press-conference? Bail your loyal followers out of the slam?Get laid, get shitfaced, and let a bunch of students spitball bullshit ideas for fighting back?If you picked the latter, you’re in good company. Last night, Perry Gibbons, soi-disant “founder” of the rideafarian religious cult, was spotted out for drinks and cuddles with a group of twentysomething students in the backwater town of Madison, WI, a place better known for its cheddar than its activism.While Gibbons regaled the impressionable post-adolescents with tales of his derring-do, he avidly noted their strategic suggestions for solving his legal, paramilitary, and technical problems.One suggestion that drew Gibbons’s attention and admiration was to approach venture capitalists and beg them for the capital to sue Disney and then use the settlements from the suits to pay back the VCs.This mind-croggling Ponzi scheme is the closest thing to a business model we’ve yet heard of from the chip-addled techno-hippies of the New Work and its post-boom incarnation.One can only imagine how our Ms Church will cover this in her fan-blog: breathless admiration for Mr Gibbons’s cunning in soliciting yet more “way out of the box” thinking from the Junior Guevaras of the Great Midwest, no doubt.Perhaps Gibbons can be afforded a little sympathy, though. His latest encounter with Florida law left him with a broken arm and it may be that the pain medication is primarily responsible for Gibbons’s fancy thinking. If that’s the case, we can only hope that his young, blond Scandie nursie will carefully minister him back to health (while his comrades rot in gaol around the country).This organization needs to die before it gets someone killed.Comments? Write to Freddy at honestfred@techstink.co.ukLester interrupted Suzanne’s phone-call to break in and announce that he’d run Rat-Toothed Freddy to ground: the reporter had caught the first flight from Madison to Chicago and then gone west to San Jose. The TSA had flagged him as a person-of-interest and were watching his movements, and a little digging on its website could cause it to disclose Freddy’s every airborne movement.Suzanne relayed this to Perry.“Don’t you go there,” she said. “He’s gunning for the San Francisco crew, and he’s hoping for a confrontation or a denunciation so that he can print it. He gets idees fixes that he worries at like a terrier, going for more bile.”“Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?”“I think that he thinks that technology hasn’t lived up to its promise and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him, that means that anyone who actuallylikestechnology is the enemy, the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its true potential.”“Fuck, that is so twisted.”“And given the kind of vile crap he writes, the only readers he has are nut-cases who get off on seeing people who are actually creating stuff flayed alive for their failures. They egg him on—ever see one of his letters columns? If he changed to actual reportage, telling the balanced stories of what was going on in the world, they’d jump ship for some other hate-monger. He’s a lightning-rod for assholes—he’s the king of the trolls.”Perry looked away. “What do I do?”“You could try to starve him. If you don’t show your head, he can’t report on you, except by making stuff up—and made-up stuff gets boring, even for the kinds of losers who read his stuff.”“But I’ve got work to do.”“Yeah, yeah you do. Maybe you’ve just got to take your lumps. Every complex ecosystem has parasites after all. Maybe you just call up San Francisco and brief them on what to expect from this guy and take it from there.”Once they were off the line, Lester came up behind her and hugged her at the waist, squeezing the little love-handles there, reminding her of how long it had been since she’d made it to yoga.“You think that’ll work?”“Maybe. I’ve been talking to theNew Journalism Reviewabout writing a piece on moral responsibility and paid journalism, and if I can bang it out this aft, I bet they’ll publish it tomorrow.”“What’s that going to do?”“Well, it’ll distract him from Perry, maybe. It might get his employer to take a hard look at what he’s writing—I mean that piece is just lies, mischaracterizations, and editorial masquerading as reportage.” She put her lid down and paced around the condo, looking at the leaves floating in the pool. “It’ll give me some satisfaction.”Lester gave her a hug, and it smelled of the old days and the old Lester, the giant, barrel-chested pre-fatkins Lester. It took her back to a simpler time, when they’d had to worry about commercial competition, not police raids.She hugged him back. He was all hard muscle and zero body-fat underneath his tight shirt. She’d never dated anyone that fit, not even back in high-school. It was a little disorienting, and it made her feel especially old and saggy sometimes, though he never seemed to notice.Speaking of which, she felt his erection pressing against her midriff, and tried to hide her grin. “Gimme a couple hours, all right?”She dialed the NJR editor’s number as she slid into her chair and pulled up a text-editor. She knew what she planned on writing, but it would help to be able to share an outline with the NJR if she was going to get this out in good time. Working with editors was a pain after years of writing for the blog, but sometimes you wanted someone else’s imprimatur on your work.Five hours later, the copy was filed. She rocked back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head, listening to the crackle of her spine. She’d been half-frozen by the air conditioning, so she’d turned it off and opened a window, and now the condo was hot and muggy. She stripped down to her underwear and headed for the shower, but before she could make it, she was intercepted by Lester.He fell on her like a dog on dinner, and hours slipped by as they made the apartment even muggier. Lester’s athleticism in the sack was flattering, but sometimes boundless to the point of irritation. She was rescued from it this time by the doorbell.Lester put on a bathrobe and answered the door, and she heard the sounds of the family Kettlewell spilling in, the kids’ little footfalls pounding up and down the corridors. Hurriedly, Suzanne threw on a robe and ducked across the corridor into the bathroom, but not before catching sight of Eva and Landon. Eva’s expression was grimly satisfied; Landon looked stricken. Fuck it, anyway. She’d never given him any reason to hope, and he had no business hoping.Halfway through her shower, she heard someone moving around in the bathroom, and thinking it was Lester, she stuck her head around the curtain, only to find Ada on the pot, little jeans around her ankles. “I hadda make,” Ada said, with a shrug.Christ. What was she doing back here, anyway? She’d missed it all so much from Petersburg. But she hadn’t really bargained for this. It was only a matter of time until Tjan showed up too, surely they’d be wanting a council of war after Freddy’s opening salvo.She waited for the little girl to flush (ouch! hot water!) and got dressed as discreetly as possible.By the time she got to the balcony where the council of war was under way, the two little girls, Lyenitchka and Ada, had gotten Pascal up on the sofa and were playing dress up with him, hot-gluing Barbie heads to his cheeks and arms and chubby knees, like vacantly staring warts.“Do you like him?”“I think he looks wonderful, girls. Is that glue OK for him, though?”Ada nodded vigorously. “I’ve been gluing things to my brother with that stuff forever. Dad says it’s OK so long as I don’t put it in his eyes.”“Your dad’s a smart man.”“He’s in love with you,” Lyenitchka said, and giggled. Ada slugged her in the arm.“That’s supposed to be a secret, stupid,” Ada said.Flustered, Suzanne ducked out onto the patio and shut the door behind her. Eva and Tjan and Kettlewell all turned to look at her.
Sammy had filled a cooler and stuck it in the back-seat of his car the night before, programmed his coffee-maker, and when his alarm roused him at 3AM, he hit the road. First he guzzled his thermos of lethal coffee, then reached around in back for bottles of icy distilled water. He kept the windows rolled down and breathed in the swampy, cool morning air, the most promising air of the Florida day, before it all turned to steam and sizzle.
He didn’t bother looking for truck-stops when he needed to piss, just pulled over on the turnpike’s side and let fly. Why not? At that hour, it was just him and the truckers and the tourists with morning flights.
He reached Miami ahead of schedule and had a diner-breakfast big enough to kill a lesser man, a real fatkins affair. He got back on the road groaning from the chow and made it to the old Wal-Mart just as the merchants were setting up their market on the roadside.
When he’d done the Boston ride, he’d been discouraged that they’d kept on with their Who-ville Xmas even though he’d grinched away all their fun, but this time he was expecting something like this. Watching these guys sell souvenirs at the funeral for the ride made him feel pretty good this time around: their disloyalty had to be a real morale-killer for those ride-operators.
The cops were getting twitchy, which made him grin. Twitchy cops were a key ingredient for bad trouble. He reached behind him and pulled an iced coffee from the cooler and cracked it, listening to the hiss as the embedded CO2 cartridge forced bubbles through it.
Now here came a suit. He looked like a genuine mighty morphin’ power broker, which made Sammy worry, because a guy like that hadn’t figured into his plans, but look at that; he was having a huge fight with the eyebrow guy and now the eyebrow guy was running away from him.
Getting the lawyers to agree to spring the budget to file in every location where there was a ride had been tricky. Sammy had had to fudge a little on his research, claim that they were bringing in real money, tie it to the drop in numbers in Florida, and generally do a song and dance, but it was all worth it. These guys clearly didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
Now eyebrow man was headed for the cop-cars and the entrance, and there, oh yes, there it was. Five cars’ worth of goths, lugging bags full of some kind of home-made or scavenged horror-memorabilia, pulling up short at the entrance.
They piled out of their cars and started milling around, asking questions. Some approached the cops, who seemed in no mood to chat. The body-language could be read at 150 feet:
Goth: But officer, I wanna get on this riiiiiide.
Cop: You sicken me.
Goth: All around me is gloom, gloom. Why can’t I go on my riiiiiide?
Cop: I would like to arrest you and lock you up for being a weird, sexually ambiguous melodramatic who’s dumb enough to hang around out of doors, all in black, inFlorida.
Goth: Can I take your picture? I’m gonna put it on my blog and then everyone will know what a meanie you are.
Cop: Yap yap yap, little bitch. You go on photographing me and mouthing off, see how long it is before you’re in cuffs in the back of this car.
Scumbag street-vendors: Ha ha ha, look at these goth kids mouthing off to the law, that cop must have minuscule testicles!
Cop: Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Eyebrow guy: Um, can everyone just be nice? I’d prefer that this all not go up in flames.
Scumbags, goths: Hurr hurr hurr, shuttup, look at those dumb cops, ahahaha.
Cops: Grrrr.
Eyebrow: Oh, shit.
Four more cars pulled up. Now the shoulder was getting really crowded and freeway traffic was slowing to a crawl.
More goths piled out. Family cars approached the snarl, slowed, then sped up again, not wanting to risk the craziness. Maybe some of them would get on the fucking turnpike and drive up to Orlando, where the real fun was.
The four-lane road was down to about a lane and a half, and milling crowds from the shantytown and the arriving cars were clogging what remained of the thoroughfare. Now goths were parking their cars way back at the intersection and walking over, carrying the objects they’d planned to sacrifice to the ride and smoking clove cigarettes.
Sammy saw Death Waits before Death Waits turned his head, and so Sammy had time to duck down before he was spotted. He giggled to himself and chugged his coffee, crouched down below the window.
The situation was heating up now. Lots of people were asking questions of the cops. People trying to drive through got shouted at by the people in the road. Sometimes a goth would slam a fist down on a hood and there’d be a little bit of back and forth. It was a powder-keg, and Sammy decided to touch it off.
He swung his car out into the road and hit the horn and revved his engine, driving through the crowd just a hair faster than was safe. People slapped his car as it went by and he just leaned on the horn, ploughing through, scattering people who knocked over vendors’ tables and stepped on their wares.
In his rear-view, he saw the chaos begin. Someone threw a punch, someone slipped, someone knocked over a table of infringing merch. Wa-hoo! Party time!
He hit the next left, then pointed his car at the freeway. He reached back and snagged another can of coffee and went to work on it. As the can hissed open, he couldn’t help himself: he chuckled. Then he laughed—a full, loud belly-laugh.
Perry watched it happen as though it were all a dream: The crowds thickening. The cops getting out of their cars and putting their hands on their belts. A distant siren. More people milling around, hanging out in the middle of the road, like idiots,idiots. Then that jerk in the car—what the hell was he thinking, he was going to kill someone!
And then it all exploded. There was a knot of fighting bodies over by the tables, and the knot was getting bigger. The cops were running for them, batons out, pepper-spray out. Perry shouted something, but he couldn’t hear himself. In a second the crowd noises had gone from friendly to an angry roar.
Perry spotted Suzanne watching it all through the viewfinder on her phone, presumably streaming it live, then shouted again, an unheard warning, as a combatant behind her swung wide and clocked her in the head. She went down and he charged for her.
He’d just reached her when a noise went off that dropped him to his knees. It was their antipersonnel sound-cannon, which meant that Lester was around here somewhere. The sound was a physical thing, it made his bowels loose and made his head ring like a gong. Thought was impossible. Everything was impossible except curling up and wrapping your hands around your head.
Painfully, he raised his head and opened his eyes. All around him, people were on their knees. The cops, though, had put giant industrial earmuffs on, the kind of thing you saw jackhammer operators wearing. They were moving rapidly toward... Lester who was in a pickup truck with the AP horn stuck in the cargo bed, wired into the cigarette lighter. They had guns drawn and Lester was looking at them wide-eyed, hands in the air.
Their mouths were moving, but whatever they were saying was inaudible. Perry took his phone out of his pocket and aimed it at them. He couldn’t move without spooking them and possibly knocking himself out from the sound, but he could rodneyking them as they advanced on Lester. He could practically read Lester’s thoughts:If I move to switch this off, they’ll shoot me dead.
The cops closed on Lester and then the sour old male cop was up in the bed and he had Lester by the collar, throwing him to the ground, pointing his gun. His partner moved quickly and efficiently around the bed, eventually figuring out how to unplug the horn. The silence rang in his head. He couldn’t hear anything except a dog-whistle whine from his abused eardrums. Around him, people moved sluggishly, painfully.
He got to his feet as quick as he could and drunk-walked to the truck. Lester was already in plastic cuffs and leg-restraints, and the big, dead-eyed cop was watching an armored police bus roll toward them in the eerie silence of their collective deafness.
Perry managed to switch his phone over to streaming, so that it was uploading everything instead of recording it locally. He faded back behind some of the cars for cover and kept rolling as the riot bus disgorged a flying squadron of helmeted cops who began to methodically and savagely grab, cuff, and toss the groaning crowd lying flat on the ground. He wanted to add narration, but he didn’t trust himself to whisper, since he couldn’t hear his own voice.
A hand came down on his shoulder and he jumped, squeaked, and fell into a defensive pose, waiting for the truncheon to hit him, but it was Suzanne, grim faced, pointing her own phone. She had a laminated press-pass out in her free hand and was holding it up beside her head like a talisman. She pointed off down the road, where some of the goth kids who’d just been arriving when things went down were more ambulatory, having been somewhat shielded from the noise. They were running and being chased by cops. She made a little scooting gesture and Perry understood that she meant he should be following them, getting the video. He sucked in a big breath and nodded once and set off. She gave his hand a firm squeeze and he felt that her palms were slick with sweat.
He kept low and moved slow, keeping the viewfinder up so that he could keep the melee in shot. He hoped like hell that someone watching this online would spring for his bail.
Miraculously, he reached the outlier skirmish without being spotted. He recorded the cops taking the goths down, cuffing them, and hooding one kid who was thrashing like a fish on a hook. It seemed that he would never be spotted. He crept forward, slowly, slowly, trying to feel invisible and unnoticed, trying to project it.
It worked. He was getting incredible footage. He was practically on top of the cops before anyone noticed him. Then there was a shout and a hand grabbed for his phone and the spell was broken. Suddenly his heart was thundering, his pulse pounding in his ears.
He turned on his heel and ran. A mad giggle welled up in his chest. His phone was still streaming, presumably showing wild, nauseous shots of the landscape swinging past as he pumped his arm. He was headed for the ride, for the rear entrance, where he knew he could take cover. He felt the footsteps thud behind him, dimly heard the shouts—but his temporary deafness drowned out the words.
He had his fob out before he reached the doors and he badged in, banging the fob over the touch-plate an instant before slamming into the crash-bar and the doors swung open. He waited in agitation for the doors to hiss shut slowly after him and then it was the gloom of the inside of the ride, dark in his sun-adjusted eyesight.
It was only when the doors shivered behind him that he realized what he’d just done. They’d break in and come and get him, and in the process, they’d destroy the ride, for spite. His eyes were adjusting to the gloom now and he made out the familiar/unfamiliar shapes of the dioramas, now black and lacy with goth memorabilia. This place gave him calm and joy. He would keep them from destroying it.
He set his phone down on the floor, propped against a plaster skull so that the doorway was in the shot. He walked to the door and shouted as loud as he could, his voice inaudible in his own ears. “I’m coming out now!” he shouted. “I’m opening the doors!”
He waited for a two-count, then reached for the lock. He turned it and let the door crash open as two cops in riot-visors came through, pepper-spray at the fore. He was down on the ground, writhing and clawing at his face in an instant, and the phone caught it all.
All Perry wanted was for someone to cut the plastic cuffs off so he could scrub at his eyes, though he knew that would only make it worse. The riot-bus sounded like an orgy, moaning and groaning with dozens of voices every time the bus jounced over a pothole.
Perry was on the floor of the bus, next to a kid—judging from the voice—who cursed steadily the whole way along. One hard jounce made their heads connect and they both cussed, then apologized to one another, then laughed a little.
“My name’s Perry.” His voice sounded like he was underwater, but he could hear. The pepper spray seemed to have cleared out his sinuses and given him back some of his hearing.
“I’m Death Waits.” He said it without any drama. Perry wasn’t sure if he’d heard right. He supposed he had. Goth kids.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” Their heads were banged together again. They laughed and cursed.
“Christ my face hurts,” Perry said.
“I’m not surprised. You look like a tomato.”
“You can see?”
“Lucky me, yup. I got a pretty good couple of whacks on the back and shoulders once I was down, but no gas.”
“Lucky you all right.”
“I’m more pissed that I lost the tombstone I brought down. It was a real rarity, and it was hard to get, too. I bet it got tromped.”
“Tombstone, huh?”
“From the Graveyard Walk at Disney. They tore it down last week.”
“And you were bringing it to add it to the ride?”
“Sure—that’s where it belongs.”
Perry’s face still burned, but the pain was lessening. Before it had been like his face was on fire. Now it was like a million fire ants biting him. He tried to put it out of his mind by concentrating on the pain in his wrists where the plastic straps were cutting into him.
“Why?”
There was a long silence. “Has to go somewhere. Better there than in a vault or in the trash.”
“How about selling it to a collector?”
“You know, it never occurred to me. It means too much to go to a collector.”
“The tombstone means too much?”
“I know it sounds stupid, but it’s true. You heard that Disney’s tearing out all the goth stuff? Fantasyland meant a lot to some of us.”
“You didn’t feel like it was, what, co-opting you?”
“Dude, you can buy goth clothes at a chain of mall-stores. We’re all over the mainstream/non-mainstream fight. If Disney wants to put together a goth homeland, that’s all right with me. And that ride, it was the best place to remember it. You know that it got copied over every night to other rides around the country? So all the people who loved the old Disney could be part of the memorial, even if they couldn’t come to Florida. We had the idea last week and everyone loved it.”
“So you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?”
“Your ride?”
“Well, I built it.”
“No fucking way.”
“Way.” He smiled and that made his face hurt.
“Dude, that is the coolest thing ever. You built that? How did—How do you become the kind of person who can build one of those things? I’m out of work and trying to figure out what to do next.”
“Well, you could join one of the co-ops that’s building the other rides.”
“Sure, I guess. But I want to be the kind of person who invents the idea of making something like that. Did you get an electrical engineering degree or something?”
“Just picked it up as I went along. You could do the same, I’m sure. But hang on a sec—you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?”
“Well, yeah. But it was stuff they’d torn down.”
Perry’s eyes streamed. This couldn’t be a coincidence, stuff from Disney rides showing up in his ride and the cops turning up to enforce a court order Disney got. But he couldn’t blame this kid, who sounded like a real puppy-dog.
“Wait, you don’t think the cops were there because—”
“Probably. No hard feelings though. I might have done the same in your shoes.”
“Oh shit, I amso sorry. I didn’t think it through atall, I can see that now. Of course they’d come after you. They must totally hate you. I used to work there, they just hate anything that takes a Florida tourist dollar. It’s why they built the monorail extension to Orlando airport—to make sure that from the moment you get off the plane, you don’t spend a nickel on anything that they don’t sell you. I used to think it was cool, because they built such great stuff, but then they went after the new Fantasyland—”
“You can’t be a citizen of a themepark,” Perry said.
The kid barked a laugh. “Man, how true isthat? You’ve nailed it, pal.”
Perry managed to crack an eye, painfully, and catch a blurry look at the kid: a black Edward Scissorhands dandelion clock of hair, eyeliner, frock-coat—but a baby-face with cheeks you could probably see from the back of his head. About as threatening as a Smurf. Perry felt a sudden, delayed rush of anger. Howdarethey beat up kids like this “Death Waits”—all he wanted to do was ride a goddamned ride! He wasn’t a criminal, wasn’t out rolling old ladies or releasing malicious bioorganisms on the beach!
The bus turned a sharp corner and their heads banged together again. They groaned and then the doors were being opened and Perry squeezed his eyes shut again.
Rough hands seized him and marched him into the station house. The crowd susurrations were liquid in his screwed-up ears. He couldn’t smell or see, either. He felt like he was in some kind of terrible sensory deprivation nightmare, and it made him jerky, so whenever a hand took him and guided him to another station in the check-in process (his wallet lifted from his pocket, his cheek swabbed, his fingers pressed against a fingerprint scanner) he flinched involuntarily. The hands grew rougher and more insistent. At one point, someone peeled open his swollen eyelid, a feeling like being stabbed in the eye, and his retina was scanned. He screamed and heard laughter, distant through his throbbing eardrums.
It galvanized him. He forced his eyes open, glaring at the cops around him. Mostly they were Florida crackers, middle-aged guys with dead-eyed expressions of impersonal malevolence. There was a tiny smattering of brown faces and women’s faces, but they were but a sprinkling when compared to the dominant somatype of Florida law.
The next time someone grabbed him to shove him towards the next station on this quest, he jerked his arm away and sat down. He’d seen protestors do this before, and knew that it was hard to move a sitting man expeditiously or with dignity. Hands seized him by the arms, and he flailed until he was free, remaining firmly seated. The laughter was turning to anger now. Beside him, someone else sat. Death Waits, looking white-faced and round-eyed. More people hit the floor. A billy-club was shoved under his arm, which was then twisted into an agonizing position. He was suddenly ready to give up the fight and go along, but he couldn’t get to his feet fast enough. With a sickeningcrack, his arm broke. He had a moment’s lucid awareness that a bone had broken in his body, and then the pain was on him and he choked out a shout, then a louder one, and then everything went dark.
As it turned out, his prison infirmary time didn’t last long at all. Kettlewell had faded fast from the riot, headed back to the guesthouse and got the lawyers on the phone. He’d shown them the stream off of Perry’s phone and they were in front of a judge before Perry reached the jail.
Perry was led out of the infirmary with his arm in a sling. His face was still painfully swollen, and he’d managed to turn an ankle as well. At least his hearing was coming back.
Kettlewell took Perry’s good arm and gave him a soulful hug that embarrassed him. Kettlewell led him outside, to where a big cab was waiting. In it were the family Kettlewell, Lester, and Suzanne. Lester had a couple bandages taped to his face and when Suzanne smiled, he saw her lips were stained red and one of her front teeth had been knocked out.
He managed a brave smile. “Looks like you guys got the full treatment, huh?”
Suzanne squeezed his hand. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.” Ada and Pascal looked goggle-eyed at them. Ada was popping Korean lotus-bean walnut cakes into her mouth from a greasy paper bag, and she offered them silently to Perry, who took one just to be polite, but found after the first bite that he wasn’t really hungry after all.
Kettlewell and Perry fought about what to do next, but Kettlewell prevailed. He took them to a private doctor who photographed them and examined them and x-rayed them, documenting everything while Ada Kettlewell played camera-woman with her phone, videoing it all.
“I don’t think suing the police is going to help, Landon,” Perry said. Suzanne nodded vigorously. The three victims were in paper examining gowns, and the Kettlewells were still in street clothes, which gave them a real advantage in the self-confidence department.
“It’ll help if we cash out a big settlement—it’ll bankroll our defense against the Disney trademark claims. IP lawyers charge more than God per hour. I got the injunction lifted, but we’re still going to have to go to court, and that’s not going to be cheap.”
It needled Perry—he didn’t like the idea of being embroiled in the legal system in the first place, and while he could grudgingly admit a certain elegance in using cash settlements from the law to fund their defense in court, the whole business made him squirm.
Eva sat down beside him. “I can tell this sucks for you, Perry.” Ada whispered the wordsucksand giggled, and Eva rolled her eyes. “But there’s fifty people wedidn’tbail out in there, who are all of them going to have to figure out their own way through the legal system. You can’t run a business if your customers risk a solid beating and jail time just for showing up.”
I don’t want to run a business,he thought, but he knew that was petulant. He was the man with the roll of bills down his pants. “There are fifty people still in the slam?”
Kettlewell nodded. Suzanne had her camera out and she was recording. It had been a long time since Perry had really felt the camera’s eye on him. It was one thing to be recorded by some friends for remembrance, but now Suzanne’s camera seemed like the gaze of posterity. He needed to rise to it, he knew.
“Let’s get them out. All of them.”
Kettlewell raised his eyebrows. “And how do you plan on doing that?”
“We’ll charge it to the business,” Perry said. Lester chuckled and gave him a thump on the back. “It’s a legit expense—these are ourcustomersafter all.”
Kettlewell shook his head at all of them, then he left the doctor’s office. He already had his phone stuck to his head and was talking with the lawyer before he got out of earshot.
Perry and Lester and Suzanne and Eva exchanged mischievous glances, grinning with unexpected delight. Pascal, riding on Eva’s hip, woke up and started crying and Eva handed him to Lester while she went for the diaper bag.
“Here we go again,” Lester said, wrinkling his nose and holding the wailing Pascal at arm’s length.
Suzanne got it all with her phone, then she flipped it shut and gave Lester a hard kiss on the cheek.
“Fatherhood would suit you,” she said.
He went bright red. “Don’t you get any ideas,” he said. Suzanne laughed and skipped away, looking all of ten.
Perry felt huge. Larger than life. The adventure was beginning anew, with these good people whom he loved like family. He had the work and the people, and who needed anything more.
It was a feeling that lasted all the way back to the ride.
But then he surveyed the ride itself and found it in utter ruins, far worse than it had been left when he’d been dragged out of it. Every single exhibit was smashed, strewn here and there.
He couldn’t believe it. He brought up the clean-up lights, flooding the place, and then he saw what he’d missed at first: the smashed exhibits were not smashed exhibits—they werereplicasof smashed exhibits. At every ride in the country, police had gone in smashing, and every other ride in the country had faithfully reproduced the damage, dutiful printers churning out replica detritus and dutiful robots placing it with micrometer precision.
He began to laugh and couldn’t stop. Lester came in and immediately got the joke and laughed along with him. They managed to stop laughing just long enough to explain it to Suzanne and Kettlewell, who didn’t find it nearly as funny as they did. Suzanne took pictures.
Finally he got down to business, opening the change-log and rolling the ride back through the “revisions” to its unsmashed state. It would take the robots a long time to set everything right again, but at least he didn’t have to oversee it.
Instead, he tracked down as many of the market-stall vendors as he could locate in the shantytown and made sure they were all right—they were, though they’d lost some inventory. He comped them all a month’s rent and made sure they knew that steps were being taken to keep it from happening again. He knew that they could make nearly as much money selling from a roadside or online, and he wanted to keep them happy. Besides, it wasn’t their fault.
He was exhausted and his arm was really starting to gripe him. He found himself stopping in the street every few steps to rub his eyes and force himself on. Francis came on him when he was like that, leaning against the prefab concrete wall of one of the tall, twisty shanties, and he took Perry’s car-keys away and drove him home. Perry was in too much of a state by the time he got there to think about how Francis would get back—he was already lying in bed before it occurred to him that the old man with the gimpy leg probably walked the ten miles home.
He woke up later that night to sex noises from Lester’s room and he recognized Suzanne’s voice. Later, he woke again to hear the tail end of another argument between Lester and Suzanne, and then Suzanne storming out of the apartment.Oh, goody, he thought. He lay on his back, trying to find sleep again—the clock said 3AM—and found thoughts of Hilda drifting unbidden into his mind.
It was silly—they’d only spent one night together, and he had to admit that as great as the sex had been, he’d had better with the fatkins gymnasts you could pick up down on South Beach. She was too young for him. She lived inWisconsin. But there were touches in the ride that had originated with her instantiation—he looked over the logs every now and then—and he found himself contemplating them with sentimental smiles.
He fell asleep again and only woke when he rolled over on his bad arm and yelped himself awake. The smell of waffles, bacon and eggs was strong in the apartment. He couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to shower with his cast on, so he pulled on a pair of shorts and let himself into the living room.
Lester was at the stove, cooking up half a pig and pouring maple batter into the waffle-iron. He waved a spatula at him and pointed out at the terrace. Perry stepped out and saw Suzanne and Tjan and Tjan’s little kids—what were their names? Lyenitchka and the little boy? Man, the whole family was here.
“Your arm is broken,” Lyenitchka said, pointing at him.
Perry nodded gravely. “That’s true. Want to sign my cast?” He was pretty sure that he had a grease-pencil that would mark the surface, though the hospital had sworn that it would shed dirt, ink and anything else he threw at it.
She nodded vigorously. Tjan looked him over and gave a little wave, then Perry went back into the living room and asked his computer to find the grease-pencil.
“Thought you’d be busy in Boston,” he said, while Lyenitchka painstakingly spelled out her name, going over the letters to get them to show up dark—the cast surface really didn’t want to suck up any tint.
“Boston came out OK. We had lawyers on tap at the start and the vibe was cool. I incorporated there, so it was easier than you guys had it. But some of the others were hit bad, like San Francisco and Madison.”
“Madison?” Perry was alarmed by how alarmed he sounded.
“Mass arrests. The cops there are real hard-cases, with all this antipersonnel gear left over from the stem-cell riots.”
Perry jerked and spoiled Lyenitchka’s writing. He patted her head and set his arm back down where she could get at it. He groaned.
“They’re mostly still in. We’re trying to get them bailed out, but the judge at the arraignment set bail pretty high.”
“I’ll post it,” Perry said. “I can put up my savings or something...”
Tjan looked uncomfortable. “Perry, there are 250 people in the lockup in Wisconsin. Some of them are going to skip out, it’s nearly a certainty. If you bail them all out, you’ll go broke. I mean, it’s good to see you and I’m sorry you got hurt and all respect, but don’t be an idiot.”
Perry felt himself go belligerent. His hands went into fists and his broken wing protested. That brought him back to reality. He forced himself to smile.
“There’s a girl in Madison, I want to make sure she’s OK.”
Tjan and Suzanne stared at him for a second. Then Lester clapped him across the back from behind him, startling him and making him squeak. “Big fella!” he crowed. “I should have known.”
Perry gave him a mock glare. “Youhave no right to sayanythingon this score.” He darted a glance at Suzanne and saw that she was blushing. Tjan took this in and nodded, as though his suspicions had just been confirmed.
“Fair enough,” Tjan said. “Let’s make some inquiries about the young lady. What’s her name?”
“Hilda Hammersen.”
Tjan’s eyebrows shot up. “HildaHammersen? From the mailing lists?ThatHilda?”
Hilda was the queen of the mailing lists—brash, quick, and argumentative, but never the kind of person who started flamewars. Hilda’s arguments were hot and fast, and she always won. Perry had watched her admiringly from the sidelines, only weighing in occasionally, but he seemed to remember now that she’d taken Tjan to the cleaners once on an issue of protocol resolution.
“That’s the one,” Perry said.
“I always pictured her as being about fifty, with a machete between her teeth,” Lester said. “No offense.”
“Lyenitchka, go get my phone from my bed-stand,” Perry said, patting the girl on the shoulder. When she got back he went through his photos of Hilda with them.
Lester made a wolf-whistle and Suzanne punched him in the shoulder and took the phone away.
“She’s very pretty,” Suzanne said, disapprovingly. “And very young.”
“Oh yes, dating younger people issosleazy,” Lester said with a chuckle. Suzanne squirmed and even Perry had to laugh.
“Guys, here it is. I need to spring Hilda, and we need to do something about all those customers and supporters and so on who went to jail today. We need to fight all the injunctions—all of them—and prevent them from recurring.”
“And we need to eat breakfast, which is ready,” Lester said, gesturing at the table behind him, which was stacked high with waffles, sausages, eggs, toast, and pitchers of juice and carafes of coffee.
Lyenitchka and Sasha looked at each other and ran to the table, taking seats next to one another. The adults followed and soon they were eating. Perry managed a waffle and a sausage, but then he went off to his room. Hilda was in the slam in Madison, and who the hell knew what the antipersonnel stuff the Madison cops used had done to her. He just wanted to get on a fucking plane andgo there.
Halfway through his shower, he knew that that was what he was going to do. He packed a shoulder-bag, took a couple more painkillers, and walked out into the living room.
“Guys, I’m going to Madison. I’ll be back in a day or two. We’ll work everything out over the phone, OK?”
Lester and Suzanne came over to him. “You going to be OK, buddy?” Lester said.
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“We can spring her from here,” Tjan said. “We have the Internet, you know.”
“I know,” Perry said. “You do that, OK? And tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
The security at the airport went bonkers over him. The perfect storm: a fresh arrest, a suspicious cast, and a ticket bought with cash. He missed the first two flights to Chicago, but by mid-afternoon he was landing at O’Hare and submitting to an interim screening procedure before boarding for Madison. His phone rang in the middle of the screening, and the wrinkly old TSA goon-lady primly informed him that he might as well get that since once the phone rings, they have to start the procedure over again.
“Tjan,” he said.
“They can’t spring her today. Tomorrow, though.”
He closed his eyes and shut out the TSA goon. She had a huge bouffant of copper hair, and a midwesterner’s sense of proportionality when it came to eye-shadow and rouge. She was the kind of woman who could call you “honey” and make it sound like “Islamofascist faggot.”
“Why not, Tjan?”
There was a pause. “She’s in the infirmary and they won’t release her until tomorrow.”
“Infirmary.”
“Nothing serious—she took a knock on the head and they want to hold her for observation.”
He pictured a copper’s electrified billy-club coming down on shining blond hair and felt like throwing up.
“Perry? Buddy. She’s OK, really. I had our lawyer visit her in the prison infirmary and she swears she looks great. The lawyer’s name is Candice—take a cab to her office from the airport. OK?”
“Why is she in the prison infirmary, Tjan? Why can’t she be moved to a real hospital?”
“It’s just a liability thing. The police don’t want to risk the suit if she goes complicated on them between hospitals.”
“Jesus.”
“Seriously, she’s fine. We’ve got a good lawyer on the scene.”
But Perry had a bad feeling. The TSA goon picked up on it and gave him a little bit of extra attention. Acting nervous or agitated in an airport was a one-way ticket to a cavity search.
But then he was lifting off and headed for Madison, and though the time crawled on the one-hour flight, it was, after all, only an hour. He even napped briefly, though a sky marshall woke him shortly after for a random bag-search. His fellow passengers—badly dressed midwesterners and a couple of hipster students—all turned their bags out in the cramped cabin and then got back in their seats for the landing.
Perry had meant to phone in a car reservation at O’Hare, but the extra search had eaten up the time he’d allocated for it, and now all the rental counters were sold out. Reluctantly, he got into a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the office of the lawyers that Tjan had hired.
The cabbie was a young African kid with a shaved head. He had a dent in one temple and more dents in one of his wrists, visible as he let his long hands drape over the steering wheel.
“I know where it is,” he said when Perry gave him the address. “That lawyer, she is very good. She helped me with the Homeland Security.”
The kid was young, 21 or 22, with a studious air, despite his old injuries. He reminded Perry of the shantytowners, people who didn’t always get medical attention for their ailments, people who were often missing a tooth or two, who had mysterious lumps from badly-set bones or scars or funny eyebrows like his. The midwesterners on the plane had been flawless as action-figures, but Perry’s friends and this African kid looked like something carved out of coal and chalk.
Perry was one big jitter from the trip and the coffee and the pills for his arm, but he found himself drawn into conversation as they whizzed past the fields and malls, the factories and office-parks.
“I’m from Gulu, in Uganda. There has been civil war there for thirty five years. I studied chemical engineering through the African Virtual University wiki-program, and qualified for a Chavez scholarship here in Madison.” His accent was light but exotic, the African rolling of the Rs, the British-sounding vowel-shifts. “But the Homeland Security didn’t want to renew my visa last year. They said I had financial irregularities. I was paypalling to a friend in Kampala who withdrew it in shillings and sent it to my family in giros. Homeland Security said that I wasmoney laundering. I thought I’d be sent away or put in prison, but Ms Candice wrote them a letter and they vanished.” He snapped his long, knuckly fingers for emphasis.
“Jesus. Well, that’s good. She’s going to help me get my girlfriend out of jail.” Perry realized he’d just called Hilda his girlfriend, which would be news to her, but there it was.
“You don’t need to worry. She’ll get your friend free.”
Perry nodded and tried to close his eyes and relax. He couldn’t. What the hell had happened to the world. It had seemed so exciting when his father was bringing home new shapes he’d spun off his CAD/CAM rig. When Perry had started to trade designs with people, to effortlessly find people on the net who wanted to collaborate with him and vice-versa. When Perry had started a business making cool art out of free junk and selling it off an Internet connection that was likewise free.
Free, free, free. No need to talk to a government, or grovel for a curator, or put up with an agent or a boss. He’d just assumed all along that he’d end up living in a world where all those parasites and bullies and middlemen would just blow away in the wind.
But they’d all found jobs in the new world. They weren’t needed anymore, but that didn’t mean that they went away. Now they were wanding him in airports and suing him for trademark infringement and busting his girlfriend and breaking his arm and giving hassle to this poor African kid who’d taught himself to be an engineer with a ferchrissakeswiki.
He dry-swallowed another pain-killer and then remembered that taking the pills meant he wouldn’t be able to get a drink, which he could sure as shit use.
“My name’s Perry,” he said.
“Richard,” the driver said. “We’re almost there, Perry. I wish you the very best of luck.”
“You too,” he said. The driver shook his hand warmly after getting his luggage out of the trunk, a limp handshake by North American standards, but gentle and friendly nonetheless. His dented wrist flexed oddly as the half-knit bones there moved.
The lawyer’s office was not what Perry was expecting. It looked like someone’s living room, with a couple of overstuffed sofas, a dozing cat, and the lawyer, Candice, who was a young-looking woman in her mid-twenties. She dressed in jeans and an oversized UW sweatshirt, with a laptop perched on one knee. She had a friendly, open face, framed with lots of curly brown hair.
“You must be Perry,” she said, setting the laptop down and giving him an unexpected hug. “That was from Hilda. I saw her a couple hours ago. She was very adamant that I pass it on to you.”
“Nice to meet you, he said, accepting a cup of tea from an insulated jug on a cardboard side-board. “Hilda is all right?”
“Sit down,” the lawyer said.
Perry’s stomach turned a somersault. “Hilda’s all right?”
“Sit.”
Perry sat.
“She was gassed with a neurotoxin that has given her a temporary but severe form of Parkinson’s disease. Normally it just renders people immobile, but one in a million has a reaction like this. It’s just bad luck that Hilda was one of them.”
“She wasgassed?”
“They all were. There was a hell of a fight, as I understand it. It really looks like it was the cops’ fault. Someone told them that there were printed guns in the ride-location and they used extreme and disproportionate force.”
“I see,” Perry said. His blood whooshed in his ears. Printed guns? No frigging way. Sure, ray-guns in some of the exhibits. But nothing that fired anything. He felt tears begin to stream down his face. The lawyer moved to his sofa and put her arm around his shoulders.
“She’s going to be fine,” Candice said. “The Parkinson’s is rare, but it goes away in 100 percent of the the cases where it occurs. What this means is that we’ve got an amazing chance of taking a huge bite out of the local law that we can use to fund future defense. Tjan told me that that’s the strategy and I think it’s sound. Plus the harder we hit the law today, the more reluctant they’ll be to rush off half-cocked the next time someone trumps up a BS trademark claim. It could be much worse, Perry. There’s a kid who lost an eye to a rubber bullet.”
Perry fisted the tears away. “Let’s go get her,” he said.
“They say she shouldn’t be moved,” Candice said.
“What does our doctor say?”
“I phoned a couple MDs this afternoon and got conflicting stories. Everyone agrees that not moving her is safer than moving her, though. The only disagreement is about how dangerous it would be to move her.”
“Let’s go see her, then.”
“That we can do.”
Perry had trouble with the search at the prison hospital. His cast and their scanners didn’t get along and they couldn’t be satisfied with a hand search. For a couple minutes it looked like he was going to be kept out, but Candice—who had changed into a power-suit before they left the office—put on a stern voice and demanded to speak to the duty sergeant, and then to his commanding officer, and in ten minutes, they were on the hospital ward, where the metal-railed beds had prisoners handcuffed to them.
“Hilda?” She looked sunken and sick, her face slack and her jaw askew. Her eyes opened and rolled crazily, they focused on him. Her body shook through two waves of tremors before she was able to raise a shaking hand toward him, trailing IV tubes. She was trying to say his name, but it wouldn’t come out, just a series of plosive Ps.
But then he took her hand and felt its fine warmth, the calluses he remembered from all those months ago, and he felt better. Actually better. Felt some peace for the first time in a long time.
“Hello, Hilda,” he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt, and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands, burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move on his.
They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but they hadn’t taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed wasn’t the right place to make pronouncements of love.
“I love you,” he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. “I love you, Hilda.”
She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he dared. Candice came back and stood by them.
“They think that she’ll be better in the morning. She’s already much better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep’s the only thing for it. They’ve got her mildly sedated, too.”
Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their night together, and he stroked her cheek.
“I’ll stay here,” he said.
“I don’t think that they’re going to let you do that, Perry. This is a prison, not a hospital.”
“I’ll stay here,” he said again. “Just make it happen, OK? We’re going to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That’s got to give us some leverage. I’ll stay here.”
She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of painkillers. They’d have painkillers here.
Candice went away, and then, a while later, she came back. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll come and get you in the morning.”
“Thanks,” he said. Then he thought that he should say something more, and he turned around, but the lawyer had gone.
He fell asleep holding Hilda’s hand with his good hand, and woke up with an unbelievable pain in his broken arm and couldn’t find a nurse. He bit down on the pain and spent a long watch that night staring at Hilda, thinking of all she meant to him and how weird it was that she meant so much when they’d had so brief a moment together. They hadn’t let him bring his phone in, or he’d have taken a thousand pictures of her face in repose. He nodded off again.
He woke when she did, stirring in her bed. Her movements were still weak and feeble, but they lacked the uncontrolled tremors of the night before. He leaned in for a kiss, not caring about his sour breath or hers.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Morning, gorgeous,” she said, and took him in a soft, sleepy hug.
Candice sprung them and took them across town to her doctor, a young man who took great care in examining Hilda, explaining patiently which fluids he was drawing and which tests he planned on running on them. Perry had noticed that midwesterners came in two flavors: big Scandinavian Aryans with giant shoulders and easy smiles, and exchange students and immigrants in varying shades of brown, who looked hurt and bent alongside of the natives—looked like the people he knew from back home, people who didn’t have ready access to medical care or good nutrition in their formative years.
The doctor was Vietnamese, but he was at least a couple generations in, judging by his accent, and he had the same midwestern smile and seemed big and bulky compared with the Vietnamese people Perry knew in Florida. He watched the man peer intently at a screen after taping some electrodes to Hilda’s head, and felt like he’d come to some land of Norse giants.
The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice’s car and cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn’t until Perry got back with her to her apartment—every stick of furniture made from clever cardboard—and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch his phone on again.
He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with sexy cowgirls printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers, lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent bleats.
“Shit,” he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going on.
A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with overreacting cops.
Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down.
“Right, what’s the game-plan?”
“How should I know?” Perry said. He could hear the whine in his voice. “I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal defenses, but Disney’s denial-of-service attacking us in the courtroom. They’re also getting all this destruction dealt to us by the cops.”
“You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let’s break this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them, then call up the troops and let them know what’s going on. I’ll get a conference call set up while we chat.”
She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put down her laptop and rest, but she wasn’t having any of it.
And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces: incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together scrapbooks of the carnage wrought.
It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and Kettlewell in.
“Perry, do you think it’s a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan to respond to them?”
Hilda shook her head and put a hand on Perry’s good arm to calm him down before he answered Kettlewell. “That’s how we do it over on our side. Their side is all about secrecy. Our side trades the advantage of surprise for the advantage of openness. You watch—by tonight we’ll have by-laws drafted, press-releases, exhaustive documentation. You watch.”
On the screen, Lester’s face suddenly hove into view, fish-eye distorted by his proximity to the lens. Hilda gave an amused squeak and pulled back.
“So that’s Yoko, huh?” Lester said, grinning. “Cute! Listen guys, don’t let these suits talk you out of what you’re doing. This is the right thing. I’m on all the message boards and stuff and they’re all champing to do something for real.”
“Yoko?” Hilda said. She raised an adorable eyebrow.
“Just a figure of speech,” Lester said. “I’m Lester. You must be Hilda. Perry’s told us practically nothing about you, which is probably a sign of something or other.”
Hilda regarded Perry with mock coolness. “Oh really?”
“Lester,” Perry said. “I love you like a brother. Shut the fuck up already.”
Lester made a little whipping motion. Suddenly he was gone from the picture, and they saw Suzanne pulling him away by one ear. Hilda snorted. “I like her,” she said. Suzanne gave them a wave and Tjan and Kettlewell came back into frame.
They made their goodbyes and hung up. Now Hilda and Perry were alone, together, in her bedroom, laptops shut, day done—though it was hardly gone noon—and the silence stretched.
“Thanks for coming, Perry,” she said.
“I—” He broke off. He didn’t know what to say. They had only known each other for a day, only had a one-night stand. She probably thought that he was a giant creep. “I was worried.” he said. “Um. You should probably rest up some more, right?”
He got up and headed for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.
“Figured I’d let you rest,” he said with a half-shrug.
“Get in this bed this instant, young man,” she said, slapping the bed beside her. “And get those stinky clothes off before you do—I won’t have you getting my sheets all covered in your travel-grime.”
He felt the foolish grin spread across his face and he skinned out of his clothes as fast as he could with his cast on.
They didn’t leave the house until suppertime, freshly showered (she’d been a delightful help in scrubbing those spots where the cast impeded access) and changed. Perry took a painkiller after the shower, which kicked in as they went out the door, and the autumn evening was crisp and sharp.
They got as far as the corner before the man approached them. “Perry Gibbons, isn’t it?” He had an English accent, and a little pot-belly, and a big white bubble-jacket and a scarf wound round his throat.
“That’s right,” Perry said. He looked at the guy. “Do I know you?”
“No, I don’t think so. But I’ve followed you in the press. Quite remarkable.”
“Thanks,” Perry said. Being recognized—how weird was that. Cool that it happened in front of Hilda. “This is Hilda,” he said. She took the man’s hand, and he grinned, showing two long rat-like front teeth.
“Fred,” he said. “What an absolute delight running into you out here of all places. What are you doing in town?”
“Just visiting with friends,” Perry said.
“Wasn’t there some kind of dust-up at your place in Florida? I saw what they did to the ride here, what a bloody mess.”
“Yeah,” Perry said. He pointed at his casted arm. “Seemed like a good time to get out of Dodge.”
Hilda said, “We’re getting some dinner, if you’d like to come along.”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“No, it’s no sweat, we’ve got a whole bunch of people associated with the ride meeting us. You’d be more than welcome.”
“Goodness, thatishospitable of you. How can I refuse?”
Luke and Ernie were there with their girlfriends, and there were more kids, midwestern and healthy even if they weren’t necessarily all Scandic, some Vietnamese kids, some Hmong, some desis descended from the H1B diaspora. They had a gigantic meal in a student place that was heavy on the potatoes and beers the size of your head, which Perry resisted for a couple hours until he figured that he’d metabolized most of the painkiller and then started in, getting just short of roaring drunk. He told them war stories, told them about Death Waits, told them about the co-op and the plan to fight back.
“That just doesn’t sound right to me,” said a friend of Luke’s, a law-school grad student who had been bending Perry’s ear all night with stories from his law-clinic work defending university students from music-industry lawsuits. “I mean, sure, go after the cops because they roughed you guys up, but how much money do the cops have? You gotta target some fat cash, and for that you want to go after Disney. Abuse of trademark, abuse of process, something like that. The standard’s pretty high, but if you can get a judgement, the money is incredible. You could take them to the cleaners.”
Perry looked blearily at him. He was young, like all of them, but he had a good rhetorical style that Perry recognized as something born of real confidence. He knew his stuff, or thought he did. He had a strawberry mark on his high forehead that looked like a map of a distant island, and Perry thought that the mark probably threw off the kid’s opponents. “So we sue Disney and five years from now we cash in—how does that help us now?”
The kid nodded. “I hoped you’d ask me that. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Here’s what you need to do, dude, here’s the fucking thing.” The room had grown silent. Everyone leaned closer. Fred poured Perry another beer from the pitcher in the middle of the table. “Here’s how you do it. You raise investment capital for it. There’s a ton of money in this, a ton. Disney’s got deep pockets and you’ve got a great case.
“But like you say, it’ll take ten, fifteen years to get the money out of them. And it’ll cost a mil in legal fees on the way. So what you do is, you create an investment syndicate. You can maybe get thirty million out of Disney, plus whatever the jury awards in punitives, and if you keep half of it, you can deliver a fifteen-x return on investment. So go find a millionaire and borrow sixteen million, and turn the defense over to him.”
Perry was dumbstruck. “You’re joking. How can that possibly work?”
“It’s how patent lawsuits work! Some dickhead engineer gets a bogus patent for his doomed startup, and as they’re sinking into the mud, some venture capitalist comes and buys the company up just so it can go around and threaten other companies with real businesses for violating the patent. They ask for sums just below what it would cost to get the US Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate the patent, and everyone ponies up. Venture capitalism is the major source of funding for commercial lawsuits these days.”
Fred laughed and clapped. “Brilliant! Perry, that’s just brilliant. Are you going to do it?”
Perry looked at the table, doodling in the puddles of beer with a fingertip. “I just want to get back to making stuff, you know. This is nuts. Devoting ten years of my life to suing someone?”
“You don’t have to do the suing. That’s the point. You outsource that. You get the money; someone else does the business stuff.” Hilda put her arm around his shoulders. “Give the suits something to occupy themselves with—otherwise they get antsy and stir up trouble.”
Perry and Hilda laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Fred and the others joined in, and Perry scrawled a drunken note to Tjan and Kettlewell with the info. The party broke up not long after, amid much chortling and snorting, and they staggered home. Fred gave Perry a warm handshake and treated Hilda to a lingering, sloppy hug until she pushed him off, laughing even harder.
“All right then,” Perry said, “home again home again.”
Hilda gave his groin a friendly honk and then made a dash for it, and he gave chase.
PHOTO: A Drunken Perry Gibbons Gets a How’s Your Father From Ride-Bride Hilda Hammersen
MADISON, WI: Say you managed to inspire some kind of “movement” of techno-utopians who built a network of amusement park rides that guide their visitors through an illustrated history of the last dotcom bubble.
Say that your merry band of unwashed polyamorous info-hippies was overtaken by jackbooted thugs from one of the dinosauric media empires of yesteryear, whose legal machinations resulted in nationwide raids, beatings, gassings, and the total shutdown of your “movement.”
What would you do? Sue? Call a press-conference? Bail your loyal followers out of the slam?
Get laid, get shitfaced, and let a bunch of students spitball bullshit ideas for fighting back?
If you picked the latter, you’re in good company. Last night, Perry Gibbons, soi-disant “founder” of the rideafarian religious cult, was spotted out for drinks and cuddles with a group of twentysomething students in the backwater town of Madison, WI, a place better known for its cheddar than its activism.
While Gibbons regaled the impressionable post-adolescents with tales of his derring-do, he avidly noted their strategic suggestions for solving his legal, paramilitary, and technical problems.
One suggestion that drew Gibbons’s attention and admiration was to approach venture capitalists and beg them for the capital to sue Disney and then use the settlements from the suits to pay back the VCs.
This mind-croggling Ponzi scheme is the closest thing to a business model we’ve yet heard of from the chip-addled techno-hippies of the New Work and its post-boom incarnation.
One can only imagine how our Ms Church will cover this in her fan-blog: breathless admiration for Mr Gibbons’s cunning in soliciting yet more “way out of the box” thinking from the Junior Guevaras of the Great Midwest, no doubt.
Perhaps Gibbons can be afforded a little sympathy, though. His latest encounter with Florida law left him with a broken arm and it may be that the pain medication is primarily responsible for Gibbons’s fancy thinking. If that’s the case, we can only hope that his young, blond Scandie nursie will carefully minister him back to health (while his comrades rot in gaol around the country).
This organization needs to die before it gets someone killed.
Comments? Write to Freddy at honestfred@techstink.co.uk
Lester interrupted Suzanne’s phone-call to break in and announce that he’d run Rat-Toothed Freddy to ground: the reporter had caught the first flight from Madison to Chicago and then gone west to San Jose. The TSA had flagged him as a person-of-interest and were watching his movements, and a little digging on its website could cause it to disclose Freddy’s every airborne movement.
Suzanne relayed this to Perry.
“Don’t you go there,” she said. “He’s gunning for the San Francisco crew, and he’s hoping for a confrontation or a denunciation so that he can print it. He gets idees fixes that he worries at like a terrier, going for more bile.”
“Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?”
“I think that he thinks that technology hasn’t lived up to its promise and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him, that means that anyone who actuallylikestechnology is the enemy, the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its true potential.”
“Fuck, that is so twisted.”
“And given the kind of vile crap he writes, the only readers he has are nut-cases who get off on seeing people who are actually creating stuff flayed alive for their failures. They egg him on—ever see one of his letters columns? If he changed to actual reportage, telling the balanced stories of what was going on in the world, they’d jump ship for some other hate-monger. He’s a lightning-rod for assholes—he’s the king of the trolls.”
Perry looked away. “What do I do?”
“You could try to starve him. If you don’t show your head, he can’t report on you, except by making stuff up—and made-up stuff gets boring, even for the kinds of losers who read his stuff.”
“But I’ve got work to do.”
“Yeah, yeah you do. Maybe you’ve just got to take your lumps. Every complex ecosystem has parasites after all. Maybe you just call up San Francisco and brief them on what to expect from this guy and take it from there.”
Once they were off the line, Lester came up behind her and hugged her at the waist, squeezing the little love-handles there, reminding her of how long it had been since she’d made it to yoga.
“You think that’ll work?”
“Maybe. I’ve been talking to theNew Journalism Reviewabout writing a piece on moral responsibility and paid journalism, and if I can bang it out this aft, I bet they’ll publish it tomorrow.”
“What’s that going to do?”
“Well, it’ll distract him from Perry, maybe. It might get his employer to take a hard look at what he’s writing—I mean that piece is just lies, mischaracterizations, and editorial masquerading as reportage.” She put her lid down and paced around the condo, looking at the leaves floating in the pool. “It’ll give me some satisfaction.”
Lester gave her a hug, and it smelled of the old days and the old Lester, the giant, barrel-chested pre-fatkins Lester. It took her back to a simpler time, when they’d had to worry about commercial competition, not police raids.
She hugged him back. He was all hard muscle and zero body-fat underneath his tight shirt. She’d never dated anyone that fit, not even back in high-school. It was a little disorienting, and it made her feel especially old and saggy sometimes, though he never seemed to notice.
Speaking of which, she felt his erection pressing against her midriff, and tried to hide her grin. “Gimme a couple hours, all right?”
She dialed the NJR editor’s number as she slid into her chair and pulled up a text-editor. She knew what she planned on writing, but it would help to be able to share an outline with the NJR if she was going to get this out in good time. Working with editors was a pain after years of writing for the blog, but sometimes you wanted someone else’s imprimatur on your work.
Five hours later, the copy was filed. She rocked back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head, listening to the crackle of her spine. She’d been half-frozen by the air conditioning, so she’d turned it off and opened a window, and now the condo was hot and muggy. She stripped down to her underwear and headed for the shower, but before she could make it, she was intercepted by Lester.
He fell on her like a dog on dinner, and hours slipped by as they made the apartment even muggier. Lester’s athleticism in the sack was flattering, but sometimes boundless to the point of irritation. She was rescued from it this time by the doorbell.
Lester put on a bathrobe and answered the door, and she heard the sounds of the family Kettlewell spilling in, the kids’ little footfalls pounding up and down the corridors. Hurriedly, Suzanne threw on a robe and ducked across the corridor into the bathroom, but not before catching sight of Eva and Landon. Eva’s expression was grimly satisfied; Landon looked stricken. Fuck it, anyway. She’d never given him any reason to hope, and he had no business hoping.
Halfway through her shower, she heard someone moving around in the bathroom, and thinking it was Lester, she stuck her head around the curtain, only to find Ada on the pot, little jeans around her ankles. “I hadda make,” Ada said, with a shrug.
Christ. What was she doing back here, anyway? She’d missed it all so much from Petersburg. But she hadn’t really bargained for this. It was only a matter of time until Tjan showed up too, surely they’d be wanting a council of war after Freddy’s opening salvo.
She waited for the little girl to flush (ouch! hot water!) and got dressed as discreetly as possible.
By the time she got to the balcony where the council of war was under way, the two little girls, Lyenitchka and Ada, had gotten Pascal up on the sofa and were playing dress up with him, hot-gluing Barbie heads to his cheeks and arms and chubby knees, like vacantly staring warts.
“Do you like him?”
“I think he looks wonderful, girls. Is that glue OK for him, though?”
Ada nodded vigorously. “I’ve been gluing things to my brother with that stuff forever. Dad says it’s OK so long as I don’t put it in his eyes.”
“Your dad’s a smart man.”
“He’s in love with you,” Lyenitchka said, and giggled. Ada slugged her in the arm.
“That’s supposed to be a secret, stupid,” Ada said.
Flustered, Suzanne ducked out onto the patio and shut the door behind her. Eva and Tjan and Kettlewell all turned to look at her.