Cory Doctorow

Yet the dream of a copy-proof song or movie is a logical absurdity. DRM systems — built over a span of years at a cost of millions — are routinely cracked in an afternoon by bored teenagers. BigChampagne, the P2P (peer-to-peer) monitoring service, reports that it takes a mere 180 seconds for a DRM’ed song released on the iTunes Store to show up as a free P2P download. Anyone who thinks that companies are going to make bits get harder to copy in the future is either not paying attention or kidding himself.

DRM’s principal effect is legal, not technical. Since the passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s been illegal to break DRMs in this country. It doesn’t matter if DRM restricts access to something you have every right to use (for example, a DRM that region-locks a movie you’ve bought so that it won’t play in the U.S.). You’re not allowed to break DRM, and corporations certainly can’t field products that break it. The results are ugly: Companies like 321 Studios (whose DVD X-Copy software lets you make otherwise legal backups of your DVDs) were sued into oblivion by the motion picture companies for trying such a thing.

So if you shellac a one-atom-thick layer of DRM over a product, you get the full power of the American legal system as a weapon to use against competitors. Apple may have created a successful “Switch” campaign by reverse-engineering Microsoft products like PowerPoint to make Keynote, an Apple program that lets you run old PowerPoint decks on your Mac, but Microsoft can’t create a “Switch to the Zune” campaign that offers you the ability to play your iTunes Store songs on a Zune, Microsoft’s latest abortive iPod-killer.

Although Apple’s DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying, it does manage to raise the cost of switching from an iPod to a competing device. Every iTunes song you buy for 99 cents amounts to a 99 cent tax on switching from an iPod to a Zune. That’s because your iTunes songs won’t play on your Zune — or on any other player, save those made or licensed by Apple. Jobs tries to skate around this in his memo, suggesting that only a tiny fraction of the music on iPods comes from his music store, and so the anti-switching effects are minimal.

While it’s true that most of us haven’t loaded our 10,000-song iPods with $9,900 worth of iTunes songs, it doesn’t follow that the switching cost for even casual iTunes customers is negligible. If you’d bought just one iTunes track every month since the launch in 2003, you’d have rung up $82 in lock-in music. Throw in a couple of $9.99 albums and maybe an audiobook or two and you can easily find yourself in $150 down the lock-in hole.

That’s $150 you kiss goodbye if you buy a sexy little Creative Labs Zen or a weird little no-name from the wildly imaginative entrepreneurs of Malaysia. Not only won’t your iTunes Store music play on those devices, it’s illegal to try to get it to play on those devices.

Jobs is right. If you had 10 grand worth of proprietary music on your iPod, his company’s iTunes would be anti-competitive. But that’s not to say that $150 worth of lock-in (enough to double the cost of many portable players) isn’t a powerful disincentive against switching from the iPod. I’m a lifelong Apple fan boy — I have an actual Mac tattoo — but even I remember the dark time of the Performa, when Apple’s hardware trailed so far behind the market leaders that buying it was like wearing a hair shirt. I think that it’s reasonable to assume that Apple won’t always make the world’s best music player. I’d like to keep my options open. But the longer you own an iPod, the more likely it is you’ll buy more iTunes music, and the fewer options you’ll have.

Jobs’ DRM stance has historically been all over the map. He’s defended and decried DRM and consumer rights depending on which way the wind blows, and the spirit moves him. There was the “Rip, Mix, Burn” campaign, when Apple celebrated the idea that you could take DRM-free music off of CDs and load it onto your iPod (if you want to do the same thing with a DRM’ed DVD, you’re an outlaw). Back in 2002, he went on the record with this gem: “If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.”

But later, an Apple attorney told a tech conference that Apple would keep its DRM even if the labels asked to have it removed. And when Real announced that it had put a Real DRM player on Apple’s iPod so that you could listen to its DRM music on Apple’s player, Apple responded with legal threats.

Actions speak louder than words. Artists have asked — begged — Apple to sell their music without DRM for years. From individual bestselling acts like Barenaked Ladies to entire labels of copy-friendly music like Magnatune, innumerable copyright holders have asked Apple to sell their work as open MP3s instead of DRM-locked AACs. Apple has always maintained that it’s DRM or nothing. These artists believe that the answer to selling more music is cooperating with fans, not treating them as presumptive pirates and locking down their music.

If you rip your own CDs and load them onto your iPod, you’ll notice something curious. The iPod is a roach motel: Songs check in, but they don’t check out. Once you put music on your iPod, you can’t get it off again with Apple’s software. No recovering your music collection off your iPod if your hard drive crashes. What’s more, Apple prevents copying indiscriminately. You can’t copy any music off your iPod. Apple even applies the no-copying measure to audio released under a Creative Commons license (for example, my own podcasts), which prohibits adding DRM. The Creative Commons situation is inexcusable; because Creative Commons licenses are machine-readable, iTunes could automatically find the C.C.-licensed works and make them available for copying back to your computer.

Then there’s the matter of the movies and TV shows sold through the iTunes Store. The first adopter of this marketplace was Disney/Pixar. Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney/Pixar. Apparently, he forced himself to add DRM to his Pixar movies, turning a deaf ear to his own impassioned arguments to leave the DRM off. Videos you buy from the iTunes Store can only be watched on Apple’s products. So every movie you buy from Apple is a tax down the line of switching from Apple to a competing product.

Some have argued that Apple’s famous fetish for consistency in user experience stops it from putting only some tracks into the iTunes Store without DRM. The reasoning goes that users will be confused by a store that sells both DRM and non-DRM music. But if this is so, how is it that Apple currently offers DRM-free podcasts alongside DRM’ed, pay-for-use podcasts in the selfsame store?

If DRM is designed to prevent copying, why is it that vendors always end up building “security” systems with all the integrity of a wet paper bag? Jobs explains it himself. All cryptography relies on keeping a set of keys that are secret against attackers. If Jobs sells you a download of “The Incredibles,” he has to give you the keys, otherwise all you have is a bunch of noisy, encrypted junk, not a movie.

“The problem, of course,” Jobs writes, “is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music.”

But Apple — and DRM — tries to resolve this problem by hiding the keys from you even as it delivers them to you. DRM relies on hardware and software that treat you, the guy who owns the device, as an untrusted party. DRM hides its keys on your own bought-and-paid-for equipment, locking you out of seeing what your own machine is doing.

Like all secrets, DRM can corrupt its host. Just look at Sony’s last foray into DRM, which included a “rootkit,” malicious software used by virus-writers to hide their programs’ existence from anti-spyware apps. Conceptually, spyware and DRM have the same goals: to do something to your computer that you don’t want to happen. Sony’s rootkit infected 500,000 American computer networks, including military and government systems. Apple’s DRM is even more widespread.

In Europe, Apple’s DRM has attracted unwelcome attention from regulators in Scandinavia, France and Germany. Europe is slowly adopting the same treaty that gave birth to the DMCA, the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996. Europe’s version, the EUCD, has to be incorporated into each member-state’s national law, and each law is a fresh opportunity for consumer rights activists to point out the anti-competitive effects of the ban on breaking DRM, with Apple’s iTunes front and center.

European regulators seem powerless to overturn the EUCD, so instead they’re turning to regulatory answers to iTunes’ lock-in. Norway’s ombudsman has been on the forefront of this, ordering Apple to open its DRM to interoperability. This demand makes strange allies out of DRM fighters and the entertainment giants they do battle with.

Activists like the idea of regulators bringing DRM to heel. Music companies like the idea of being able to negotiate pricing and delivery of their songs. In their utopia, you’d be able to buy music at prices they set (not just 99 cents a song) from a variety of stores and play them on a variety of devices from a variety of vendors. The incredible market dominance of iTunes/iPod has made Apple into a veritable Wal-Mart of digital downloads. And that has the music companies in a major snit.

Recently, Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. tried to get Apple to give him control over pricing of Warner’s tracks, so that he could charge more for top-40 music and less for back-catalog. Bronfman was handed his hat and laughed out of Cupertino. After all, what was he going to do, pull Warner’s music out of the iTunes Store and only offer it through stores whose products can’t play on iPods? It’s no surprise that Bronfman responded to Jobs’ music memo with an infantile tantrum: “completely without merit … completely without logic.” Bronfman doesn’t want no DRM, he wants a DRM that benefits the music companies without leaving any value on the table for the tech companies.

This weird alliance of copy fighters and music giants has Apple caught in a squeeze. The real meat in Jobs’ memo is in his excuses for not opening up Apple’s DRM to competitors. He explains that interoperability is a technical impossibility, since DRM requires that users be locked out of its secrets, and once you have multiple vendors, one of them is certain to leak the secrets.

DRM-cracker supreme Jon Johansen points out that Microsoft’s “interoperable” DRM, PlaysForSure, is no less secure than iTunes, despite a wide range of licensers. Of course, iTunes isn’t secure: Otherwise, it would take more than three minutes for iTunes music to migrate to P2P. Since PlaysForSure is also insecure, they can be called equivalent. Jobs’ argument is that his sieve will leak faster if regulators make him go interoperable.

Of course, it’s easy for Jobs to aver that he will drop DRM if the labels let him. As Princeton’s Ed Felten points out, Jobs says the labels call the shots on DRM and forced him to add DRM to iTunes Music. So it’s hardly brave defiance to swear to take it off when the labels tell him to. As Felten puts it, “Apple is like the kid who says he is willing to go to the dentist, because he knows that no matter what he says he’s going to see the dentist whenever his parents want him to.”

At the end of the day, DRM is the biggest impediment to a legitimate music market. Apple doesn’t sell music because of DRM — it sells music in spite of DRM. The iTunes Store proves that you can compete with free. People have bought billions of dollars worth of music from Apple because it offered a better user experience. But no one bought for the DRM. Some people bought in spite of it, some bought in ignorance of it, but there’s no customer for whom DRM is a selling point. No one woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her music.

When honest people are suckered into buying DRM, they often discover that the music they bought doesn’t work as well as the music their friends get free on P2P. In fact, there’s no better incentive to venture into the P2P waters than getting access to the music you may have already bought. Far from protecting music from illicit copying, DRM practically demands illicit copying. With DRM, the only way to get music that plays on all your devices, past and present, is to rip it off. If you buy DRM, you end up being part of someone’s business model, and a slave to the lock-in.

Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.

She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.

Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of ewoks listening to C3PO.

“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their 3D printer project.

“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to be easy. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for an E lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”

Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.

Andrea took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks in a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.

The response was amazing. Every TV news-crew in the greater Miami area made a pilgrimage to their factory to film Lester working in a tight t-shirt over a 3D printer, wrangling huge vats of epoxy-mix goop in the sun with sweat beading over his big, straining biceps.

Her message boards exploded. It seemed that a heretofore unsuspected contingent of her growing readership was substantially obese. And they had friends. Lester eventually gave up on posting, just so he could get some work done. They had the printers to the point where they could turn out new printers, but the whole system was temperamental and needed careful nursing. Lester was more interested in what people had to say on the engineering message-boards than chatting with the fatties.

The fatties were skeptical and hopeful in equal measures. The big fight was over whether there was anything to this, whether Lester would keep the weight off, whether the new skinny Lester was really Lester, whether he’d undergone surgery or had his stomach stapled. America’s wallets had been cleaned out by so many snake-oil peddlers with a “cure” for obesity that no one could believe what they saw, no matter how much they wanted to.

Lord, but it was bringing in the readers, not to mention the advertising dollars. The clearing price for a thousand weight-loss ads targeted to affluent, obese English-speakers was over fifty bucks, as compared to her customary CPM of three bucks a thou. Inside of a week, she’d made enough to buy a car.

“You should go,” Lester told her, as she clicked him through her earnings spreadsheet. “Jesus, this is insane. You know that these fatties actually follow me around on the net now, asking me questions in message boards about engineering? The board moderators are asking me to post under an assumed name. Madame, your public has spoken. There is a dire need for your skills in St Petersburg. Go. They have chandeliers in the subways and caviar on tap. All the blinis you can eat. Bear steaks.”

She shook her head and slurped at the tea he’d brought her. “You’re joking. It’s all mafiyeh there. Scary stuff. Besides, I’m covering this beat right now, New Work.”

“New Work isn’t going anywhere, Andrea. We’ll be here when you get back. And this story is one that needs your touch. They’re micro-entrepreneurs solving post-industrial problems. It’s the same story you’ve been covering here, but with a different angle. Take that money and buy yourself a business-class ticket to St Petersburg and spend a couple weeks on the job. You’ll clean up. They could use the publicity, too — someone to go and drill down on which clinics are legit and which ones are clip-joints. You’re perfect for the gig.”

“I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. Taking big chances had gotten her this far and it would take her farther, she knew. The world was your oyster if you could stomach a little risk.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hell yeah. You’re totally right, Lester.”

“Zasterovyeh!”

“What you said!”

“It’s cheers,” he said. “You’ll need to know that if you’re going to make time in Petrograd. Let me go send some e-mail and get you set up. You book a ticket.”

And just like that she was off to Russia.

Lester insisted that she buy a business-class ticket, and she discovered to her bemusement that British Airways had about three classes above Business, presumably with even more exclusive classes reserved for royalty and peers of the realm. She luxuriated in fourteen hours of reclining seats and warm peanuts and in-flight connectivity, running a brief videoconference with Lester just because she could. Tjan had sent her a guide to the hotels and she’d opted for the Pribaltiyskaya, a crumbling Stalin-era four-star of spectacular, Vegasesque dimensions. The facade revealed the tragedy of the U.S.S.R.’s unrequited love-affair with concrete, as did the cracks running up the walls of the lobby.

They checked her into the hotel with the nosiest questionnaire ever, a two-pager on government stationery that demanded to know her profession, employer, city of birth, details of family and so forth. An American businessman next to her at the check-in counter saw her puzzling over it. “Just make stuff up,” he said. “I always write that I come from 123 Fake Street, Anytown, California, and that I work as a professional paper-hanger. They don’t check on it, except maybe the mob when they’re figuring out who to mug. First time in Russia?”

“It shows, huh?”

“You get used to it,” he said. “I come here every month on business. You just need to understand that if it seems ridiculous and too bad to be true, it is. They have lots of rules here, but no one follows ‘em. Just ignore any unreasonable request and you’ll fit right in.”

“That’s good advice,” she said. He was middle-aged, but so was she, and he had nice eyes and no wedding ring.

“Get a whole night’s sleep, don’t drink the so-called ‘champagne’ and don’t change money on the streets. Did you bring melatonin and modafinil?”

She stared blankly at him. “Drugs?”

“Sure. One tonight to sleep, one in the morning to wake up, and do it again tomorrow and you’ll be un-lagged. No booze or caffeine, either, not for the first couple days. I have extra, here.” He dug in his travel bag and came up with some generic Walgreens bottles.

“That’s OK,” she said, handing her credit card to a pretty young clerk. “Thanks, though.”

He shook his head. “It’s your funeral,” he said. “Jet-lag is way worse for you than this stuff. It’s over the counter stateside. I don’t leave home without it. Anyway, I’m in room 1422. If it’s two in the morning and you’re staring at the ceiling and regretting it, call me and I’ll send some down.”

Was he hitting on her? Christ, she was so tired, she could barely see straight. There was no way she was going to need any help getting to sleep. She thanked him again and rolled her suitcase across the cavernous lobby with its gigantic chandeliers and up the elevators.

But sleep didn’t come. The network connection cost a fortune — something she hadn’t seen in years — and the number of worms and probes bouncing off her firewall was astronomical. The connection was slow and frustrating. Come 2 a.m., she was, indeed, staring at the ceiling.

Would you take drugs offered by a stranger in a hotel lobby? They were in a Walgreens bottle for chrissakes. How bad could they be? She picked up the house-phone on the chipped bedstand and punched his hotel room.

“Lo?”

“Oh Christ, I woke you up,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“‘Sok. Lady from check-in, right? Gimme your room number, I’ll send up a melatonin now and a modafinil for the morning. No sweatski.”

“Uh,” she hadn’t thought about giving a strange man her room number. In for a penny, in for a pound. “2813,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Geoff,” he said. “It’s Geoff. New York — upper West Side. Work in health products.”

“Andrea,” she said. “Florida, lately. I’m a writer.”

“Good night, Andrea. Pills are en route.”

“Good night, Geoff. Thanks.”

“Tip the porter a euro, or a couple bucks. Don’t bother with rubles.”

“Oh,” she said. It had been a long time since her last visit overseas. She’d forgotten how much minutiae was involved.

He rang off. She put on a robe and waited. The porter took about fifteen minutes, and handed her a little envelope with two pills in it. He was about fifteen, with a bad mustache and bad skin, and bad teeth that he displayed when she handed him a couple of dollar bills.

A minute later, she was back on the phone.

“Which one is which?”

“Little white one is melatonin. That’s for now. My bad.”

She saw him again in the breakfast room, loading a plate with hard-boiled eggs, potato pancakes, the ubiquitous caviar, salami, and cheeses. In his other hand he balanced a vat of porridge with strawberry jam and enough dried fruit to keep a parrot zoo happy for a month.

“How do you keep your girlish figure if you eat like that?” she said, settling down at his table.

“Ah, that’s a professional matter,” he said. “And I make it a point never to discuss bizniz before I’ve had two cups of coffee.” He poured himself a cup of coffee. “This is number two.”

She picked her way through her cornflakes and fruit salad. “I always feel like I don’t get my money’s worth out of buffet breakfasts,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make up for you.” He pounded his coffee and poured another cup. “Humanity returns,” he said, rubbing his thighs. “Marthter, the creature waketh!” he said in high Igor.

She laughed.

“You are really into, uh, substances, aren’t you?” she said.

“I am a firm believer in better living through chemistry,” he said. He pounded another coffee. “Ahhh. Coffee and modafinil are an amazing combo.”

She’s taken hers that morning when the alarm got her up. She’d been so tired that it actually made her feel nauseated to climb out of bed, but the modafinil had gotten her going. She knew a little about the drug, and figured that if the TSA approved it for use by commercial pilots, it couldn’t be that bad for you.

“So, my girlish figure. I work for a firm that has partners here in Petersburg who work on cutting-edge pharma products, including some stuff the FDA is dragging its heels on, despite widespread acceptance in many nations, this one included. One of these is a pill that overclocks your metabolism. I’ve been on it for a year now, and even though I am a stone calorie freak and pack away five or six thousand calories a day, I don’t gain an ounce. I actually have to remember to eat enough so that my ribs don’t start showing.”

Andrea watched him gobble another thousand calories. “Is it healthy?”

“Compared to what? Being fat? Yes. Running ten miles a day and eating a balanced diet of organic fruit and nuts? No. But when the average American gets the majority of her calories from soda-pop, ‘healthy’ is a pretty loaded term.”

It reminded her of that talk with Lester, a lifetime ago in the IHOP. Slowly, she found herself telling him about Lester’s story.

“Wait a second, you’re Andrea Fleeks? New Work Fleeks? San Jose Mercury News Fleeks?”

She blushed. “You can’t possibly have heard of me,” she said.

He rolled his eyes. “Sure. I shoulder-surfed your name off the checking form and did a background check on you last night just so I could chat you up over breakfast.”

It was a joke, but it gave her a funny, creeped-out feeling. “You’re kidding?”

“I’m kidding. I’ve been reading you for freaking years. I followed Lester’s story in detail. Professional interest. You’re the voice of our generation, woman. I’d be a philistine if I didn’t read your column.”

“You’re not making me any less embarrassed, you know.” It took an effort of will to keep from squirming.

He laughed hard enough to attract stares. “All right, I did spend the night googling you. Better?”

“If that’s the alternative, I’ll take famous, I suppose,” she said.

“You’re here writing about the weight-loss clinics, then?”

“Yes,” she said. It wasn’t a secret, but she hadn’t actually gone out of her way to mention it. After all, there might not be any kind of story after all. And somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that she didn’t want to tip off some well-funded newsroom to send out its own investigative team and get her scoop.

“That is fantastic,” he said. “That’s just, wow, that’s the best news I’ve had all year. You taking an interest in our stuff, it’s going to really push it over the edge. You’d think that selling weight loss to Americans would be easy, but not if it involves any kind of travel: 80 percent of those lazy insular fucks don’t even have passports. Ha. Don’t quote that. Ha.”

“Ha,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Look, how about this, we’ll meet in the lobby around nine, after dinner, for a cup of coffee and an interview?” She had gone from intrigued to flattered to creeped-out with this guy, and besides, she had her first clinic visit scheduled for ten and it was coming up on nine and who knew what a Russian rush-hour looked like?

“Oh. OK. But you’ve got to let me schedule you for a visit to some of our clinics and plants — just to see what a professional shop we run here. No gold-teeth-shiny-suit places like you’d get if you just picked the top Google AdWord. Really American-standard places, better even, Scandinavian-standard, a lot of our doctors come over from Sweden and Denmark to get out from under the socialist medicine systems there. They run a tight ship, ya shore, you betcha,” he delivered this last in a broad Swedish bork-bork-bork.

“Um,” she said. “It all depends on scheduling. Let’s sort it out tonight, OK?”

“OK,” he said. “Can’t wait.” He stood up with her and gave her a long, two-handed handshake. “It’s a real honor to meet you, Andrea. You’re one of my real heroes, you know that?”

“Um,” she said again. “Thanks, Geoff.”

He seemed to sense that he’d come on too strong. He looked like he was about to apologize.

“That’s really kind of you to say,” she said. “It’ll be good to catch up tonight.”

He brightened. It was easy enough to be kind, after all.

She had the front desk call her a taxi — she’d been repeatedly warned off of gypsy cabs and any vehicle that one procured by means of a wandering tout. She got into the back, had the doorman repeat the directions to Lester’s clinic twice to the cabbie, watching him switch on the meter, and checked the tariff, then settled in to watch St Petersburg go flying by.

She switched on her phone and watched it struggle to associate with a Russian network. They were on the road for all of five minutes — long enough to note the looming bulk to the Hermitage and the ripples left by official cars slicing through the traffic with their blue blinking lights — when her phone went nutso. She looked at it — she had ten texts, half a dozen voice-mails, a dozen new clipped articles, and it was ringing with a number in New York.

She bumped the New York call to voice-mail. She didn’t recognize the number. Besides, if the world had come to an end while she was asleep, she wanted to know some details before she talked to anyone about it. She paged back through the texts in reverse chronological — the last five were increasingly panicked messages from Lester and Perry. Then one from Tjan. Then one from Kettlebelly. They all wanted to discuss “the news” whatever that was. One from her old editor at the Merc asking if she was available for comment about “the news.” Tjan too. The first one was from Rat-Toothed Freddy, that snake.

“Kodacell’s creditors calling in debts. Share price below one cent. Imminent NASDAQ de-listing. Comments?”

Her stomach went cold, her breakfast congealed into a hard lump. The clipped articles had quotes from Kettlewell (“We will see to it that all our employees are paid, our creditors are reimbursed, and our shareholders are well-done-by through an orderly wind-down”), Perry (“Fuck it — I was doing this shit before Kodacell, don’t expect to stop now”) and Lester (“It was too beautiful and cool to be real, I guess.”) Where she was mentioned, it was usually in a snide context that made her out to be a disgraced pitchman for a failed movement.

Which she was. Basically.

Her phone rang. Kettlewell.

“Hi, Kettlewell,” she said.

“Where have you been?” he said. He sounded really edgy. It was the middle of the night in California.

“I’m in St Petersburg,” she said. “In Russia. I only found out about ten seconds ago. What happened?”

“Oh Christ. Who knows? Cascading failure. Fell short of last quarter’s estimates, which started a slide. Then a couple lawsuits filed. Then some unfavorable press. The share price kept falling, and things got worse. Your basic clusterfuck.”

“But you guys had great numbers overall–”

“Sure, if you looked at them our way, they were great. If you looked at them the way the street looks at them, we were in deep shit. Analysts couldn’t figure out how to value us. Add a little market chaos and some old score-settling assholes, like that fucker Freddy, and it’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did. They’re already calling us the twenty-first century Enron.”

“Kettlewell,” she said, “I lived through a couple of these, and something’s not right. When the dotcoms were going under, their CEOs kept telling everyone everything was all right, right up to the last minute. They didn’t throw in the towel. They stood like captains on the bridge of sinking ships.”

“So?”

“So what’s going on here. It sounds like you’re whipped. Why aren’t you fighting? There were lots of dotcoms that tanked, but a few of those deep-in-denial CEOs pulled it off, restructured and came out of it alive. Why are you giving up?”

“Andrea, oh, Andrea.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “You think that this happened overnight? You think that this problem just cropped up yesterday and I tossed in the towel?”

Oh. “Oh.”

“Yeah. We’ve been tanking for months. I’ve been standing on the bridge of this sinking ship with my biggest smile pasted on for two consecutive quarters now. I’ve thrown out the most impressive reality distortion field the business world has ever seen. Just because I’m giving up doesn’t mean I gave up without a fight.”

Andrea had never been good at condolences. She hated funerals. “Lionel, I’m sorry. It must have been very hard–”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, sure. I wanted you to have the scoop on this, but I had to talk to the press once the story broke, you understand.”

“I understand,” she said. “Scoops aren’t that important anyway. I’ll tell you what. I’ll post a short piece on this right away, just saying, ‘yes, it’s true, and I’m getting details.’ Then I’ll do interviews with you and Lester and Perry and put up something longer in a couple of hours. Does that work?”

He laughed again, no humor in it. “Yeah, that’ll be fine.”

“Sorry, Kettlewell.”

“No, no,” he said. “No, it’s OK.”

“Look, I just want to write about this in a way that honors what you’ve done over the past two years. I’ve never been present at the birth of anything remotely this important. It deserves to be described well.”

It sounded like he might be crying. There was a snuffling sound. “You’ve been amazing, Andrea. We couldn’t have done it without you. No one could have described it better. Great deeds are irrelevant if no one knows about them or remembers them.”

Her phone was beeping. She snuck a peek. It was her old editor. “Listen,” she said. “I have to go. There’s a call coming in I have to take. I can call you right back.”

“Don’t,” he said. “It’s OK. I’m busy here anyway. This is a big day.” His laugh was like a dog’s bark.

“Take care of yourself, Kettlewell,” she said. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

“Nil carborundum illegitimis to you, too.”

She clicked over to her editor. “Jimmy,” she said. “Long time no speak. Sorry I missed your calls before — I’m in Russia on a story.”

“Hello, Andrea,” he said. His voice had an odd, strained quality, or maybe that was just her mood, projecting. “I’m sorry, Andrea. You’ve been doing good work. The best work of your career, if you ask me. I follow it closely.”

It made her feel a little better. She’d been uncomfortable about the way she and Jimmy had parted ways, but this was vindicating. It emboldened her. “Jimmy, what the hell do I do now?”

“Christ, Andrea, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what not to do, though. Off the record.”

“Off the record.”

“Don’t do what I’ve done. Don’t hang grimly on to the last planks from the sinking ship, chronicling the last few struggling, sinking schmucks’ demise. It’s no fun being the stenographer for the fall of a great empire. Find something else to cover.”

The words made her heart sink. Poor Jimmy, stuck there in the Merc’s once-great newsroom, while the world crumbled around him. It must have been heartbreaking.

“Thanks,” she said. “You want an interview?”

“What? No, woman. I’m not a ghoul. I wanted to call and make sure you were all right.”

“Jimmy, you’re a prince. But I’ll be OK. I land on my feet. You’ve got someone covering this story, so give her my number and have her call me and I’ll give her a quote.”

“Really, Andrea–”

“It’s fine, Jimmy.”

“Andrea,” he said. “We don’t cover that kind of thing from our newsroom anymore. Just local stuff. National coverage comes from the wires or from the Knight-Ridder national newsroom.”

She sucked in air. Could it be possible? Her first thought when Jimmy called was that she’d made a terrible mistake by leaving the Merc, but if this is what the paper had come to, she had left just in time, even if her own life-raft was sinking, it had kept her afloat for a while.

“The offer still stands, Jimmy. I’ll talk to anyone you want to assign.”

“You’re a sweetheart, Andrea. What are you in Russia for?”

She told him. Screw scoops, anyway. Not like Jimmy was going to send anyone to Russia, he couldn’t even afford to dispatch a reporter to Marin County by the sounds of things.

“What a story!” he said. “Man!”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah I guess it is.”

“You guess? Andrea, this is the single most important issue in practically every American’s life — there isn’t one in a thousand who doesn’t worry endlessly about his weight.”

“Well, I have been getting really good numbers on this.” She named the figure. He sucked air between his teeth. “That’s what the whole freaking chain does on a top story, Andrea. You’re outperforming fifty local papers combined.”

“Yeah?”

“Hell yeah,” he said. “Maybe I should ask you for a job.”

When he got off the phone, she spoke to Perry, and then to Lester. Lester said that he wanted to go traveling and see his old friends in Russia and that if she was still around in a couple weeks, maybe he’d see her there. Perry was morose and grimly determined. He was on the verge of shipping his 3D printers and he was sure he could do it, even if he didn’t have the Kodacell network for marketing and logistics. He didn’t even seem to register it when she told him that she was going to be spending some time there.

Then she had to go into the clinic and ask intelligent questions and take pictures and record audio and jot notes and pay attention to the small details so that she would be able to write the best account possible.

They dressed well in Russia, in the clinics. Business casual, but well tailored and made from good material. The Europeans knew from textiles, and expert tailoring seemed to be in cheap supply here.

She’d have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years’ worth of Florida casual.

She’d see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle — not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics.

She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room percolator.

“Hello, Freddy,” she said.

“Andrea, darling!” He sounded like he was breathing hard.

“What can I do for you?”

“Just wanted a quote, love, something for color.”

“Oh, I’ve got a quote for you.” She’d given the quote a lot of thought. Living with the squatters had broadened her vocabulary magnificently.

“And those are your good points,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “Goodbye, Freddy.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

A note from the author:

Here ends the first “book” of “Themepunks,” a novel that I’m still hard at work on. There are two more books in the novel; the second one is about two-thirds done now, and will run about twice as long as this first section. The third section will wrap things up, resolving the stories of all the characters we meet on the way.

The next book opens with the New Work in ruins. Perry and Lester are now running a ride that is a kind of interactive museum of the accomplishments of the New Work movement, housed in the shell of a dead Wal-Mart. Riders pass through on stair-climbing Dean Kamen wheelchair knockoffs, “voting” on each exhibit’s elements by hitting a “+1″ and “-1″ lever on the front of the chair. They also bring in their own treasures for display in the museum and leave them in the parts where they think they fit.

The ride gets cooler and cooler as time goes by. Tjan rounds up some of his Boston pals to open a second ride, networked to the first, kept in harmony by automated exhibit-tending robots. Soon there’s a network of these rides, all around the U.S. This isn’t invention, it’s storytelling, the New Workers and their progeny talking to one another.

America has been transformed by the “fatkins” movement, body-hackers whose metabolisms have been boosted to 10,000-15,000 calories a day. These new sybarites are obsessed with pleasures of the flesh and biotech, and Lester lives among them, a reborn sybarite.

But all is not well. Sammy, an executive at Walt Disney World (a separate public company, divorced from the parent company) has conceived of a deep and abiding hatred of the ride and the riders. Add to that the reappearance of Kettlewell and Andrea, and Kettlewell’s furious wife, and police raids on the ride and things start to spiral out of control…

I’ve been really delighted with this experiment so far! The feedback you’ve sent has been great, and has really helped me think about book 2 as I wrote it. It remains to be seen whether Salon will pick up the next book for syndication, but in any event I’m immensely grateful to them for seeing this through to now, and the whole thing will be published between covers by Tor Books once it’s in the can.

Thanks again — and keep watching the junkyards!

Cory

“I’d buy a tooled-leather laptop case,” Perry said, swilling a sweaty bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy scalp.

“The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which it hasn’t been in like a hundred years. If you’re not inventing stuff, you’re keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It’s like a tiny, distributed gold rush.”

“Or like the New Deal,” Andrea said. That was how she’d come to invite him down, after she’d read his paper coining the term New Work to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt’s public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression.

“Yeah, exactly, exactly! I’ve got research that shows that one in five Americans is employed in the New Work industry. 20 percent!”

Perry’s lazy eye opened a little wider. “No way,” he said.

“Way,” the PhD candidate said. He finished his caipirinha and shook the crushed ice at a passing waiter, who nodded and ambled to the bar to get him a fresh one. “You should get on the road and write about some of these guys,” he said to Andrea. “They need some ink, some phosphors. They’re pulling up stakes and moving to the small towns their parents came from, or to abandoned suburbs, and just doing it. Bravest fucking thing you’ve seen in your life.”

The PhD candidate stayed out the week, and went home with a suitcase full of the parts necessary to build a 3D printer that could print out all of the parts necessary to build a 3D printer.

Lester e-mailed her from wherever it was he’d gone, and told her about the lovely time he was having. It made her miss him sharply. Perry was hardly ever around for her now, buried in his work, buried with the kids from the shantytown and with Francis. She looked over her last month’s blogs and realized that she’d been turning in variations on the same theme for all that time. She knew it was time to pack a duffel bag of her own and go see the bravest fucking thing she’d seen in her life.

“Bye, Perry,” she said, stopping by his workbench. He looked up at her and saw the bag and his funny eyebrow wobbled.

“Leaving for good?” he said. He sounded unexpectedly bitter.

“No!” she said. “No! Just a couple weeks. Going to get the rest of the story. But I’ll be back, count on it.”

He grunted and slumped. He was looking a lot older now, and beaten down. His hair, growing out, was half grey, and he’d gotten gaunt, his cheekbones and forehead springing out of his face. On impulse, she gave him a hug like the ones she’d shared with Lester. He returned it woodenly at first, then with genuine warmth. “I will be back, you know,” she said. “You’ve got plenty to do here, anyway.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Course I do.”

She kissed him firmly on the cheek and stepped out the door and into her car and drove to Miami International.

Tjan met her at Logan and took her bag. “I’m surprised you had the time to meet me,” she said. The months had been good to him, slimming down his pot-belly and putting a twinkle in his eye.

“I’ve got a good organization,” he said, as they motored away toward Rhode Island, through strip-mall suburbs and past boarded-up chain restaurants. Everywhere there were signs of industry: workshops in old storefronts, roadside stands selling disposable music players, digital whoopee cushions, and so forth. “I barely have to put in an appearance.”

Tjan yawned hugely and constantly. “Jet-lag,” he apologized. “Got back from Russia a couple days ago.”

“Did you see your kids?” she said. “How’s business there?”

“I saw my kids,” he said, and grinned. “They’re amazing, you know that? Good kids, unbelievably smart. Real little operators. The older girl is running a baby-sitting service — not baby-sitting herself, you see, but recruiting other kids to do the sitting for her while she skims a management fee and runs the quality control.”

“She’s your daughter all right,” she said. “So tell me everything about the Westinghouse projects.”

She’d been following them, of course, lots of different little startups, each with its own blogs and such. But Tjan was quite fearless about taking her through their profit and losses, and taking notes on it all kept her busy until she reached her hotel. Tjan dropped her off and promised to pick her up the next morning for a VIP tour of the best of his teams, and she went to check in.

She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. “Andrea bloody Fleeks! What are you doing here, love?”

The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy.

“Hey, Freddy,” she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and he swallowed and smiled wetly. “Nice to see you.”

“Fantastic to see you, too! I’m here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you’re here for, too?”

“No,” she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn’t planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. “Well, nice to see you.”

“Oh, do stay for a drink,” he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark’s smile. “Come on — they have a free cocktail hour in this place. I’ll have to report you to the journalist’s union if you turn down a free drink.”

“I don’t think ‘bloggers’ have to worry about the journalist’s union,” she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn’t get the message. He still didn’t. He laughed instead.

“Oh, love, I’m sure they’ll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith.”

“Good night, Freddy,” was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth.

“OK, good night,” he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped.

“Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, mean-spirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn’t piss on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the fuck out of my way before I kick your tiny little testicles up through the roof of your reeking mouth.”

She said it quietly, but the desk-clerks behind her overheard it anyway and giggled. Freddy’s smile only bobbled, but then returned, broader than ever.

“Well said,” he said and gave her a single golf-clap. “Sleep well, Andrea.”

She boiled all the way to her room and when she came over hungry, she ordered in room service, not wanting to take the chance that Rat-Toothed Freddy would still be in the lobby.

She settled down to answer some e-mail — she’d heard from Lester again, which cheered her up — and saw that her wireless network monitor was going bonkers. Her computer was streaming zillions of bits off of its hard-drive. She was accustomed to the occasional listener to her stored music or viewer of her video, but this was nuts. She didn’t know much about this stuff, but she knew who to ask.

Hey blog-readers! I’ve got a PowerBook G9 running the latest OS and patches. Something is causing me to transmit a lot of data over a wireless network in a hotel here, and I want to know what it is. How do I figure that out?

The first reply came five minutes later. Then six more. She was downloading various recommended apps while mediating the flamewar that broke out between two of her readers with contradictory views about the best way for her to solve her problem.

But she did get the utility installed and immediately saw the cause of her data-hemorrhage: the app reported someone had gained illicit access to her computer, using a guest account that came with the OS, and had run an exploit that escalated their privileges so that they could copy her entire hard drive over the network.

Her first impulse was so switch off her machine, but if she did that, she wouldn’t be able to ask her online people for advice on fixing this. The utility had a couple buttons for stopping the process, so she tried them, repeatedly clicking until the network traffic levels fell to acceptable levels. She posted some screenshots on her blog and got more advice for rooting out any malware the attacker had left behind. All that evening as she patched and picked over her computer, her mind ground around and around, thinking about all the stuff on her machine: personal notes, candid photos, raw journals of her feelings, things she’d never share with anyone.

She had just closed her eyes and lain back on the pillow when she had a thought so terrible it literally nauseated her: Rat-Toothed Freddy. This was so his thing, to avenge himself for her outburst of temper to go picking through her machine. Eyes staring a the ceiling, she clenched and unclenched her fists on the sheets. Her computer, her betrayer, whirred softly. She should have encrypted her files, she knew, and it had been on her list of things to do for years, just as soon as she met a geek who could actually explain how that crypto stuff worked.

She tapped the spacebar and brought the screen back up. More e-mail from her blog people. Suggestions for tracing back the attack. Information on encrypting her files. The two flame warriors asking her for more mediation on which was right and which was wrong. She opened up the recipe for tracing back the attack and started to run through it, and shortly she had a lot of junk on her screen that, with the right interpretation, would tell her more about who had attacked her. As she watched, more junk appeared. The progress-bar said that this would run all night and more as it picked through her log-files, so she dimmed her screen and went to sleep.

In the breakfast room, she found herself eyeing up her fellow diners’ laptops as they surfed news over their pancakes and oatmeal. She was looking for a generic Ikea laptop, recent model, with a fast typist at the helm. That much the log-analyzer had deduced. If she could find the machine, she could look at the network card’s unique ID to confirm that it was the one that had been used to raid her computer. One thing the log-analyzer had been sure of was that the offender was on her local network, though it had warned that the attacker might be anywhere, having compromised a local machine to use as a jumping-off point to attack her. That didn’t strike her as likely: not many people knew that she was here on the local net.

Tjan met her as she was finishing her coffee. She hadn’t seen Rat-Toothed Freddy yet and couldn’t remember what sort of machine he used habitually, though she was pretty sure that she’d have remembered it if he’d been using one of Ikea’s veneer-finish wood-grain machines.

“I’ve got five projects slated for you to visit today,” Tjan said, sliding into the booth beside her. Funnily now that he was in the cold northeast, he was dressing like a Floridian in blue jeans and a Hawai’ian barkcloth shirt with a bright patter of pineapples and Oscar Meyer Weinermobiles. Back in Florida, he’d favored unflattering nylon slacks and white shirts with ironed collars.

The projects were fascinating and familiar. The cultural differences between Florida New Work and New England New Work were small but telling: a lot more woodcraft, from a part of the country where many people had grown up in their grandfathers’ woodworking shops. A little more unreflexive kitsch, like the homely kittens and puppies that marched around the reactive, waterproof, smash-proof screens integrated into a bio-monitoring crib.

At the fourth site, she was ambushed by a flying hug. Tjan laughed as she nearly went down under the weight of a strong, young woman who flung her arms around Andrea’s neck. “Holy crap it’s good to see you!”

Andrea untangled herself and got a look at her hugger. She had short mousy hair, twinkling blue eyes, and was dressed in overalls and a pretty flowered blouse, scuffed work boots and stained and torn work-gloves. “Uh…” she said, then it clicked. “Fiona?”

“Yeah! Didn’t Tjan tell you I was here?” The last time she’d seen this woman, she was weeping over pizza and getting ready to give up on life. Now she was practically vibrating.

“Uh, no,” she said, shooting a look at Tjan, who was smiling like the Buddha and pretending to inspect a pair of shoes with gyroscopically stabilized retractable wheels in the heels.

“I’ve been here for months! I went back to Oregon, like you told me to, and then I saw a recruiting ad for Westinghouse and I sent them my CV and then I got a videoconference interview and then, bam, I was on an airplane to Rhode Island!”

Andrea blinked. I told you to go back to Oregon? Well, maybe she had. That was a lifetime ago.

The workshop was another dead mall, this one a horseshoe of storefronts separated by flimsy gyprock. The Westinghousers had cut through the walls with drywall knives to join them all together. The air was permeated with the familiar Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave tang of 3D printers. The parking lot was given over to some larger apparatus and a fantastical children’s jungle-gym in the shape of a baroque, spired pirate fortress, with elegantly curved turrets, corkscrew sky-bridges, and flying buttresses crusted over with ornate, grotesque gargoyles. Children swarmed over it like ants, screeching with pleasure.

“Well, you’re looking really good, Fiona,” she said. Still not great with people, she thought. Fiona, though, was indeed looking good, and beaming. She wasn’t wearing the crust of cosmetics and hair-care products she’d affected in the corporate Silicon Valley world. She glowed pink.

“Andrea,” Fiona said, getting serious now, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. “I can’t thank you enough for this. This has saved my life. It gave me something to live for. For the first time in my life, I am doing something I’m proud of. I go to bed every night thankful and happy that I ended up here. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you.”

Andrea tried not to squirm. Fiona gave her another long hug. “It’s all your doing,” she said at last. “I just told you about it. You’ve made this happen for you, OK?”

“OK,” Fiona said, “but I still wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I love you, Andrea.”

Ick. Andrea gave her another perfunctory hug and got the hell out of Dodge.

“What’s with the jungle-gym?” It really had been something, fun and martian-looking.

“That’s the big one,” Tjan said, with a big grin. “Most people don’t even notice it, they think it’s daycare or something. Well, that’s how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so that the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically: now it’s a self-modifying jungle-gym. The kids love it. It is the crack cocaine of jungle-gyms, though we won’t be using that in the marketing copy, of course.”

“Of course,” Andrea said dryly. She’d automatically reached for her notepad and started writing when Tjan started talking. Now, reviewing her notes, she knew that she was going to have to go back and get some photos of this. She asked Tjan about it.

“The robots go all night, you know. Not much sleep if you do that.”

No going back to the hotel to see Rat-Toothed Freddy, what a pity. “I’ll grab a couple blankets from the hotel to keep warm,” she said.

“Oh, you needn’t,” he said. “That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It’s pretty gorgeous, if you ask me.”

They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Andrea ensconced herself at someone’s vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on e-mail before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket between a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters’ roar.

Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn’t have much by way of hands at their ends. “We just use rare-earth magnets,” Fiona said. “Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars.”

Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together with snick sounds that were audible over the whine of their motors.

Andrea switched on her camera’s night-vision mode and got shooting. “Where did you get all these robots?”

Tjan grinned. “It’s an open design — the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There’s a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren’t proprietary enough and they were worried that they’d have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though.”

The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, shifting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch.

“Can I go out and have a look?” she said. “I mean, is it safe?”

“Sure,” Fiona said. “Of course! Our robots won’t harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction.”

“Still, try to stay out of their way,” Tjan said. “Some of that stuff they’re moving around is heavy.”

So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off.

Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Stood there amidst the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she’d arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity’s creations had evolved past their inventors.

She was going to have to do a lot of writing before bed.

Rat-Toothed Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she passed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy.

She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina’s research triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams.

Another three weeks of this stuff and she’d get to go home — Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling.

It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn’t been her idea, she’d been dragged back by impassioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who’d rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them.

The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disassembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts’ interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they’d won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew.

Lester e-mailed her and said that he’d seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he’d be in town too?

They ate at Devil’s Night, a restaurant in a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades’ worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Hell Night was the Hallowe’en of torching abandoned buildings, and the neighborhood had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs.

Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement and glass to preserve the look of a burned-out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way glass that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below.

Andrea showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decade since she’d left. She was flustered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread.

When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn’t there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days’ stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton shirt underneath. He was beaming at her.

“Andrea,” he said.

Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. “Lester?” she said, wonderingly.

He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands.

When he let go of her, he laughed again. “Oh, Andrea, I could not have asked for any better reaction than this. Thank you.” They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he.

“Lester?” she said again.

“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders.”

Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Andrea picked one at random. So did Lester.

“So,” he said, patting his washboard tummy. “You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?”

“Can I take notes?” Andrea said, pulling out her pad.

“Oh by all means,” he said. “I got a discount on my treatments on the basis that you would end up taking notes.”

The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn’t want to pay U.S. prices for crowns. The treatment hadn’t originated there: the electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Reversible genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that it burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still.

But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks.

“Is that safe?” she said.

“Everyone asks that,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, it’s safe if they’re monitoring you and standing by with lots of diagnostic equipment. But if you’re willing to take slower losses, you can go on a way less intensive regime that won’t require supervision. This stuff is the next big grey-market pharma gold. They’re violating all kinds of pharma patents, of course, but that’s what Cuba and Canada are for, right? Inside of a year, every fat person in America is going to have a bottle of pills in his pocket, and inside of two years, there won’t be any fat people.”

She shook her head. “You look… Lester, you look incredible. I’m so proud of you.”

He ducked his head. He really did look amazing. Dropping the weight had taken off ten years, and between that and the haircut and the new clothes, he was practically unrecognizable.

“Does Perry know?”

“Yeah,” Lester said. “I talked it over with him before I opted for it. Tjan had mentioned it in passing, it was a business his ex-wife was tangled up with through her mafiyeh connections, and once I had researched it online and talked to some people who’d had the treatment, including a couple MDs, I decided to just do it.”

It had cost nearly everything he’d made from Kodacell, but it was a small price to pay. He insisted on getting dinner.

Afterward, they strolled through the fragrant evening, past the deco skyscrapers and the ploughed fields and community gardens, their livestock pens making soft animal noises.

“It’s wonderful to see you again, Lester,” she said, truthfully. She’d really missed him, even though his participation on her message boards had hardly let up (though it had started coming in at weird hours, something explained by the fact that he’d been in Russia). Walking alongside of him, smelling his smell, only seeing him out of the corner of her eye, it was like nothing had changed.

“It’s great to see you again too.” Tentatively, he took her hand in his big paw. His hand was warm but not sweaty, and she realized it had been a long time since anyone had held her hand. Heart pounding, she gave his hand a squeeze.

Their conversation and their walk rambled on, with no outward acknowledgment of the contact of hand on hand, but her hand squeezed his softly now and again, or he squeezed hers, and then they were at her hotel. < i>How did that happen? she asked herself.

But then they were having a nightcap, and then he was in the elevator with her and then he was at the door of her room, and the blood was roaring in her ears as she stuck her credit-card in the reader to open it.

Wait, she tried to say. Lester, hang on a second, is what she tried to say, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. He stepped through the door with her, then said, “Uh, I need to use the bathroom.”

With relief, she directed him to the small water closet. The room was basic — now that she was her own boss, she wasn’t springing for Crown Plazas and Hiltons, this was practically a coffin — and there was nowhere to sit except the bed. Her laptop was open and there was a lot of e-mail in her inbox, but for once, she didn’t care. She was keenly attuned to the water noises coming from behind the door, each new sound making her jump a little. What was he doing in there, inserting a fucking diaphragm?

She heard him work the latch on the door and she put on her best smile. Her stomach was full of butterflies. He smiled back and sat down on the bed next to her, taking her hand again. His hand was moist from being washed, and a little slippery. She didn’t mind. Wordlessly, she put her head on his barrel chest. His heart was racing, and so was hers.

Gradually, they leaned back, until they were side by side on the bed, her head still on his chest. Moving like she was in a dream, she lifted her head from his chest and stared into his eyes. They were wide and scared. She kissed him, softly. His lips were trembling and unyielding. She kissed him more insistently, running her hands over his chest and shoulders, putting one leg over him. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. He wasn’t bad, but he was scared or nervous and all jittery.

She kissed his throat, breathing in the smell, savoring the rough texture of his three-day beard. Tentatively, he put his hands on her back, stroked her, worked gradually towards her bottom. Then he stopped.

“What’s wrong?” she said, propping herself up on her forearms, still straddling him.

She saw that there were tears in his eyes.

“Lester? What’s wrong?”

He opened his mouth and then shut it. Tears slid off his face into his ears. She blotted them with a corner of hotel-pillow.

She stroked his hair. “Lester?”

He gave out a choked sob and pushed her away. He sat up and put his face in his hands. His back heaved. She stroked his shoulders tentatively.

Finally, he seemed to get himself under control. He sniffled.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Lester, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this,” he said. “I…”

“Just tell me,” she said. “Whatever it is, tell me.”

“You didn’t want me before.” He said it simply without accusation, but it stung like he’d slapped her in the face.

“Oh, Lester,” she said, moving to hug him, but he pushed her away.

“I have to go,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He was tall, though he’d never seemed it before, but oh, he was tall, six foot four or taller. He filled the room. His eyes were red and swollen, but he put on a smile for her. “Thanks, Andrea. It was really good to see you again. I’ll see you in Florida.”

She stood up and moved quickly to him, stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him fiercely. He hugged her back and she kissed him on the cheek.

“I’ll see you in Florida,” she said.

And then he was gone. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for tears, but they didn’t come. So she picked up her laptop and started to work through her mountain of e-mail.

Read Chapter 10.

Describing their illegal homesteading as “live-work” condos that Dr Seuss might have designed, Kodacell shill Fleeks goes on to describe how this captive, live-in audience has been converted to a workforce for Kodacell’s most profitable unit (“most profitable” is a relative term: to date, this unit has turned a profit of about 1.5 million, per the last quarterly report; by contrast the old Kodak’s most profitable unit made twenty times that in its last quarter of operation).

America has a grand tradition of this kind of plantation living: the coal barons’ company towns of the 19th century are the original model for this kind of industrial practice in the U.S.A. Substandard housing and only one employer in town — that’s the kind of brave new world that Fleeks’s boyfriend Kettlewell has created.

A reader writes: “I live near the shantytown that was relocated to the Kodacell factory in Florida. It was a dangerous slum full of drug dealers. None of the parents in my neighborhood let their kids ride their bikes along the road that passed it by — it was a haven for all kinds of down-and-out trash.”

There you have it, the future of the American workforce: down-and-out junkie squatters working for starvation wages.

“Kettlewell, you can’t let jerks like Freddy run this company. He’s just looking to sell banner-space. This is how the Brit rags write — it’s all meanspirited sniping.” Andrea had never seen Kettlewell so frustrated. His surfer good looks were fading fast — he was getting a little paunch on him and his cheeks were sagging off his bones into the beginnings of jowls. His car had pulled up to the end of the driveway and he’d gotten out and walked through the shantytown with the air of a man in a dream. The truckers who pulled in and out all week picking up orders had occasionally had a curious word at the strange little settlement, but for Andrea it had all but disappeared into her normal experience. Kettlewell made it strange and even a little outrageous, just by his stiff, outraged walk through its streets.

“You think I’m letting Freddy drive this decision?” He had spittle flecks on the corners of his mouth. “Christ, Andrea, you’re supposed to be the adult around here.”

Perry looked up from the floor in front of him, which he had been staring at intently. Andrea caught his involuntary glare at Kettlewell, before he dropped his eyes again. Lester put a big meaty paw on Perry’s shoulder. Kettlewell was oblivious.

“Those people can’t stay, all right? The shareholders are baying for blood. The fucking liability — Christ, what if one of those places burns down? What if one of them knifes another one? We’re on the hook for everything they do. We could end up being on the hook for a fucking cholera epidemic.”

Irrationally, Andrea burned with anger at Rat-Toothed Freddy. He had written every venal, bilious word with the hope that it would result in a scene just like this one. And not because he had any substantive objection to what was going on: simply because he had a need to deride that which others hailed. He wasn’t afflicting the mighty, though: he was taking on the very meekest, people who had nothing, including a means of speaking up for themselves.

Perry looked up. “You’ve asked me to come up with something new and incredible every three to six months. Well, this is new and incredible. We’ve built a living lab on our doorstep for exploring an enormous market opportunity to provide low-cost, sustainable technology for use by a substantial segment of the population who have no fixed address. There are millions of American squatters and billions of squatters worldwide. They have money to spend and no one else is trying to get it from them.”

Kettlewell thrust his chin forward. “How many millions? How much money do they have to spend? How do you know that any of this will make us a single cent? Where’s the market research? Was there any? Or did you just invite a hundred hobos to pitch their tent out front of my factory on the strength of your half-assed guesses?”

Lester held up a hand. “We don’t have any market research, Kettlewell, because we don’t have a business-manager on the team anymore. Perry’s been taking that over as well as his regular work, and he’s been working himself sick for you. We’re flying by the seat of our pants here because you haven’t sent us a pilot.”

“You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?” Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Andrea very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough.

Kettlewell noticed. “Get out,” he said. “I want to talk with these two alone.”

“No,” Andrea said. “That’s not our deal. I get to document everything. That’s the deal.”

Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry’s desk and collapsed into it.

“Put the notebook away, Andrea, please?”

She lowered the book and tucked her pen into a back pocket.

“Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It’s about 10, 15 percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by 60 percent or more.”

“They’re going to short us because they don’t like what we’ve done here?” Perry said. “Christ, that’s ridiculous!”

Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. “No, Perry, no. They’re doing it because they can’t figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there’s not enough of them. We’ve only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so 90 percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects — the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we’ve got are little projects.”

“So it’s not our fault then, is it?” Lester said. Perry was staring out the window.

“No, it’s not your fault, but this doesn’t help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe.”

“Calm down, Lionel,” Perry said. “Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?”

Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. “Go ahead.”

“There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities.”

Andrea nodded. “They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs.”

“There’s something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited — think of how a homeless person can’t take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn’t have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too — they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any U.N. SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It’s what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it’s there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can’t buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time — why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money –”

Kettlewell held up a hand. “I like the theory. It’s a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?”

“We’re it,” Perry said. “This place, right here. There’s no numbers to prove what I’m saying is right because everyone who knows it’s right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we’re allowed to do this — right here we can prove it. We’ve got the capital in our account, we’re profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company.”

Andrea was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning.

Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Andrea was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at.

Francis took the news calmly. “Sound business strategy. Basically, it’s what I’ve been telling you to do all along, so I’m bound to like it.”

It took a couple weeks to hive off the Home Aware stuff to some of the other Kodacell business-units. Perry flew a bunch, spending days in Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan overseeing the retooling efforts that would let him focus on his new project.

By the time he got back, Lester had retooled their own workspace, converting it to four functional areas: communications, shelter, food and entertainment. “They were Francis’s idea,” he said. Francis’s gimpy leg was bothering him more and more, but he’d overseen the work from a rolling ergonomic office-chair. “It’s his version of the hierarchy of needs — stuff he knows for sure we can sell.”

It was the first time the boys had launched something new without knowing what it was, where they’d started with a niche and decided to fill it instead of starting with an idea and looking for a niche for it.

“You’re going to underestimate the research time,” Francis said, during one of their flip-chart brainstorms, where they had been covering sheet after sheet with ideas for products they could build. “Everyone underestimates research time. Deciding what to make is always harder than making it.” He’d been drinking less since he’d gotten involved in the retooling effort, waking earlier, bossing around his young-blood posse to get him paper, bricks, Tinkertoys.

He was right. Andrea steadily recorded the weeks ticking by as the four competing labs focus-grouped, designed, tested and scrapped all manner of “tchotchkes for tramps,” as Rat-Toothed Freddy had dubbed it in a spiraling series of ever-more-bilious columns. But the press was mostly positive: camera crews liked to come by and shoot the compound. One time, the pretty black reporter from the night of the fire came by and said very nice things during her standup. Her name was Maria and she was happy to talk shop with Andrea, endlessly fascinated by a “real” journalist who’d gone permanently slumming on the Internet.

“The problem is that all this stuff is too specialized, it has too many prerequisites,” Perry said, staring at a waterproof, cement-impregnated bag that could be filled with a hose, allowed to dry, and used as a self-contained room. “This thing is great for refugees, but it’s too one-size-fits all for squatters. They have to be able to heavily customize everything they use to fit into really specialized niches.”

More squatters had arrived to take up residence with them — families, friends, a couple of dodgy drifters — and a third story was going onto the buildings in the camp. They were even more Dr Seussian than the first round, idiosyncratic structures that had to be built light to avoid crushing the floors below them, hanging out over the narrow streets, corkscrewing like vines seeking sun.

He kept staring, and would have been staring still had he not heard the sirens. Three blue-and-white Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s cars were racing down the access road into their dead mall, sirens howling, lights blazing.

They screeched to a halt at the shantytown’s edge and their doors flew open. Four cops moved quickly into the shantytown, while two more worked the radios, sheltering by the cars.

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. He ran for the door, but Andrea grabbed him.

“Don’t run toward armed cops,” she said. “Don’t do anything that looks threatening. Slow down, Perry.”

He took a couple deep breaths. Then he looked around his lab for a while, frantically muttering, “Where the fuck did I put it?”

“Use Home Aware,” she said. He shook his head, grimaced, went to a keyboard and typed MEGAPHONE. One of the lab-drawers started to throb with a white glow.

He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window.

“ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?”

The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop.

“SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.”

“WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?”

The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third.

Perry ran for the door and Andrea chased after him, trying to stop him. The cops at the cars were talking intently into their radios, though it was impossible to know if they were talking to their comrades in the shantytown or to their headquarters. Perry burst out of the factory door and there was another shot and he spun around, staggered back a step, and fell down like a sack of grain. There was blood around his head. Andrea stuck her hand in her mouth to stifle a scream and stood helplessly in the doorway of the workshop, just a few paces from Perry.

Lester came up behind her and firmly moved her aside. He lumbered deliberately and slowly and fearlessly to Perry’s side, knelt beside him, touched him gently. His face was grey. Perry thrashed softly and Andrea let out a sound like a cry, then remembered herself and took out her camera and began to shoot and shoot and shoot: the cops, Lester with Perry like a tragic Pieta, the shantytowners running back and forth screaming. Snap of the cops getting out of their cars, guns in hands, snap of them fanning out around the shantytown, snap of them coming closer and closer, snap of a cop pointing his gun at Lester, ordering him away from Perry, snap of a cop approaching her.

“It’s live,” she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. “Going out live to my blog. Daily readership half a million. They’re watching you now, every move. Do you understand?”

The officer said, “Put the camera down, ma’am.”

She held the camera. “I can’t quote the First Amendment from memory, not exactly, but I know it well enough that I’m not moving this camera. It’s live, you understand — every move is going out live, right now.”

The officer stepped back, turned his head, muttered in his mic.

“There’s an ambulance coming,” he said. “Your friend was shot with a nonlethal rubber bullet.”

“He’s bleeding from the head,” Lester said. “From the eye.”

Andrea shuddered.

Ambulance sirens in the distance. Lester stroked Perry’s hair. Andrea took a step back and panned it over Perry’s ruined face, bloody and swollen. The rubber bullet must have taken him either right in the eye or just over it.

“Perry Mason Richardson was unarmed and posed no threat to Sheriff’s Deputy Badge Number 5724 –” she zoomed in on it — “when he was shot with a rubber bullet in the eye. He is unconscious and bloody on the ground in front of the workshop where he has worked quietly and unassumingly to invent and manufacture new technologies.”

The cop knew when to cut his losses. He turned aside and walked back into the shantytown, leaving Andrea to turn her camera on Perry, on the EMTs who evacced him to the ambulance, on the three injured shantytowners who were on the ambulance with him, on the corpse they wheeled out on his own gurney, one of the newcomers to the shantytown, a man she didn’t recognize.

They operated on Perry all that night, gingerly tweezing fragments of bone from his shattered left orbit out of his eye and face. Some had floated to the back of the socket and posed a special risk of brain damage, the doctor explained into her camera.

Lester was a rock, sitting silently in the waiting room, talking calmly and firmly with the cops and over the phone to Kettlebelly and the specially empaneled board-room full of Kodacell lawyers who wanted to micromanage this. Rat-Toothed Freddy filed a column in which he called her a “grandstanding bint,” and accused Kodacell of harboring dangerous fugitives. He’d dug up the fact that one of the newcomers to the shantytown — not the one they’d killed, that was a bystander — was wanted for holding up a liquor-store with a corkscrew the year before.

Lester unscrewed his earphone and scrubbed at his eyes. Impulsively, she leaned over and gave him a hug. He stiffened up at first but then relaxed and enfolded her in his huge, warm arms. She could barely make her arms meet around his broad, soft back — it was like hugging a giant loaf of bread. She squeezed tighter and he did too. He was a good hugger.

“You holding in there, kiddo?” she said.

“Yeah,” he murmured into her neck. “No.” He squeezed tighter. “As well as I need to, anyway.”

The doctor pried them apart to tell them that the EEG and fMRI were both negative for any brain-damage, and that they’d managed to salvage the eye, probably. Kodacell was springing for all the care he needed, cash money, no dorking around with the fucking HMO, so the doctors had put him through every machine on the premises in a series of farcically expensive tests.

“I hope they sue the cops for the costs,” the doctor said. She was Pakistani or Bangladeshi, with a faint accent, and very pretty even with the dark circles under her eyes. “I read your columns,” she said, shaking Andrea’s hand. “I admire the work you do,” she said, shaking Lester’s hand. “I was born in Delhi. We were squatters who were given a deed to our home and then evicted because we couldn’t pay the taxes. We had to build again, in the rains, outside of the city, and then again when we were evicted again.”

She had two brothers who were working for startups like Kodacell’s, but run by other firms: one was backed by McDonald’s, the other by the AFL-CIO’s investment arm. Andrea did a little interview with her about her brothers’ projects — a bike-helmet that had been algorithmically evolved for minimum weight and maximum protection; a smart skylight that deformed itself to follow light based on simple phototropic controllers. The brother working on bike-helmets was riding a tiger and could barely keep up with orders; he was consuming about half of the operational capacity of the McDonald’s network and climbing fast.

Lester joined in, digging on the details. He’d been following the skylights in blogs and on a list or two and he’d heard of the doctor’s brother, which really tweaked her, she was visibly proud of her family.

“But your work is most important. Things for the homeless. We get them in here sometimes, hurt, off the ambulances. We usually turn them away again. The ones who sell off the highway medians and at the traffic lights.” Andrea had seen them, selling homemade cookies, oranges, flowers, newspapers, plasticky toys, sad or beautiful handicrafts. She had a carved coconut covered in intricate scrimshaw that she’d bought from a little girl who was all skin and bones except for her malnourished pot-belly.

“They get hit by cars?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Deliberately, too. Or beaten up.”

Perry was moved out of the operating theater to a recovery room and then to a private room and by then they were ready to collapse, though there was so much e-mail in response to her posts that she ended up pounding on her PowerBook’s keyboard all the way home as Lester drove them, squeezing the bridge of his nose to stay awake. She didn’t even take her clothes off before collapsing into bed.

“They need the tools to make any other tools,” is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They’d shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn’t going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he’d looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate.

“They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it.” He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the 3D printer and scanner setups. “I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves.”

Francis shifted in his seat. “What are they supposed to do with those?”

“Everything,” Perry said, his eye glinting. “Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids’ toys — if it’s in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fucking fish. No top-down ‘solutions’ driven by ‘market research’” — his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm — “the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny.”

They put up the sign that night: AUTHOR OF YOUR OWN DESTINY, hung over the workshop door. Andrea trailed after Perry transcribing the rants that spilled out of his mouth as he explained it to Lester and Francis, and then to Kettlewell when he called, and then to the pretty young black lady from the TV who by now had figured out that there was a real story in her back yard, then to an NPR man on the phone, and then to a CNN crew who drove in from Miami and filmed the shantytown and the workshop like Japanese tourists at Disney World, never having ventured into the manky, failed strip-mall suburbs just outside of town.

Francis had a protege who had a real dab touch with the 3-D printers. The manufacturer, Lester’s former employer, had been out of business for two years by then, so all the service on the machines had to be done on the premises. Francis’s protege — the one who claimed his mother had pushed his father under a bus, his name was Jason — watched Lester work on recalcitrant machines silently for a couple days, then started to hand him the tool he needed next without having to be asked. Then he diagnosed a problem that had stumped Lester all morning. Then he suggested an improvement to the feedstock pump that increased the mean time between failures by a couple hours.

“No, man, no, not like that,” Jason said to one of the small gang of boys he was bossing. “Gently, or you’ll snap it off.” The boy snapped it off and Jason pulled another replacement part out of a tub and said, “See, like this,” and snapped it on. The small gang of boys regarded him with something like awe.

“How come no girls?” Andrea said as she interviewed him while he took a smoke-break. Perry had banned cigarettes from all indoor workshops, nominally to keep flames away from the various industrial chemicals and such, but really just to encourage the shantytowners to give up the habit that they couldn’t afford anyway. He’d also leaned on the shantytowners who’d opened up small shops in their houses to keep cigs out of the town, without a lot of success.

“Girls aren’t interested in this stuff, lady.”

“You think?” There was a time when she would have objected, but it was better to let these guys say it out loud, hear themselves say it.

“No. Maybe where you come from, OK? Don’t know. But here girls are different. They do good in school but when they have babies they’re done. I mean, hey, it’s not like I don’t want girls in the team, they’d be great. I love girls. They fuckin’ work, you know. No bullshit, no screwing around. But I know every girl in this place and none of ‘em are even interested, OK?”

Andrea cocked one eyebrow just a little and Jason shifted uncomfortably. He scratched his bare midriff and shuffled. “I do, all of them. Why would they? One girl, a roomful of boys, it’d be gross. They’d act like jerks. There’s no way we’d get anything done.”

Andrea lifted her eyebrow one hair higher. He squirmed harder.

“So all right, that’s not their fault. But I got enough work, all right? Too much to do without spending time on that. It’s not like any girls have asked to join up. I’m not keeping them out.”

Andrea jotted a couple of notes, keeping perfectly mum.

“Well, I’d like to have them in the workshop, OK? Maybe I should ask some of them if they’d come. Shit, if I can teach these apes, I can teach a girl. They’re smart. Girls would made this place a little better to work in. Lots of them trying to support their families, so they need the money, too.”

There was a girl there by the afternoon. The next day, there were two more. They seemed like quick studies, despite their youth and their lip-gloss. Andrea approved.

Lester stayed long enough to see the first prototype printer-printers running, then he lit out with a duffel bag jammed into the back of his modded Smart car. “Where are you going?” Andrea said, as Perry looked on gloomily. “I’ll come and visit you. I want to follow your story.” Truth be told, she was sorry to see him go, very sorry. He was such a rock, such an anchor for Perry’s new crazy pirate energy and for the madness around them. He hadn’t given much notice (not to her — Perry didn’t seem that surprised).

“I can’t really talk about it,” he said. “Nondisclosure.”

“So it’s a new job,” she said. “You’re going to work for Tjan?” Tjan’s Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the eastern seaboard, ten in the Midwest and was rumored to have twice as many in eastern Europe.

He grinned. “Oh, Andrea, don’t try to journo me.” He reached out an hugged her in a cloud of her father’s perfume. “You’re fantastic, you know that? No, I’m not going to a job. It’s a thing that’s an amazing opportunity, you know?”

She didn’t, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him.

Read Chapter 9.

“Sorry, it’s not safe,” he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire.

“I live there,” Francis said. “That’s my home.”

The firefighter looked away. “It’s not safe,” he said.

“Why aren’t you fighting the fire?” Andrea said.

Francis’s head snapped around. “You’re not fighting the fire! You’re going to let our houses burn!”

A couple more firefighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.

“Sir,” the movie star said, “the owner of this property has asked us not to intervene. Since there’s no imminent risk to life and no risk of the burn spreading off his property, we can’t trespass to put out the fire. Our hands are tied.”

“The owner?” Francis spat. “This land is in title dispute. The court case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?”

The movie star shrugged. “That’s all I know, sir.”

Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket-brigade was falling back. They could feel the heat now, like putting your face in the steam from a boiling kettle.

Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting, or charge into the flames.

Andrea grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed the first firefighter she encountered.

“I’m Andrea Fleeks, from the San Jose Mercury News, a Knight Ridder paper. I’d like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene, please.” She hadn’t been with the Merc for months, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say, I’m Andrea Fleeks with fleeks.org. She was pretty sure that no matter how high her readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the firefighter wouldn’t have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when she mentioned the name of a real newspaper.

He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the shoulder, whispering in his ear. Andrea squeezed Francis’s hand as the fire chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked fast. “Andrea Fleeks,” she said, and took out her notebook, the key prop in any set piece involving a reporter. “I’m told that you are going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I’m also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief …?”

“Chief Brian Wannamaker,” he said. He was her age, with the leathery skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. “I’m afraid I have no comment for you at this time.”

Andrea kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis’s hand a warning squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. “I see. You can’t comment, you can’t fight the fire. Is that what you’d like me to write in tomorrow’s paper?”

The chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Andrea saw that his hands were clenched into fists. “Let me make a call, OK?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone.

Andrea strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously climb it.

A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester.

“Chief!” she said, going around the engine and pointing. The chief had the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking orders.

Now the firefighters moved, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the flames and the smoke changed to white steam.

The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as the firefighters executed their clockwork dance.

The steam was hot enough to scald, and Andrea pulled the collar of her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners, mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and pinkened by the heat.

She saw the one whose father had reportedly been pushed under a bus by his mother, and he grimaced at her. “What we gonna do now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all right? Is your family all right?”

“Don’t got nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go,” he said. “Don’t even have a change of clothes. My moms won’t stop crying.”

There were tears in his eyes. He was all of fifteen, she realized. He’d seemed much older on the roof. She gathered him into her arms and gave him a hug. He was stiff and awkward at first and then he kind of melted into her, weeping on her shoulder. She stroked his back and murmured reassuringly. Some of the other shantytowners looked at the spectacle, then looked away. Even a couple of his homeboys — whom she’d have bet would have laughed and pointed at this show of weakness — only looked and then passed on. One had tears streaking the smoke smudges on his face.

For someone who isn’t good at comforting people, I seem to be doing a lot of it, she thought.

Francis and Lester and Perry found her and Francis gave the boy a gruff hug and told him everything would be fine.

The fire was out now, the firefighter hosing down the last embers, going through the crowd and checking for injuries. A TV news crew had set up and a pretty black reporter in her twenties was doing a stand up.

“The illegal squatter community has long been identified as a problem area for gang and drug activity by the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s office. The destruction here seems total, but it’s impossible to say whether this spells the end of this encampment, or whether the denizens will rebuild and stay on.”

Andrea burned with shame. That could have been her. When she’d first seen this place, it had been like something out of a documentary on Ethiopia. As she’d come to know it, it had grown homier. The residents built piecemeal, one wall at a time, one window, one poured concrete floor, as they could afford it. None of them had mortgages, but they had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones with garden gnomes standing guard.

The reporter was staring at her — and naturally so; she’d been staring at the reporter. Glaring at her.

“My RV,” Francis said, pointing, distracting her. It was a charred wreck. He went to the melted doors and opened them, stepping back as a puff of smoke rose from the inside. A firefighter spotted it and diverted a stream of water into the interior, soaking Francis and whatever hadn’t burned. He turned and shouted something at the firefighter, but he was already hosing down something else.

Inside Francis’s trailer, they salvaged a drenched photo-album, a few tools, and a lock-box with some of his papers in it. He had backed up his laptop to his watch that morning, so his data was safe. “I kept meaning to scan these in,” he said, paging through the photos in the soaked album. “Should have done it.”

Night was falling, the mosquitoes singing and buzzing. The neat little laneways and homey, patchwork buildings lay in ruins around them.

The shantytowners clustered in little groups or picked through the ruins. Passing cars slowed down to rubberneck, and a few shouted filthy, vengeful things at them. Andrea took pictures of their license plates. She’d publish them when she got home.

A light drizzle fell. Children cried. The swampy sounds of cicadas and frogs and mosquitoes filled the growing dark and then the streetlights flicked on all down the river of highway, painting everything in blue-white sodium glow.

“We’ve got to get tents up,” Francis said. He grabbed a couple of young bucks and gave them orders, things to look for — fresh water, plastic sheeting, anything with which to erect shelters.

Lester started to help them, and Perry stood with his hands on his hips, next to Andrea.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is a fucking disaster. I mean, these people are used to living rough, but this — he broke off, waving his hands helplessly. He wiped his palms off on his butt, then grabbed Francis.

“Get them going,” he said. “Get them to gather up their stuff and walk them down to our place. We’ve got space for everyone for now at least.”

Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester’s car and shouted for people to gather ’round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and it wasn’t long before nearly everyone was gathered around them.

“Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go.”

There were murmurs of assent. Andrea had seen him meet with his people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect they afforded to him. He wasn’t the leader, per se, but when he spoke, people listened. It was a characteristic she’d encountered in the auto-trade and in technology, the ones the others all gravitated to. Charismatics.

“We’ve got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It’s about a half hour walk. It’s indoors and there’s toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don’t have to come, but this isn’t going to be any fun tonight.”

A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. “What about our stuff, we can’t leave it here tonight. It’s all we’ve got.”

Francis nodded. “We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of five tonight. Young people. You’ll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out.” The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they’d get of this would come from the news anchor who’d tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They’d never see what Andrea saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young bucks and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.

Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Andrea had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.

Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old-timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester’s car and he took off. Andrea walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis’s discretion.

Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.

“What now?” she said.

“We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses.”

“At your place? You’re going to let them stay?”

“Why not? We don’t use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn’t been by in five years. He won’t care.”

She took a couple more steps. “Perry, I’m going to write about this,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. “Of course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I’ll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks.”

“What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?”

“This? Look, this is what I’ve been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They’re a huge untapped market.”

What she wanted to ask was What would Tjan say about this? but they didn’t talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he’d confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people wanted to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.

They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.

They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they’d found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.

“This is the place,” Francis said. “We’ll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there — orderly lines, no shoving.”

“What about food?” asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.

“This isn’t the Red Cross, Freddy,” Francis snapped. “We’ll organize food for ourselves in the morning.”

Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.

“There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It’s his place. He’s going to go to Costco for us when they open.”

The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Andrea smiled. These people were good people, they’d been through more than Andrea could imagine. It felt right that she could help them — like making up for every panhandler she’d ignored and every passed-out drunk she’d stepped over.

There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Andrea walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.

Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet — she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket — and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn’t climb in between those sheets.

She couldn’t.

And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels — even the sofa cushions, which the landlord was not going to be happy about — and speeding back to the workshop.

She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman — apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny — sat up and said, “Hey, where’s one for me?” Andrea recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester’s friend. The one who’d grabbed her and cursed her.

She didn’t want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor.

“Where’s one for me?” the woman said, more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up.

Andrea was shaking. Who the hell was she to decide who got a blanket? Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down?

Andrea gave her a blanket, and she snatched one of the sofa cushions besides.

It’s why she’s still alive, Andrea thought. How she’s survived.

She gave away the rest of the blankets and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on t-shirts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding.

The new shantytown went up fast — faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters — building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic — and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.

Little things went missing from the workshops — tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet — and they started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in amongst the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before, and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.

She found the earrings later that day, in the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.

“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.

“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young bucks and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”

“Perry, this is the business. Kettlewell hasn’t sent a replacement for Tjan and you’ve filled in and you’ve turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That’s important news — the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you’ve found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it’s not just solving Kodacell’s problem: it’s solving the problem for all of those people, too.”

Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. “I don’t want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It’s going good. Scrutiny could kill it.”

“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about here,” she said. “There’s nothing here that isn’t as it should be.”

Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. “You do what you have to do,” he said.

The original shantytown was astonishing. Built around a nexus of trailers and RVs that didn’t look in the least roadworthy, the settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs with palm leaves, shingles, linoleum, corrugated tin — even plywood with flattened beer cans. Some walls were wood. Some had windows. Some were made from old car doors, with hand-cranked handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on nets.

A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived, and rather than building out — and farther away from their neighbors’ latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of electrical power — they build up, on top of the existing structures, shoring up the walls where necessary. It wasn’t hurricane-proof, but neither are the cracker-box condos that “property owners” occupy. They made contractual arrangements with the dwellers of the first stories, paid them rent. A couple with second-story rooms opposite one another in one of the narrow “streets” consummated their relationship by building a sky-bridge between their rooms, paying joint rent to two landlords.

The thing these motley houses had in common, all of them, was ingenuity and pride of work. They had neat vegetable gardens, flower-boxes, and fresh paint. They had kids’ bikes leaned up against their walls, and the smell of good cooking in the air. They were homely homes.

Many of the people who lived in these houses worked regular service jobs, walking three miles to the nearest city bus stop every morning, and three miles back every evening. They sent their kids to school, faking local addresses with PO boxes. Some were retired. Some were just down on their luck.

They helped each other. When something precious was stolen, the community pitched in to find the thieves. When one of them started a little business selling sodas or sandwiches out of her shanty, the others patronized her. When someone needed medical care, they chipped in for a taxi to the free clinic, or someone with a working car drove them. They were like the neighbors of the long-lamented American town, an ideal of civic virtue that is so remote in our ancestry as to have become mythical. There were eyes on the street here, proud residents who knew what everyone was about and saw to it that bad behavior was curbed before it could get started.

Somehow, it burned down. The fire department won’t investigate, because this was an illegal homestead, so they don’t much care about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire department wouldn’t fight the fire at first, because someone at city hall said that the land’s owner wouldn’t let them on the property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is unknown — a decades-old dispute over title has left it in legal limbo that let the squatters settle there. It’s suspicious all right — various entities had tried to evict the squatters before, but the legal hassles left them in happy limbo. What the law couldn’t accomplish, the fire did.

The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters into their factory, and now they have “live-work” condos that look like something Dr. Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they were “constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind that had been drinking,” as a press account of the day had it.

Last year, the city completed a new housing project near to here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. They shantytowners wouldn’t go: “It was too expensive,” said Mrs. X, who doesn’t want her family back in Oklahoma to know she’s squatting with her husband and their young daughter. “We can’t afford any rent, not if we want to put food on the table on what we earn.”

She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to keep any cash around.

The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they’re inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology inside them]

The response was enormous and passionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she’d been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She’d expected that — she’d felt that way herself, when she’d first walked past the shantytown.

But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and e-mails from homeless people who’d been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you’d think that half her readership was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners.

“Kettlewell’s coming down to see this,” Perry said.

Her stomach lurched. She’d gotten the boys in trouble. “Is he mad?”

“I couldn’t tell — I got voice-mail at three a.m.” Midnight in San Jose, the hour at which Kettlewell got his mad impulses. “He’ll be here this afternoon.”

“That jet makes it too easy for him to get around,” she said, and stretched out her back. Sitting at her desk all morning answering e-mails and cleaning up some draft posts before blogging them had her in knots. It was practically lunch-time.

“Perry,” she began, then trailed off.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I know why you did it. Christ, we wouldn’t be where we are if you hadn’t written about us. I’m in no position to tell you to stop now.” He swallowed. The month since the shantytowners had moved in had put five years on him. His tan was fading, the wrinkles around his eyes deeper, gray salting his stubbly beard and short hair. “But you’ll help me with Kettlewell, right?”

“I’ll come along and write down what he says,” she said. “That usually helps.”

Read Chapter 8.

They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in Florida felt just right to Andrea. Francis, the leader of the paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a kiss, and even Lester’s nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good mood.

When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and Francis in the shantytown.

“I want to make some technology for those guys,” Perry said, as they sat in front of Francis’s RV drinking cowboy coffee cooked over a banked wood-stove off to one side. “Roommate ware for homeless people.”

Francis uncrossed his bony ankles and scratched at his mosquito bites. “A lot of people think that we don’t buy stuff, but it’s not true,” he said. “I shop hard for bargains, but there’s lots of stuff I spend more on because of my lifestyle than I would if I had a real house and steady electricity. When I had a chest-freezer, I could bulk buy ground round for about a tenth of what I pay now when I go to the grocery store and get enough for one night’s dinner. The alternative is using propane to keep the fridge going overnight, and that’s not cheap, either. So I’m a kind of premium customer. Back at Boeing, we loved the people who made small orders because we could charge them such a premium for custom work, while the big airlines wanted stuff done so cheap that half the time we lost money on the deal.”

Perry nodded. “There you have it — roommate ware for homeless people, a great and untapped market.”

Andrea cocked her head and looked at him. “You’re sounding awfully commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?”

He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years old. “It’s infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That’s a half-million lives — a half-million households — that we changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These RFID things of Lester’s — we’ll sign a couple million customers with those. People will change everything about how they live from moment to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over there.”

“Well, there’s thirty million of us living in what the social workers call ‘marginal housing,’” Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny smile that Andrea had found adorable until he explained that he had an untreated dental abscess that he couldn’t afford to get fixed. “So that’s a lot of difference you could make.”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “Yeah, it sure is.”

That night, she found herself still blogging and answering e-mails — they always piled up when she traveled and took a couple of late nights to clear out — after nine p.m., sitting alone in a pool of light in the back corner of Lester’s workshop that she had staked out as her office. She yawned and stretched and listened to her old back crackle. She hated feeling old, and late nights made her feel old — feel every extra ounce of fat on her tummy, feel the lines bracketing her mouth and the little bag of skin under her chin.

She stood up and pulled on a light jacket and began to switch off lights and get ready to head home. As she poked her head in Tjan’s office, she saw that she wasn’t the only one working late.

“Hey, you,” she said. “Isn’t it time you got going?”

He jumped like he’d been stuck with a pin and gave a little yelp. “Sorry,” he said, “didn’t hear you.”

He had a cardboard box on his desk and had been filling it with his personal effects — little one-off inventions the guys had made for him, personal fetishes and tchotchkes, a framed picture of his kids.

“What’s up?”

He sighed and cracked his knuckles. “Might as well tell you now as tomorrow morning. I’m resigning.”

She felt a flash of anger and then forced it down and forcibly replaced it with professional distance and curiosity. Mentally she licked her pencil-tip and flipped to a blank page in her reporter’s notebook.

“Oh yes?”

“I’ve had another offer, in Westchester County. Westinghouse has spun out its own version of Kodacell and they’re looking for a new vice-president to run the division. That’s me.”

“Good job,” she said. “Congratulations, Mr. Vice-President.”

He shook his head. “I e-mailed Kettlewell half an hour ago. I’m leaving in the morning. I’m going to say goodbye to the guys over breakfast.”

“Not much notice,” she said.

“Nope,” he said, a note of anger creeping into his voice. “My contract lets Kodacell fire me on one day’s notice, so I insisted on the right to quit on the same terms. Maybe Kettlewell will get his lawyers to write better boilerplate from here on in.”

When she had an angry interview, she habitually changed the subject to something sensitive: angry people often say more than they intend to. She did it instinctively, not really meaning to psy-ops Tjan, whom she thought of as a friend, but not letting that get in the way of the story. “Westinghouse is doing what, exactly?”

“It’ll be as big as Kodacell’s operation in a year,” he said. “George Westinghouse personally funded Tesla’s research, you know. The company understands funding individual entrepreneurs. I’m going to be training the talent scouts and mentoring the financial people, then turning them loose to sign up entrepreneurs for the Westinghouse network. There’s a competitive market for garage inventors now.” He laughed. “Go ahead and print that,” he said. “Blog it tonight. There’s competition now. We’re giving two points more equity and charging half a point less on equity than the Kodacell network.”

“That’s amazing, Tjan. I hope you’ll keep in touch with me — I’d love to follow your story.”

“Count on it,” he said. He laughed. “I’m getting a week off every eight weeks to scout Russia. They’ve got an incredible culture of entrepreneurship.”

“Plus you’ll get to see your kids,” Andrea said. “That’s really good.”

“Plus, I’ll get to see my kids,” he admitted.

“How much money is Westinghouse putting into the project?” she asked, replacing her notional notebook with a real one, pulled from her purse.

“I don’t have numbers, but they’ve shut down the whole appliances division to clear the budget for it.” She nodded — she’d seen news of the layoffs on the wires. Mass demonstrations, people out of work after twenty years’ service. “So it’s a big budget.”

“They must have been impressed with the quarterlies from Kodacell.”

Tjan folded down the flaps on his box and drummed his fingers on it, squinting at her. “You’re joking, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Andrea, they were impressed by you. Everyone knows that quarterly numbers are easy to cook — anything less than two annual reports is as likely to be enronning as real fortune-making. But your dispatches from here — they’re what sold them. It’s what’s convincing everyone. Kettlewell said that three quarters of his new recruits come on board after reading your descriptions of this place. That’s how I ended up here.”

She shook her head. “That’s very flattering, Tjan, but–”

He waved her off and then, surprisingly, came around the desk and hugged her. “But nothing, Andrea. Kettlewell, Lester, Perry — they’re all basically big kids. Full of enthusiasm and invention, but they’ve got the emotional maturity and sense of scale of a hyperactive five-year-old. You and me, we’re grownups. People take us seriously. It’s easy to get a kid excited, but when a grownup chimes in you know there’s some there there.”

Andrea recovered herself after a second and put away her notepad. “I’m just the person who writes it all down. You people are making it happen.”

“In ten years time, they’ll remember you and not us,” Tjan said. “You should get Kettlewell to put you on the payroll.”

Kettlewell himself turned up the next day. Andrea had developed an intuitive sense of the flight-times from the West Coast and so for a second she couldn’t figure out how he could possibly be standing there — nothing in the sky could get him from San Jose to Miami for a seven a.m. arrival.

“Private jet,” he said, and had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Kodak had eight of them and Duracell had five. We’ve been trying to sell them all off but no one wants a used jet these days, not even Saudi princes or Colombian drug-lords.”

“So, basically, it was going to waste.”

He smiled and looked eighteen — she really did feel like the only grownup sometimes — and said, “Zackly — it’s practically environmental. Where’s Tjan?”

“Downstairs saying goodbye to the guys, I think.”

“OK,” he said. “Are you coming?”

She grabbed her notebook and a pen and beat him out the door of her rented condo.

“What’s this all about,” Tjan said, looking wary. The guys were hang-dog and curious looking, slightly in awe of Kettlewell, who did little to put them at their ease — he was staring intensely at Tjan.

“Exit interview,” he said. “Company policy.”

Tjan rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to catch in an hour.”

“I could give you a lift,” Kettlewell said.

“You want to do the exit interview between here and the airport?”

“I could give you a lift to JFK. I’ve got the jet warmed up and waiting.”

Sometimes, Andrea managed to forget that Kodacell was a multi-billion-dollar operation and that Kettlewell was at its helm, but other times the point was very clear.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll make a day of it. We can stop on the way and pick up some barbecue to eat on the plane. I’ll even let you keep your seat in the reclining position during take-off and landing. Hell, you can turn your cellphone on — just don’t tell the Transportation Security Agency!”

Tjan looked cornered, then resigned. “Sounds good to me,” he said, and Kettlewell shouldered one of the two huge duffel-bags that were sitting by the door.

“Hi, Kettlewell,” Perry said.

Kettlewell set down the duffel. “Sorry, sorry. Lester, Perry, it’s really good to see you. I’ll bring Andrea back tonight and we’ll all go out for dinner, OK?”

Andrea blinked. “I’m coming along?”

“I sure hope so,” Kettlewell said.

Perry and Lester accompanied them down in the elevator.

“Private jet, huh?” Perry said. “Never been in one of those.”

Kettlewell told them about his adventures trying to sell off Kodacell’s private air force.

“Send one of them our way, then,” Lester said.

“Do you fly?” Kettlewell said.

“No,” Perry said. “Lester wants to take it apart. Right, Les?”

Lester nodded. “Lots of cool junk in a private jet.”

“These things are worth millions, guys,” Kettlewell said.

“No, someone paid millions for them,” Perry said. “They’re worth whatever you can sell them for.”

Kettlewell laughed. “You’ve had an influence around here, Tjan,” he said. Tjan managed a small, tight smile.

Kettlewell had a driver waiting outside of the building who loaded the duffels into the spacious trunk of a spotless dark town-car whose doors chunked shut with an expensive sound.

“I want you to know that I’m really not angry at all, OK?”

Tjan nodded again. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for a turn in an interrogation chamber. He’d barely said a word since Kettlewell arrived. For his part, Kettlewell appeared oblivious to all of this, though Andrea was pretty sure that he understood exactly how uncomfortable this was making Tjan.

“The thing is, six months ago, nearly everyone was convinced that I was a fucking moron, that I was about to piss away ten billion dollars of other people’s money away on a stupid doomed idea. Now they’re copying me and poaching my best people. So this is good news for me, though I’m going to have to find a new business manager for those two before they get picked up for turning planes into component pieces.”

Andrea’s PDA vibrated whenever the number of news stories appearing online mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to keep up — now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick.

It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated, she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article caught her eye.

KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSE

The byline was rat-toothed Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who can’t resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Andrea thumbed the PDA’s wheel and brought up the whole article.

Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we’ve followed through Andrea Fleeks’s gushing, besotted “blog” posts…

She looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the guys had circulated on her blog’s message boards and around the slashdots ever since she’d started writing about them. No woman could possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important — she had to be “with the band,” a groupie or a whore.

Combine that with Rat-Toothed Freddy’s insistence of putting blog in quote-marks and she was instantly sent into heart-thundering rage. She deleted the post and looked out the window. Her pager buzzed some more and she looked down. The same article, being picked up on blogs, on some of the bigger slashdots, and an AP wire.

She forced herself to re-open it.

has been hired to head up a new business unit on behalf of the multinational giant Westinghouse. The appointment stands as more proof of Fleeks’s power to cloud men’s minds with pretty empty words about the half-baked dot-com schemes that have oozed out of Silicon Valley and into every empty and dead American suburb.

It was hypnotic, like staring into the eyes of a serpent. Her pulse actually thudded in her ears for a second before she took a few deep breaths and calmed down enough to finish the article, which was just more of the same: nasty personal attacks, sniping, and innuendo. Rat-Toothed Freddy even managed to imply that she was screwing all of them — and Kettlewell besides.

Kettlewell leaned over her shoulder and read.

“You should send him an e-mail,” he said. “That’s disgusting. That’s not reportage.”

“Never get into a pissing match with a skunk,” she said. “What Freddy wants is for me to send him mail that he can publish along with more snarky commentary. When the guy you’re arguing with controls the venue you’re arguing in, you can’t possibly win.”

“So blog him,” Kettlewell said. “Correct the record.”

“The record is correct,” she said. “It’s never been incorrect. I’ve written an exhaustive record that is there for everyone to see. If people believe this, no amount of correction will help.”

Kettlewell made a face like a little boy who’d been told he couldn’t have a toy. “That guy is poison,” he said. “Those quote-marks around blog.”

“Let him add his quote-marks,” she said. “My daily readership is higher than the Merc’s paid circulation this week.” It was true. After a short uphill climb from her new URL, she’d accumulated enough readers that the advertising revenue was starting to approach her old salary at the Merc, an astonishing happenstance that nevertheless kept her bank-account full. She clicked a little. “Besides, look at this, there are three dozen links pointing at this story so far and all of them are critical of him. We don’t need to stick up for ourselves — the world will.”

Saying it calmed her and now they were at the airport. They cruised into a private gate, away from the militarized gulag that fronted Miami International. A courteous security guard waved them through and the driver confidently piloted the car up to a wheeled jetway beside a cute, stubby little toy jet. On the side, in cursive script, was the plane’s name: ANDREA.

She looked accusatorially at Kettlewell.

“It was called that when I bought the company,” he said, expressionless but somehow mirthful behind his curved surfer shades. “But I kept it because I liked the private joke.”

“Just no one tell Freddy that you’ve got an airplane with my name on it or we’ll never hear the fucking end of it.”

She covered her mouth, regretting her language, and Kettlewell laughed, and so did Tjan, and somehow the ice was broken between them.

“No way flying this thing is cost-effective,” Tjan said. “Your CFO should be kicking your ass.”

“It’s a little indulgence,” Kettlewell said, bounding up the steps and shaking hands with a small, neat woman pilot, an African-American with corn-rows peeking out under her smart peaked cap. “Once you’ve flown in your own bird, you never go back.”

“This is a monstrosity,” Tjan said as he boarded. “What this thing eats up in hangar fees alone would be enough to bankroll three or four teams.” He settled into an oversized Barcalounger of a seat and accepted a glass of orange juice that the pilot poured for him. “Thank you, and no offense.”

“None taken,” she said. “I agree one hundred percent.”

“See,” Tjan said.

Andrea took her own seat and her own glass and buckled in and watched the two of them, warming up for the main event, realizing that she’d been brought along as a kind of opening act.

“They paying you more?”

“Yup,” Tjan said. “All on the back-end. Half a point on every dollar brought in by a team I coach or whose members I mentor.”

Kettlewell whistled. “That’s a big share,” he said.

“If I can make my numbers, I’ll take home a million this year.”

“You’ll make those numbers. Good negotiations. Why didn’t you ask us for the same deal?”

“Would you have given it to me?”

“You’re a star,” Kettlewell said, nodding at Andrea, whose invisibility to the conversation popped like a bubble. “Thanks to her.”

“Thanks, Andrea,” Tjan said.

Andrea blushed. “Come on, guys.”

Tjan shook his head. “She doesn’t really understand. It’s actually kind of charming.”

“We might have matched the offer.”

“You guys are first to market. You’ve got a lot of procedures in place. I wanted to reinvent some wheels.”

“We’re too conservative for you?”

Tjan grinned wickedly. “Oh yes,” he said. “I’m going to do business in Russia.”

Kettlewell grunted and pounded his orange juice. Around them, the jet’s windows flashed white as they broke through the clouds and the ten thousand foot bell sounded.

“How the hell are you going to make anything that doesn’t collapse under its own weight in Russia?”

“The corruption’s a problem, sure,” Tjan said. “But it’s offset by the entrepreneurship. Some of those cats make the Chinese look lazy and unimaginative. It’s a shame that so much of their efforts have been centered on graft, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be focused on making an honest ruble.”

They fell into a discussion of the minutiae of Perry and Lester’s businesses, franker than any business discussion she’d ever heard. Tjan talked about the places where they’d screwed up, and places where they’d scored big, and about all the plans he’d made for Westinghouse, the connections he had in Russia. He even talked about his kids and his ex in St Petersburg, and Kettlewell admitted that he’d known about them already.

For Kettlewell’s part, he opened the proverbial kimono wide, telling Tjan about conflicts within the Board of Directors, poisonous holdovers from the pre-Kodacell days who sabotaged the company from within with petty bureaucracy, even the problems he was having with his family over the long hours they were working. He opened the minibar and cracked a bottle of champagne to toast Tjan’s new job, and they mixed it with more orange juice, and then there were bagels and schmear, fresh fruit, power bars, and canned Starbucks coffees with deadly amounts of sugar and caffeine.

When Kettlewell disappeared into the tiny — but marble-appointed — bathroom, Andrea found herself sitting alone with Tjan, almost knee to knee, lightheaded from lack of sleep and champagne and altitude.

“Some trip,” she said.

“You’re the best,” he said, wobbling a little. “You know that? Just the best. The stuff you write about these guys, it makes me want to stand up and salute. You make us all seem so fucking glorious. We’re going to end up taking over the world because you inspire us so. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, because you’re not very self-conscious about it right now, but Andrea, you won’t believe it because you’re so goddamned modest, too. It’s what makes your writing so right, so believable–”

Kettlewell stepped out of the bathroom. “Touching down soon,” he said, and patted them each on the shoulder as he took his seat. “So that’s about it, then,” he said, and leaned back and closed his eyes. Andrea was accustomed to thinking of him as twenty-something, the boyish age of the magazine cover portraits from the start of his career. Now, eyes closed on his private jet, harsh upper atmosphere sun painting his face, his crow’s-feet and the deep vertical brackets around his mouth revealed him for someone pushing a youthful forty, kept young by exercise and the animation of his ideas.

“Guess so,” Tjan said, slumping too. “This has been one of the memorable experiences of my life, Kettlewell, Andrea. Not entirely pleasant, but pleasant on the whole. A magical time in the clouds.”

“Once you’ve flown private, you’ll never go back to coach,” Kettlewell said, smiling, eyes still closed. “You still think my CFO should spank me for not selling this thing?”

“No,” Tjan said. “In ten years, if we do our jobs, there won’t be five companies on earth that can afford this kind of thing — it’ll be like building a cathedral after the Protestant Reformation. While we have the chance, we should keep these things in the sky. But you should give one to Lester and Perry to take apart.”

“I was planning to,” Kettlewell said. “Thanks.”

They didn’t get off the plane and Tjan didn’t look back when they’d landed at JFK. “Should we go into town and get some bialy to bring back to Miami?” Kettlewell said, squinting at the bright day on the tarmac.

“Bring deli to Miami?”

“Right, right,” he said. “Forget I asked. Besides, we’d have to charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in traffic.”

Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the smell — something indefinably New York — made her yearn for Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.

“Let’s go,” she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a touch of headache. “I’m bushed.”

“Me too,” Kettlewell said. “I left San Jose last night to get into Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and catch some winks, if that’s OK?”

“Good plan,” Andrea said.

Embarrassingly, when their seats were fully reclined, they nearly touched, forming something like a double bed. Andrea lay awake in the hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside her, the first man she’d done anything like share a bed with in at least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep.

Perry thought that they’d sell a million Home Awares in six months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high.

“Please,” he said, “I invented these things but there aren’t a million roommate households in all of America. We’ll sell half a million tops, total.”

Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.

Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.

They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they’d laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.

What’s exciting about this isn’t just the money that these guys have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to its shareholders, it’s the ecosystem that these things have enabled. There’re at least ten competing commercial systems for organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects. Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them. Seniors’ homes.

The seniors’ homes had been Francis’s idea. They’d brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young bucks who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he’d join the guys and Andrea up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.

They’re not the sole supplier. That’s what an ecosystem is all about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition is great news for you and me, because it’s already driven the price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, before the margin disappears altogether — and that’s also good news for you and me.

“Are you coming?” Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on craigslist, but she’d dumped him and Perry had confided that she’d left him because he didn’t live up to the press he’d gotten in Andrea’s column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Andrea, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.

“Up in a minute,” she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.

On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.

“Jet engine,” Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them (“They fucking pay me to do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.

“Good old Kettlebelly,” she said. “Must have broken his heart.”

Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. “This thing wasn’t going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he’d have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts.”

“Too bad,” Lester said. “It’s pretty. Gorgeous, even.” He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.

“Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel,” Francis said, and glared at the cowling. “You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers.”

“Is that why you were laid off?” Andrea said.

“I wasn’t laid off, girl,” he said. He jiggled his lame foot. “I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I’m not bitter — why should be poor be allowed to live, huh?”

His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.

“Stop that, now,” he said, “you’re getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you’d think that they grew up in some kind of zoo.” When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.

“So, kids,” Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. “What do you think of the stuff we’re building?”

They looked at their toes. “‘S OK,” one of them grunted.

“Answer the man,” Francis snapped. “Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you’ve got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?”

They shifted uncomfortably. “It’s fine,” one of them said.

“Would you use it at home?”

One of them snorted. “No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it.”

“Oh,” Perry said.

“Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my walkman. Nearly took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. Fucking juice-head.”

“You should have fucked him up,” one of the other kids said. “My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back.”

Andrea knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn’t take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law.

Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. “Have you ever tried burglar alarms?”

The kids laughed derisively and Andrea winced, but Perry was undaunted. “You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off.”

“I want one that fires spears,” the one with the juice-head father said.

“Blowtorches,” said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus.

“I want a force-field,” the third one said, speaking for the first time. “I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don’t have to sleep one eye up, ’cause I’ll be safe.”

The other two nodded, slowly.

“Damn straight,” Francis said.

That was the last time Francis’s acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued.

“What’s that smoke?” Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset’s glare.

“House-fire,” Francis said. “Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck, maybe.”

Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. “Francis, that’s your place,” he said after a second’s fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. “Just hit the button and they’ll self-stabilize.”

“That’s my place,” Francis said. “Oh, Christ.” He’d gone gray and seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes bright.

Read Chapter 7.