did. So stop breathing through your nose like a locomotive and calm

down. None of us wanted that lawyer to go after that kid."

He knew they were making sense but he didn't want to care. He'd ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up.

He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there.

"Tomorrow morning," he said. "Gone. We can figure out by email how to have a smooth transition, but no more of this. Not on my head. Not on my account."

He stalked away, which is what he should have done in the first place. Fuck being reasonable. Reasonable sucked.

#

Death found out about the Disney-in-a-Box printers seconds after they were announced. He'd been tuning his feed-watchers to give him news about the Disney Parks for nearly a decade, and this little PR item on the Disney Parks newswire rang all the cherries on his filters, flagging the item red and rocketing it to the top of his news playlist, making all the icons in the sides of his screen bounce with delight.

The announcement made him want to throw up. They were totally ripping off the rides, and he knew for a fact that most of the three-d meshes of the old yesterland rides and even the contemporary ones were fan-made, so those'd be ripped off, too.

And the worst part was, he could feel himself getting excited. This was just the kind of thing that would have given him major fanboy drool as recently as a month ago.

He just stared angrily at his screen. Being angry made the painkillers wear off, so the madder he got the more he hurt. He could nail the rocker-switch and dose himself with more of whatever the painkiller plugged into his IV was today, but since Perry and Lester and their girlfriends (had that other one been Suzanne Church? It sure looked like her) had told him he could use his laptop again, he'd stayed off the juice as much as possible. The computer could make him forget he hurt.

He looked at the clock. It was 4AM. The blinds on the ward were shut most of the time, and he kept to his own schedule, napping and then surfing, then nodding off and then surfing some more. The hospital staff just left his food on the table beside him if he was asleep when it arrived, though they woke him for his sponge baths and to stick fresh needles in his arms, which were filled with bruisey collapsed veins.

There was no one he could tell about this. Sure, there were chat-rooms with 24/7 chatter from Disney freaks, but he didn't much want to chat with them. Some of his friends would still be up and tweaking, but Christ, who wanted to IM with a speed freak at four in the morning? His typing was down to less than 30 wpm, and he couldn't keep it up for long. What he really wanted was to talk to someone about this.

He really wanted to talk to Perry about this. He should send him an email, but he had the inkling of an idea and he didn't want to put it in writing, because it was a deliciously naughty idea.

It was dumb to even think about phoning him, he barely knew him, and no one liked to get calls at four am. Besides -- he'd checked -- Perry's number was unlisted.

From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: What's your phone number?

Perry, I know that it's presumptuous, but I'd really like to talk to you v2v about something important that I'd prefer not to put in writing. I don't have any right to impose on you, especially not after you've already done me the kindness of coming to see me in the hospital, but I hope you'll send me your number anyway. Alternatively, please call me on my enum -- 1800DEATHWAITS-GGFSAH.

Your admirer,

Death Waits

It was five minutes later when his laptop rang. It was unnaturally loud on the ward, and he heard his roommates stir when the tone played. He didn't have a headset -- Christ, he was an idiot. Wait, there was one, dangling from the TV. No mic, but at least he could pair it with his laptop for sound. He stabbed at the mute button and reached for the headset and slipped it on. Then he held the computer close to his face and whispered "Hello?" into its little mic. His voice was a croak, his ruined mouth distorting the word. Why had he decided to call this guy? He was such an idiot.

"This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?"

"Yes, sorry, I don't have a mic. Can you hear me OK?"

"If I turn the volume all the way up I can."

There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin.

"What's on your mind, Death?"

"I didn't expect you to be awake at this hour."

"I had a rough night," Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied.

"What happened?"

"Nothing important," Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly understood that Perry had had a rough night because of *him*, because of what *he'd* told Perry. It made him want to cry.

"I'm sorry," Death said.

"What's on your mind, Death?" Perry said again.

Death told him what he'd found, about the Disney printers. He read Perry the URLs so he could look them up.

"OK, that's interesting," Perry said. Death could tell he didn't really think it was that interesting.

"I haven't told you my idea yet." He groped for the words. His mouth had gone dry. "OK, so Disney's going to ship these things to tons of people's houses, they'll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two, there's going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country."

"Right."

"So here's my idea: what if you could get them to build non-Disney stuff? What if you could send them plans for stuff from the rides? What if you could just download your friends' designs? What if this was opened wide."

Perry chuckled on the other end of the line, then laughed, full-throated and full of merriment. "I like the way you think, kid," he said, once he'd caught his breath.

And then this amazing thing happened. Perry Gibbons *brainstormed* with him about the kinds of designs they could push out to these things. It was like some kind of awesome dream come true. Perry was treating him like a peer, loving his ideas, keying off of them.

Then a dismal thought struck him. "Wait though, wait. They're using their own goop for the printers. Every design we print makes them richer."

Perry laughed again, really merry. "Oh, that kind of thing never works. They've been trying to tie feedstock to printers since the inkjet days. We go through that like wet kleenex."

"Isn't that illegal?"

"Who the fuck knows? It shouldn't be. I don't care about illegal anymore. Legal gets you lawyers. Come on, dude -- what's the point of being all into some anti-authoritarian subculture if you spend all your time sucking up to the authorities?"

Death laughed, which actually hurt quite a bit. It was the first laugh he'd had since he'd ended up in the hospital, maybe the first one since he'd been fired from Disney World, and as much as it hurt, it felt good, too, like a band being loosened from around his broken ribs.

His roommates stirred and one of them must have pushed the nurse call button, because shortly thereafter, the formidable Ukrainian nurse came in and savagely told him off for disturbing the ward at five in the morning. Perry heard and said his goodbyes, like they were old pals who'd chatted too long, and Death Waits rang off and fell into a light doze, grinning like a maniac.

#

Hilda eyed Perry curiously. "That sounded like an interesting conversation," she said. She was wearing a long t-shirt of his that didn't really cover much, and she looked delicious in it. It was all he could do to keep from grabbing her and tossing her on the bed -- of course, the cast meant that he couldn't really do that. And Hilda wasn't exactly smiling, either.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up," he said.

"It wasn't the talking that did it, it was you not being there in the first place. Gave me the toss-and-turns."

She came over to him then, the lean muscles in her legs flexing as she crossed the living room. She took his laptop away and set it down on the coffee-table, then took off his headset. He was wearing nothing but boxers, and she reached down and gave his dick a companionable honk before sitting down next to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek, the throat and the lips.

"So, Perry," she said, looking into his eyes. "What the fuck are you doing sitting in the living room at 5 am talking to your computer? And why didn't you come to bed last night? I'm not going to be hanging out in Florida for the rest of my life. I woulda thought you'd want to maximize your Hilda-time while you've got the chance."

She smiled to let him know she was kidding around, but she was right, of course.

"I'm an idiot, Hilda. I fired Tjan and Kettlewell, told them to get lost."

"I don't know why you think that's such a bad idea. You need business-people, probably, but it doesn't need to be those guys. Sometimes you can have too much history with someone to work with him. Besides, anything can be un-said. You can change your mind in a week or a month. Those guys aren't doing anything special. They'd come back to you if you asked 'em. You're Perry motherfuckin' Gibbons. You rule, dude."

"You're a very nice person, Hilda Hammersen. But those guys are running our legal defense, which we're going to need, because I'm about to do something semi-illegal that's bound to get us sued again by the same pack of assholes as last time."

"Disney?" She snorted. "Have you ever read up on the history of the Disney Company? The old one, the one Walt founded? Walt Disney wasn't just a racist creep, he was also a mad inventor. He kept coming up with these cool high-tech ways of making cartoons -- sticking real people in them, putting them in color, adding sync-sound. People loved it all, but it drove him out of business. It was all too expensive.

"So he recruited his brother, Roy Disney, who was just a banker, to run the business. Roy turned the business around, watching the income and the outgo. But all this came at a price: Roy wanted to tell Walt how to run the business. More to the point, he wanted to tell Walt that he couldn't just spend millions from the company coffers on weird-ass R&D projects, especially not when the company was still figuring out how to exploit the *last* R&D project Walt had chased. But it was Walt's company, and he'd overrule Roy, and Roy would promise that it was going to put them in the poorhouse and then he'd figure out how to make another million off of Walt's vision, because that's what the money guy is supposed to do.

"Then after the war, Walt went to Roy and said, 'Give me $17 million, I'm going to build a theme-park. And Roy said, 'You can't have it and what's a theme-park?' Walt threatened to fire Roy, the way he always had, and Roy pointed out that Disney was now a *public* company with shareholders who weren't going to let Walt cowboy around and piss away their money on his toys."

"So how'd he get Disneyland built?"

"He quit. He started his own company, WED, for Walter Elias Disney. He poached all the geniuses away from the studios and turned them into his 'Imagineers' and cashed in his life-insurance policy and raised his own dough and built the park, and then made Roy buy the company back from him. I'm guessing that that felt pretty good."

"It sounds like it must've," Perry said. He was feeling thoughtful, and buzzed from the sleepless night, and jazzed from his conversation with Death Waits. He had an idea that they could push designs out to the printers that were like the Disney designs, but weird and kinky and subversive and a little disturbing.

"I can understand why you'd be nervous about ditching your suits, but they're just that, suits. At some level, they're all interchangeable, mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not someone who'll run the show. If that's not these guys, hey, that's cool. Find a couple more suits and run them."

"Jesus, you really *are* Yoko, aren't you?" Lester was wearing his boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room's doorway where Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car starting down in the parking lot.

"Good morning, Lester," Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no offense taken, all good, all good.

"You fired who now, Perry?" Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon that he'd designed specifically for this purpose.

"I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan," Perry said. He was blushing. "I would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to do it, though. I had to."

"I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we've got some of the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our outfit. It's their show, too. You can't just go shit-canning them. Not just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing and they're keeping the lawyers at bay too. They're managing all the evil shit so we don't have to. I don't want to be in charge of the evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn't going to be easy. They're all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur."

"You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those two," Hilda said. "You're experienced now, and you've founded a movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just need better management structure: an executive you can overrule whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss."

Lester acted as though he hadn't heard her. "I'm being pretty mellow about this, buddy. I'm not making a big deal out of the fact that you did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I might have done the same. But it's the cold light of day now and it's time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can't afford to burn all this to the ground and start over now."

Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be unreasonable.

"Lester, they violated our trust. It was their responsibility to do this thing and do it right. They didn't do that. They didn't look closely at this thing so that they wouldn't have to put the brakes on if it turned out to be dirty. Which do you think those two would rather have happen: we run a cool project that everyone loves, or we run a lawsuit that makes ten billion dollars for their investors? They're playing a different game from us and their victory condition isn't ours. I don't want to be reasonable. I want to do the right thing. You and me could have sold out a thousand times over the years and made money instead of doing good, but we didn't. We didn't because it's better to be right than to be reasonable and rich. You say we can't afford to get rid of those two. I say we can't afford not to."

"You need to get a good night's sleep, buddy," Lester said. He was blowing through his nose, a sure sign that he was angry. It made Perry's hackles go up -- he and Lester didn't fight much but when they did, hoo-boy. "You need to mellow out and see that what you're talking about is abandoning our friends, Kettlewell and Tjan, to make our own egos feel a little better. You need to see that we're risking everything, risking spending our lives in court and losing everything we've ever built."

A Zen-like calm descended on Perry. Hilda was right. Suits were everywhere, and you could choose your own. You didn't need to let the Roy Disneys of the world call the shots.

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Lester. I hear everything you're saying, but you know what, it's going to be my way. I understand that what I want to do is risky, but there's no way I can go on doing what I'm doing and letting things get worse and worse. Making a little compromise here and there is how you end up selling out everything that's important. We're going to find other business-managers and we're going to work with them to make a smooth transition. Maybe we'll all come out of this friends later on. They want to do something different from what I want to do is all."

This wasn't calming Lester down at all. "Perry, this isn't your project to do what you want with. This belongs to a lot of us. I did most of the work in there."

"You did, buddy. I get that. If you want to stick with them, that's how it'll go. No hard feelings. I'll go off and do my own thing, run my own ride. People who want to connect to my network, no sweat, they can do it. That's cool. We'll still be friends. You can work with Kettlewell and Tjan." Perry could hardly believe these words were coming out of his mouth. They'd been buddies forever, inseparable.

Hilda took his hand silently.

Lester looked at him with increasing incredulity. "You don't mean that."

"Lester, if we split, it would break my heart. There wouldn't be a day that went by from now to the end of time that I didn't regret it. But if we keep going down this path, it's going to cost me my soul. I'd rather be broke than evil." Oh, it felt so *good* to be saying this. To finally affirm through deed and word that he was a good person who would put ethics before greed, before comfort even.

Lester looked at Hilda for a moment. "Hilda, this is probably something that Perry and I should talk about alone, if you don't mind."

"*I* mind, Lester. There's nothing you can't say in front of her."

Lester apparently had nothing to say to that, and the silence made Perry uncomfortable. Lester had tears in his eyes, and that hit Perry in the chest like a spear. His friend didn't cry often.

He crossed the room and hugged Lester. Lester was wooden and unyielding.

"Please, Lester. Please. I hate to make you choose, but you have to choose. We're on the same side. We've always been on the same side. Neither of us are the kind of people who send lawyers after kids in hospital. Never. I want to make it good again. We can have the kind of gig where we do the right thing and the cool thing. Come on, Lester. Please."

He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he'd won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.

#

Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone -- his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked.

"Hello?" he said. Not many people had this number -- he didn't like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first.

"Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?" He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. Shit. He'd given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face.

"It's not a good time, Freddy," he said. "If you call my secretary --"

"I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers -- your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C."

Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride assholes would have known about the printers. That's what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn't had time to look for it, though, and he didn't want to use the Disney Parks competitive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a fuck-up) he didn't want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.

"I'm not familiar with any response," Sammy said. "I'm afraid I can't comment --"

"Oh, it'll only take a moment to explain it," Freddy said and then launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had passed out last week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on, so that anyone's goop could print to it.

"So, what I'm looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you condone this? Did you anticipate it? What if someone prints an AK-47 with it?"

"No one's going to print a working AK-47 with this," Sammy said. "It's too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it --" He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. "As to the rest of it, that would be something you'd have to speak to one of my legal colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?"

Freddy laughed. "Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background, no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?"

Sammy felt his face go white. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about --"

"Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked out of the organization -- no one around to call the lawyers out on their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike."

Sammy seethed. He'd been concentrating on making new stuff, great stuff. Competitive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made and the world would be a more fun place once it was.

Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those ride shit-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He'd brought his own destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. God, he was a total fuck-up.

Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly -- not humming like a fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley of magic-users' songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to hell and back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the versioning system, and he'd been able to choose from among them and pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt's 1955 Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool.

"I'll just say you declined to comment, then?"

Asshole.

"You write whatever you need to write, Freddy," he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn't fuck it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to.

"Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week."

#

He wasn't ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn't walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he'd had all the treatment he needed -- even if his doctor hadn't been able to look him in the eye when this was explained -- and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere.

He'd put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he'd had with Perry and the idea he'd had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn't even know if his apartment was still there -- he hadn't been back in weeks and the rent was overdue.

And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights -- some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!) -- side-conversations, philosophical arguments.

Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune -- half-a-year's wages at his old job -- waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him.

The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. "Your friends are here," she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn't have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants -- the first pair he'd worn in weeks -- and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent.

"You will use canes?" she asked. He'd had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes? No way.

"I can't," he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall.

"Wheelchair," she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in pushing a chair with a squeaky wheel -- though the chair itself was a pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney, which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where the nurse's station, the elevators, the common area and his *fans* were.

They weren't just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but also a big crowd of people he'd never met, didn't recognize. There were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a wild cheer. The orderly stopped pushing his chair and the nurse rushed forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two very pretty girls -- he hadn't thought about "pretty" anything in a long, long time -- unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS.

The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands, but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear, something about getting security to get rid of these people if they were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was a *threat* and that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced off in a deeply Slavic huff.

And then he was among his welcoming party, and it *was* a party -- there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they'd seen the story he'd described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was something that was as personal as the twin language they'd developed to communicate with one another when they were little girls.

His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery, girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey's makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him -- one girl had gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it all started.

Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells that weren't sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs.

"Now, it's all arranged," one of the straight-looking ones told him. He'd figured out that these were the pure story people, who'd read his descriptions and concluded that he'd seen something more than anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn't seem too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old mates. "Don't worry about a thing." Car after car appeared, taking away more of the party. "Here you go."

Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge cargo space. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. "My mom was in a wheelchair for ten years before she passed," a hippie told him. He was older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went.

They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic -- Death marveling at buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital -- when the English teacher dude looked shyly at Death.

"You think it's real -- the Story, I mean -- don't you?"

Death thought about this for a second. He'd been very focused on the Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a meditative state he'd found easy to attain with all the painkillers.

"It's real," he said.

The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a little. "We think so too."

They pulled up to his condo -- how'd they know where he lived? -- and parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of fucked-up the rear bumper, but other than that, it was just as he remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash, too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his building, pushing --

A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward him, handling the curb easily, hardly a bump, and the two pretty girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived to brush their breasts and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that he'd felt since before his beating.

He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator.

The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the night talking about the story that they'd seen in the ride, where they'd seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether they had any business rating things now that the story had shown itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and it should be left to unconscious effort.

But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story, or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who couldn't see it or wouldn't see it.

At first Death didn't know what to make of all this talk. At first he found it funny and more than a little weird to be taking the story this seriously. It was beautiful, but it was an accidental beauty. The ride was the important thing, the story was its effect.

But these people convinced him that they were right, that the story *had* to be important. After all, it had inspired all of them, hadn't it? The ride was just technology -- the story was what the ride was *for*.

His head swam with it.

"We've got to protect it," he said finally, after listening to the argument, after eating the food with which they'd filled his fridge, after talking intensely with Tracey (or possibly Lacey) about their parents' unthinking blandness, after letting the English teacher guy (whose name was Jim) take him to the toilet, after letting his old goth pals play some music some mutual friends had just mixed.

"We've got to protect it and sharpen it. The story wants to get out and there will be those who can't see it." He didn't care that his speech was mangled by his fucked-up face. He'd seen his face in the mirror and Tracey and Lacey had done a nice job in making it up -- he looked like a latter-day Marilyn Manson, his twisted mouth a ghoulish smear. The doctors had talked about giving him another series of surgeries to fix his lip, a set of implanted dentures to replace the missing teeth, had even mentioned that there were specialist clinics where he could get a new set budded and grown right out of his own gums. That had been back when the mysterious forces of the lawsuit and the ride were paying his bills.

Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he'd get used to this, he'd come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one of the weird ones, like the old-timers who'd come to Disney with their teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths' kids were never goths, it seemed -- more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the grave.

"We'll let everyone know about it," he said, thinking not of *everyone* but of all the cool subculture kids he'd grown up with and worshipped and been rejected by and dated and loved and hated -- "and we'll make it part of *everyone*'s story. We'll protect it, guys. Of course we'll protect it."

That settled the argument. Death hadn't expected that. Since when did he get the last word on any subject? Since now. They were following his lead.

And then the girls put him to bed, shyly helping him undress, each of them leaning over him to kiss him good night. Tracey's kiss was sisterly, on the cheek, her spicy perfume and her jet-black hair caressing him. Lacey's kiss was anything but sisterly. She mashed her breasts to his chest and thrust her tongue into his mouth, keeping her silver eyes open and staring deep into his, her fingers working busily in his hair.

She broke the kiss off with a gasp and a giggle. She traced the ruin of his mouth with a fingertip, breathing heavily, and let it slide lower, down his chest. He found himself actually *hard*, the first pleasurable sensation he'd had in his dick since that fateful night. From the corridor came an impatient cough -- Tracey, waiting for Lacey to get going.

Lacey rolled her eyes and giggled again and then slid her hand the rest of the way down, briefly holding his dick and then encircling his balls with her fingers before kissing him again on the twist of his lips and backing out of the room, whispering, "Sleep well, see you in the morning."

Death lay awake and staring at the ceiling for a long time after they had gone. The English teacher dude had left him with a bedpan for the night and many of them had promised to return in rotations indefinitely during the days, helping him out with dressing and shopping and getting him in and out of his marvelous chair.

He stared and stared at that ceiling, and then he reached for his laptop, there beside the bed, the same place it had lived when he was in the hospital. He fired it up and went straight to today's fly-throughs of the ride and ran through them from different angles -- facing backward and sideways, looking down and looking up, noting all the elements that felt like *story* and all the ones that didn't, wishing he had his plus-one/minus-one joystick with him to carve out the story he was seeing.

#

Lester wouldn't work the ride anymore, so Perry took it on his own. Hilda was in town buying groceries -- his chest-freezer of gourmet surplus food had blown its compressor and the contents had spoiled in a mess of venison and sour blueberry sauce and duck pancakes -- and he stood alone. Normally he loved this, being the carnival barker at the middle of the three-ring circus of fans, tourists and hawkers, but today his cast itched, he hadn't slept enough, and there were lawyers chasing him. Lots of lawyers.

A caravan of cars pulled into the lot like a Tim Burton version of a funeral, a long train of funnycar hearses with jacked-up rear wheels and leaning chimney-pots, gargoyles and black bunting with super-bright black-light LEDs giving them a commercially eldritch glow. Mixed in were some straight cars, and they came and came and came, car on car. The hawkers got out more stuff, spread it out further, and waited while the caravan maneuvered itself into parking spots, spilling out into the street.

Riders got out of the cars, mostly super-skinny goths -- a line of special low-calorie vegan versions of Victorian organ-meat delicacies had turned a mom-and-pop cafe in Portland, Oregon, into a Fortune 500 company a few years before -- in elaborate DIY costumery. It shimmered darkly, petticoats and toppers, bodices and big stompy boots and trousers cut off in ribbons at the knees.

The riders converged on one of the straight cars, a beige mini-van, and crowded around it. A moment later, they were moving toward Perry's ticket-taking stand. The crowd parted as they approached and in Perry saw whom they'd been clustered around. It was a skinny goth kid in a wheelchair like the ones they kept in the ride -- they'd get that every now and again, a guest in his own chair, just needing a little wireless +1/-1 box. His hair was shaggy and black with green highlights, stuck out like an anime cosplayer's. He was white as Wonder Bread, with something funny about his mouth. His legs were in casts that had been wrapped with black gauze, and a pair of black pointy shoes had been slid over his toes, tipped with elaborate silver curlicues.

The chair zipped forward and Perry recognized him in a flash: Death Waits! He felt his mouth drop open and he shut it and came around the stand.

"No way!" he said, and grabbed Death's hand, encrusted in chunky silver jewelry, a different stylized animal skull on each finger. Death's ruined mouth pulled up in a kind of smile.

"Nice to see you," he said, limply squeezing Perry's hand. "It was very kind of you to visit me in the hospital."

Perry thought of all the things that had happened since then and wondered how much of it, if any, Death had a right to know about. He leaned in close, conscious of all the observers. "I'm out of the lawsuit. We are. Me and Lester. Fired those guys." Behind his reflective contacts, Death's eyes widened a touch.

He slumped a little. "Because of me?"

Perry thought some. "Not exactly. But in a way. It wasn't us."

Death smiled. "Thank you."

Perry straightened up. "Looks like you brought down a good crowd," he said. "Lots of friends!"

Death nodded. "Lots of friends these days," he said. An attractive young woman came over and squeezed his shoulder.

They were such a funny bunch in their DIY goth-frocks, micro-manufactured customized boots, their elaborate tattoos and implants and piercings, but for all that, cuddly and earnest with the shadows visible of the geeks they'd been. Perry felt he was smiling so broadly it almost hurt.

"Rides are on me, gang," he said. "In you go. Your money's no good here. Any friend of Death Waits rides for free today."

They cheered and patted him on the back as they went through, and Death Waits looked like he'd grown three inches in his wheelchair, and the pretty girl kissed Perry's cheek as she went by, and Death Waits had a smile so big you could hardly tell there was anything wrong with his mouth.

They rode it through six times in a row, and as they came back around for another go and another, they talked intently about the story, the story, the story. Perry knew about the story, he'd seen it, and he and Lester had talked it over now and again, but he was still constantly amazed by its ability to inspire riders.

Paying customers slipped in and out, too, and seemed to catch some of the infectious intensity of the story group. They went away in pairs, talking about the story, and shopped the market stalls for a while before coming back to ride again, to look for more story.

They'd never named the ride. It had always been "the ride." Not even a capital "R." For a second, Perry wondered if they'd end up calling it "The Story" in the end.

#

Perry got his Disney-in-a-Box through a circuitous route, getting one of the hawkers' brothers to order it to a PO box in Miami, to which Perry would drive down to pick it up and take it back.

Lester roused himself from the apartment when Perry told him it had arrived. Lester and Suzanne had been AWOL for days, sleeping in until Perry left, coming back after Perry came back, until it felt like they were just travelers staying in the same hotel.

He hadn't heard a peep from Kettlewell or Tjan, either. He guessed that they were off figuring things out with their money people. The network of ride operators had taken the news with equanimity -- Hilda had helped him write the message so that it kind of implied that everything was under control and moving along nicely.

But when Perry emailed Lester to say he was going to drive down to the PO box the next morning before opening the ride, Lester emailed back in minutes volunteering to come with him.

He had coffee ready by the time Perry got out of the shower. It was still o-dark-hundred outside, the sun not yet risen, and they hardly spoke as they got into the car, but soon they were on the open road.

"Kettlewell and Tjan aren't going to sue you," Lester said. There it was, all in a short sentence: *I've been talking to them. I've been figuring out if I'm with you or with them. I've been saving your ass. I've been deciding to be on your side.*

"Good news," Perry said. "That would have really sucked."

Perry waited for the rest of the drive for Lester to say something, but he didn't. It was a long drive.

The whole way back, Lester talked about the Disney-in-a-Box. There'd been some alien autopsy videos of them posted online already, engineers taking them to bits, making guesses about and what they did and how. Lester had watched the videos avidly and he held his own opinions, and he was eager to get at the box and find answers for himself. It was the size of an ice-chest, too big to fit on his lap, but he kept looking over his shoulder at it.

The box-art, a glossy pic of two children staring goggle-eyed at a box from which Disneoid marvels were erupting, looked a little like the Make Your Own Monster toy Perry'd had as a boy. It actually made his heart skip a beat the way that that old toy had. Really, wasn't that every kid's dream? A machine that created wonders from dull feedstock?

They got back to the ride long before it was due to open and Perry asked Lester if he wanted to get a second breakfast in the tea-room in the shantytown, but Lester begged off, heading for his workshop to get to grips with the Box.

So Perry alone waited for the ride to open, standing at his familiar spot behind the counter. The hawkers came and nodded hello to him. A customer showed up. Another. Perry took their money.

The ticket-counter smelled of sticky beverages spilled and left to bake in the heat, a sour-sweet smell like bile. His chair was an uncomfortable bar-stool he'd gotten from a kitchen-surplus place, happy for the bargain. He'd logged a lot of hours in that chair. It had wreaked havoc on his lower spine and tenderized his ass.

He and Lester had started this as a lark, but now it was a movement, and not one that was good for his mental health. He didn't want to be sitting on that stool. He might as well be working in a liquor store -- the skill-set was the same.

Hilda broke his reverie by calling his phone. "Hey, gorgeous," she said. She bounded out of bed fully formed, without any intervening stages of pre-coffee, invertebrate, pre-shower, and Homo erectus. He could hear that she was ready to catch the world by the ankle and chew her way up its leg.

"Hey," he said.

"Uh oh. Mr Badvibes is back. You and Lester fight in the car?"

"Naw," he said. "That was fine. Just..." He told her about the smell and the stool and working at a liquor store.

"Get one of those home-slices running the market stalls to take over the counter, and take me to the beach, then. It's been weeks and I still haven't seen the ocean. I'm beginning to think it's an urban legend."

So that's what he did. Hilda drove up in a bikini that made his jaw drop, and bought a pair of polarizing contacts from Jason, and Perry turned the till over to one of the more trustworthy vendors, and they hit the road.

Hilda nuzzled him and prodded him all the way to the beach, kissing him at the red lights. The sky was blue and clear as far as the eye could see in all directions, and they bought a bag of oranges, a newspaper, beach-blankets, sun-block, a picnic lunch, and a book of replica vintage luggage stickers from hawkers at various stop-points.

They unpacked the trunk in the parking garage and stepped out into the bright day, and that's when they noticed the wind. It was blowing so hard it took Hilda's sarong off as soon as she stepped out onto the street. Perry barely had time to snatch the cloth out of the air. The wind howled.

They looked up and saw the palm-trees bending like drawn bows, the hot-dog vendors and shave-ice carts and the jewelry hawkers hurriedly piling everything into their cars.

"Guess the beach is cancelled," Hilda said, pointing out over the ocean. There, on the horizon, was a wall of black cloud, scudding rapidly toward them in the raging wind. "Shoulda checked the weather."

The wind whipped up stinging clouds of sand and debris. It gusted hard and actually blew Hilda into Perry. He caught her and they both laughed nervously.

"Is this a hurricane?" she asked, joking, not joking, tension in her voice.

"Probably not." He was thinking of Hurricane Wilma, though, the year he'd moved to Florida. No one had predicted Wilma, which had been a tropical storm miles off the coast until it wasn't, until it was smashing a 50km-wide path of destruction from Key West to Kissimmee. He'd been working a straight job as a structural engineer for a condo developer, and he'd seen what a good blow could do to the condos of Florida, which were built mostly from dreams, promises, spit, and kleenex.

Wilma had left cars stuck in trees, trees stuck in houses, and it had blown just like this when it hit. There was a crackle in the air, and the sighing of the wind turned to groans, seeming to come from everywhere at once -- the buildings were moaning in their bones as the winds buffeted them.

"We have to get out of here," Perry said. "Now."

They got up to the second storey of the parking garage when the whole building moaned and shuddered beneath them, like a tremor. They froze on the stairwell. Somewhere in the garage, something crashed into something else with a sound like thunder, and then it was echoed with an actual thunder-crack, a sound like a hundred rifles fired in unison.

Hilda looked at him. "No way. Not further up. Not in this building."

He agreed. They pelted down the street and into the first sleeting showers coming out of a sky that was now dirty grey and low. A sandwich board advertising energy beverages spun through the air like a razor-edged frisbee, trailing a length of clothesline that had tethered it to the front of some beach-side cafe. On the beach across the road, beachcomber robots burrowed into the sand, trying to get safe from the wind, but were foiled again and again, rolled around like potato bugs into the street, into the sea, into the buildings. They seizured like dying things. Perry felt an irrational urge to rescue them.

"High ground," Hilda said, pointing away from the beach. "High ground and find a basement. Just like a twister."

A sheet of water lifted off the surface of the sea and swept across the road at them, soaking them to the skin, followed by a sheet of sand that coated them from head to toe. It was all the encouragement they needed. They ran.

They ran, but the streets were running with rain now and more debris was rolling past them. They got up one block and sloshed across the road. They made it halfway up the next block, past a coffee shop and a surf-shop in low-slung buildings, and the wind literally lifted them off their feet and slammed them to the ground. Perry grabbed Hilda and dragged her into an alley behind the surf-shop. There were dumpsters there, and a recessed doorway, and they squeezed past the dumpster and into the doorway.

Now in the lee, they realized how loud the storm had been. Their ears rang with it, and rang again with another thunderclap. Their chests heaved and they shivered, grabbing each other. The doorway stank of piss and the crackling ozone around them.

"This place, holy fuck, it's about to lift off and fly away," Hilda said, panting. Perry's unbroken arm throbbed and he looked down to see a ragged cut running the length of his forearm. From the Dumpster?

"It's a big storm," Perry said. "They come through now and again. Sometimes they blow away."

"What do they blow away? Trailers? Apartment buildings?" They were both spitting sand and Perry's arm oozed blood.

"Sometimes!" Perry said. They huddled together and listened to the wind lashing at the buildings around them. The Dumpster blocking their doorway groaned, and then it actually slid a few inches. Water coursed down the alley before them, with debris caught in it: branches, trash, then an electric motorcycle, scratching against the road as it rattled through the river.

They watched it pass without speaking, then both of them screamed and scrambled back as a hissing, soaked house-cat scrambled over the dumpster, landing practically in their laps, clawing at them with hysterical viciousness.

"Fuck!" Hilda said as it caught hold of her thumb with its teeth. She pushed at its face ineffectually, hissing with pain, and Perry finally worked a thumb into the hinge of its jaw and forced it open. The cat sprang away, clawing up his face, leaping back onto the Dumpster.

Hilda's thumb was punctured many times, already running free with blood. "I'm going to need rabies shots," she said. "But I'll live."

They cuddled, in the blood and the mud, and watched the river swell and run with more odd debris: clothes and coolers, beer bottles and a laptop, cartons of milk and someone's purse. A small palm-tree. A mailbox. Finally, the river began to wane, the rain to falter.

"Was that it?" Hilda said.

"Maybe," Perry said. He breathed in the moist air. His arms throbbed -- one broken, the other torn open. The rain was petering out fast now, and looking up, he could see blue sky peeking through the dirty, heavy clouds, which were scudding away as fast as they'd rolled in.

"Next time, we check the weather before we go to the beach," he said.

She laughed and leaned against him and he yelped as she came into contact with his hurt arm. "We got to get you to a hospital," she said. "Get that looked at."

"You too," he said, pointing at her thumb. It was all so weird and remote now, as they walked through the Miami streets, back toward the garage. Other shocked people wandered the streets, weirdly friendly, smiling at them like they all shared a secret.

The beach-front was in shambles, covered in blown trash and mud, uprooted trees and fallen leaves, broken glass and rolled cars. Perry hit the car radio before they pulled out of the garage. An announcer reported that Tropical Storm Henry had gone about three miles inland before petering out to a mere sun-shower, along with news about the freeways and hospitals being equally jammed.

"Huh," Perry said. "Well, what do we do now?"

"Let's find a hotel room," Hilda said. "Have showers, get something to eat."

It was a weird and funny idea, and Perry liked it. He'd never played tourist in Florida, but what better place to do so? They gathered their snacks from the back of the car and used the first aid kit in the trunk to tape themselves up.

They tried to reach Lester but no one answered. "He's probably at the ride," Perry said. "Or balls-deep in reverse-engineering the Disney Box thing. OK, let's find a hotel room."

Everything on the beach was fully booked, but as they continued inland for a couple blocks, they came upon coffin hotels stacked four or five capsules high, painted gay Miami deco pastels, installed in rows in old storefronts or stuck in street-parking spots, their silvered windows looking out over the deserted boulevards.

"Should we?" Perry said, gesturing at them.

"If we can get an empty one? Damn right -- these things are going to be in serious demand in pretty short order."

Stepping into the coffin hotel transported Perry back to his days on the road, his days staying at coffin hotel after coffin hotel, to his first night with Hilda, in Madison. One look at Hilda told him she felt the same. They washed each other slowly, as though they were underwater, cleaning out one-another's wounds, sluicing away the caked on mud and grime blown deep into their ears and the creases of their skin, nestled against their scalps.

They lay down in bed, naked, together, spooned against one another. "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons," Hilda said, snuggling against him, hand moving in slow circles on his tummy.

They slept that way and got back on the road long past dark, driving the blasted freeway slowly, moving around the broken glass and blown out tires that remained.

The path of the hurricane followed the coast straight to Hollywood, a line of smashed trees and car wrecks and blown-off roofs that made the nighttime drive even more disorienting.

They went straight back to the condo, but Lester wasn't there. Worry nagged at Perry. "Take me to the ride?" he said, after he'd paced the apartment a few times.

Hilda looked up from the sofa, where she had collapsed the instant they came through the door, arm flung over her face. "You're shitting me," she said. "It's nearly midnight, and we've been in a hurricane."

Perry squirmed. "I've got a bad feeling, OK? And I can't drive myself." He flapped his busted arm at her.

Hilda looked at him, her eyes narrowed. "Look, don't be a jerk, OK? Lester's a big boy. He's probably just out with Suzanne. He'd have called you if there'd been a problem."

He looked at her, bewildered by the ferocity of her response. "OK, I'll call a cab," he said, trying for a middle ground.

She jumped up from the couch. "Whatever. Fine. Let me get my keys. Jesus."

He had no idea how he'd angered her, but it was clear that he had, and the last thing he wanted was to get into a car with her, but he couldn't think of a way of saying that without escalating things.

So they drove in white-lipped silence to the ride, Hilda tense with anger, Perry tense with worry, both of them touchy as cats, neither saying a word.

But when they pulled up to the ride, they both let out a gasp. It was lit with rigged floodlights and car headlights, and it was swarming with people. As they drew closer, they saw that the market stalls were strewn across the parking lot, in smashed pieces. As they drew closer still, they saw that the ride itself was staring eyeless at them, window-glass smashed.

Perry was out of the car even before it stopped rolling, Hilda shouting something after him. Lester was just on the other side of the ride-entrance, wearing a paper mask and rubber boots, wading in three-inch deep, scummy water.

Perry splashed to a halt. "Holy shit," he breathed. The ride was lit with glow-sticks, waterproof lamps, and LED torches, and the lights reflected crazily from the still water that filled it as far as the eye could see, way out into the gloom.

Lester looked up at him. His face was lined and exhausted, and it gleamed with sweat. "Storm broke out all the windows and trashed the roof, then flooded us out. It did a real number on the market, too." His voice was dead.

Perry was wordless. Bits of the ride-exhibits floated in the water, along with the corpses of the robots.

"No drainage," Lester said. "The code says drainage, but there's none here. I never noticed it before. I'm going to rig a pump, but my workshop's pretty much toast." Lester's workshop had been in the old garden-center at the side of the ride. It was all glass. "We had some pretty amazing winds."

Perry felt like he should be showing off his wound to prove that he hadn't been fucking off while the disaster was underway, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. "We got caught in it in Miami," he said.

"Wondered where you were. The kid who was minding the shop just cut and run when the storm rolled in."

"He did? Christ, what an irresponsible asshole. I'll break his neck."

A slimy raft of kitchen gnomes -- their second business venture -- floated past silently in the harsh watery light. The smell was almost unbearable.

"It wasn't his job --" Lester's voice cracked on *job*, and he breathed deeply. "It wasn't his job, Perry. It was your job. You're running around, having a good time with your girlfriend, firing lawyers --" He stopped and breathed again. "You know that they're going to sue us, right? They're going to turn us into a smoking ruin because you fired them, and what the fuck are you going to do about that? Whose job is that?"

"I thought you said they weren't going to sue," Perry said. It came out in an embarrassed mumble. Lester had never talked to him like this. Never.

"Kettlewell and Tjan aren't going to sue," Lester said. "The lawyers you fired, the venture capitalists who backed them? They're going to turn us into paste."

"What would you have preferred?" Hilda said. She was standing in the doorway, away from the flood, watching them intently. Her eyes were raccoon-bagged, but she was rigid with anger. Perry could hardly look at her. "Would you have preferred to have those fuckers go around destroying the lives of your supporters in order to enrich a few pig assholes?"

Lester just looked at her.

"Well?"

"Shut up, Yoko," he said. "We're having a private conversation here."

Perry's jaw dropped, and Hilda was already in motion, sloshing into the water in her sandals. She smacked Lester across the cheek, a crack that echoed back over the water and walls.

Lester brought his hand up to his reddening face. "Are you done?" he said, his voice hard.

Hilda looked at Perry. Lester looked at Perry. Perry looked at the water.

"I'll meet you by the car," Perry said. It came out in a mumble. They held for a moment, the three of them, then Hilda walked out again, leaving Lester and Perry looking at one another.

"I'm sorry," Perry said.

"About Hilda? About the lawsuits? About skipping out?"

"About everything," he said. "Let's fix this up, OK?"

"The ride? I don't even know if I want to. Why bother? It'll cost a fortune to get it online, and they'll only shut it down again with the lawsuit. Why bother."

"So we won't fix the ride. Let's fix us."

"Why bother," Lester said, and it came out in the same mumble.

The watery sounds of the room and the smell and the harsh reflected rippling light made Perry want to leave. "Lester --" he began.

Lester shook his head. "There's nothing more we can do tonight, anyway. I'll rent a pump in the morning."

"I'll do it," Perry said. "You work on the Disney-in-a-Box thing."

Lester laughed, a bitter sound. "Yeah, OK, buddy. Sure."

Out in the parking-lot, the hawkers were putting their stalls back together as best they could. The shantytown was lit up and Perry wondered how it had held together. Pretty good, is what he guessed -- they met and exceeded county code on all of those plans.

Hilda honked the horn at him. She was fuming behind the wheel and they drove in silence. He felt numb and wrung out and he didn't know what to say to her. He lay awake in bed that night waiting to hear Lester come home, but he didn't.

#

Sammy loved his morning meetings. They all came to his office, all the different park execs, creatives, and emissaries from the old partner companies that had spun off to make movies and merch and educational materials. They all came each day to talk to him about the next day's Disney-in-a-Box build. They all came to beg him to think about adding in something from their franchises and cantons to the next installment.

There were over a million DiaBs in the field now, and they weren't even trying to keep up with orders anymore. Sammy loved looking at the online auction sites to see what the boxes were going for -- he knew that some of his people had siphoned off a carload or two of the things to e-tail out the back door. He loved that. Nothing was a better barometer of your success than having made something other people cared enough about to steal.

He loved his morning meetings, and he conducted them with the flair of a benevolent emperor. He'd gotten a bigger office -- technically it was a board-room for DiaB strategy, but Sammy *was* the DiaB strategy. He'd outfitted it with fan-photos of their DiaB shrines in their homes, with kids watching enthralled as the day's model was assembled before their eyes. The hypnotic fascination in their eyes was unmistakable. Disney was the focus of their daily lives, and all they wanted was more, more, more. He could push out five models a day, ten, and they'd go nuts for them.

But he wouldn't. He was too cunning. One model a day was all. Leave them wanting more. Never breathe a hint of what the next day's model would be -- oh, how he loved to watch the blogs and the chatter as the models self-assembled, the heated, time-bound fights over what the day's model was going to be.

"Good morning, Ron," he said. Wiener had been lobbying to get a Main Street build into the models for weeks now, and Sammy was taking great pleasure in denying it to him without shutting down all hope. Getting Ron Wiener to grovel before him every morning was better than a cup of coffee.

"I've been thinking about what you said, and you're right," Wiener said. He always started the meeting by telling Sammy how right he was to reject his last idea. "The flag-pole and marching-band scene would have too many pieces. House cats would knock it over. We need something more unitary, more visually striking. So here's what I've been thinking: what about the fire-engine?"

Sammy raised an indulgent eyebrow.

"Kids *love* fire trucks. All the colors are in the printer's gamut -- I checked. We could create a Mickey-and-Friends fire-crew to position around it, a little barn for it."

"The only thing I liked about firetrucks when I was a kid was that the word started with 'f' and ended with 'uck' --" Sammy smiled when he said it, and waited for Wiener to fake hilarity, too. The others in the room -- other park execs, some of their licensing partners, a few advertisers -- laughed too. Officially, this was a "brainstorming session," but everyone knew that it was all about getting the nod from Sammy.

Wiener laughed dutifully and slunk away. More supplicants came forward.

"How about this?" She was very cute -- dressed in smart, dark clothes that were more Lower East Side than Orlando. She smelled good, too -- one of the new colognes that hinted at free monomers, like hot plastic or a new-bought tire. Cat-slanted green eyes completed the package.

"What you got there?" She was from an ad agency, someone Disney Parks had done business with at some point. Agencies had been sending their people to these meetings too, trying to get a co-branding coup for one of their clients.

"It's a series of three, telling a little story. Beginning, middle and end. The first one is a family sitting down to breakfast, and you can see, it's the same old crap, boring microwave omelets and breakfast puddings. Mom's bored, dad's more bored, and sis and brother here are secretly dumping theirs onto mom's and dad's plates. All this stuff is run using the same printers, so it looks very realistic."

It did indeed. Sammy hadn't thought about it, but he supposed it was only natural that the omelets were printed -- how else could General Mills get that uniformity? He should talk to some of the people in food services about getting some of that tech to work at the parks.

"So in part two, they're setting up the kitchen around this mystery box -- one part Easy-Bake lightbulb oven, one part Tardis. You know what that is?"

Sammy grinned. "Why yes, I believe I do." Their eyes met in a fierce look of mutual recognition. "It's a breakfast printer, isn't it?" The other supplicants in the room sucked in a collective breath. Some chuckled nervously.

"It's about moving the apparatus to the edge. Bridging the last mile. Why not? This one will do waffles, breakfast cereals, bagels and baked goods, small cakes. New designs every day -- something for mom and dad, something for the kids, something for the sullen teens. We're already doing this at the regional plants and distributorships, on much larger scales. But getting our stuff into consumers' homes, getting them *subscribed* to our food --"

Sammy held up a hand. "I see," he said. "And our people are already primed for home-printing experiences. They're right in your sweet spot."

"Part three, Junior and little sis are going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but these things are shaped *like them*, with their portraits on each sugar-lump. Mom and dad are eating tres sophistique croissants and delicate cakes. Look at Rover here, with his own cat-shaped dog-biscuit. See how happy they all are?"

Sammy nodded. "Shouldn't this all be under nondisclosure?" he said.

"Probably, but what are you gonna do? You guys are pretty good at keeping secrets, and if you decide to shaft us by selling out to one of our competitors, we're probably dead, anyway. I'll be able to ship out half a million units in the first week, then we can ramp production if need be -- lots of little parts-and-assembly subcontractors will take the work if we offer."

Sammy liked the way she talked. Like someone who didn't need to spend a lot of time screwing around, planning, like someone who could just make it happen.

"You're launching when?"

"Three days after you start running this campaign," she said, without batting an eyelash.

"My name's Sammy," he said. "How's Thursday?"

"Launch on Sunday?" She shook her head. "It's tricky, Sunday launches. Gotta pay everyone scale-and-a-half." She gave him a wink. "What the hell, it's not my money." She stuck out her hand. She was wearing a couple of nice chunky obsidian rings in abstract curvy shapes, looking a little porny in their suggestion of breasts and thighs. He shook her hand and it was warm and dry and strong.

"Well, that's this week taken care of," Sammy said, and pointedly cleared the white-board surface running the length of the table. The others groaned and got up and filed out. The woman stayed behind.

"Dinah," she said. She handed him a card and he noted the agency. Dallas-based, not New York, but he could tell she was a transplant.

"You got any breakfast plans?" It was hardly gone 9AM -- Sammy liked to get these meetings started early. "I normally get something sent in, but your little prototypes there..."

She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. "Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I'm nothing *but* breakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?"

"Heh. Oh yeah."

"I'm on the next flight to DFW," she said. "I've got a cab waiting to take me to the airport."

"I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details," Sammy said.

"Only if you want to do it in the taxi."

"I was thinking we could do it on the plane," he said.

"You're going to buy a ticket?"

"On my plane," he said. They'd given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs.

"Oh yes, I think that can be arranged," she said. "It's Sammy, right?"

"Right," he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive.

#

Lester hadn't left Suzanne's apartment in days. She'd rented a place in the shantytown -- bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry's apartment had become so tense.

Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day.

She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry's ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof -- none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn't getting any rent.

She looked over Lester's shoulder for the fiftieth time. "How's it going?"

"Don't write about this, OK?"

He'd never said that to her.

"I'll embargo it until you ship."

He grunted. "Fine, I guess. OK, well, I've got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don't make it easy, which is weird. It's like they don't plan on updating it once it's in the field -- maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals."

"Why's the firmware matter to you?"

"Well, that's where it stores information about where to get the day's designs. If we're going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don't know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it's accessing their site when it's really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine -- no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that."

Suzanne nodded. She wondered if "a few hardcore geeks" summed up the total audience for this project in any event. She didn't mention it, though. Lester's brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the crease above his nose.

"Well, I'm sure you'll get it," she said.

"Yeah. It's just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader."

Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring, sexy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering angrily about boot-loaders.

Suzanne missed Russia. She'd had a good life there, covering the biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry, but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to.

She'd liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the squalor. She'd bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners where they took apart the day's experiences on Planet Petrograd.

"I'm going out, Lester," she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation.

"Hey," he said. "Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I'm just -- I'm trying to work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I don't know what to do --" He broke off and thumped the side of the printer.

"How's Perry getting on with rebuilding?"

"He's getting on," Lester said. "As far as I know. I read that the Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that means."

"He freaks me out," Suzanne said. "I mean, I feel terrible for him, and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people -- the way they follow him around. It's just weird. Like the charismatic cults back home." She realized she'd just called Russia "home" and it made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these people, anyway?

Lester hadn't noticed. "I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they like what he has to say about stories. I just can't get a lot of spit in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something we did and completed and should move on from."

Suzanne didn't have anything to say, and Lester wasn't particularly expecting anything, he was giving off a palpable let-me-work vibe, so she let herself out of the apartment -- her apartment! -- and headed out into the shantytown. On the way to the ride, she passed the little tea-house where Kettlewell and Tjan had done their scheming and she suddenly felt very, very old. The only grownup on-site.

She was about to cross the freeway to the ride when her phone rang. She looked at the face and then nearly dropped it. Freddy was calling her.

"Hello, Suzanne," he said. The gloat in his voice was unmistakable. He had something really slimy up his sleeve.

"How can I help you?"

"I'm calling for comment on a story," he said. "It's my understanding that your lad, Perry, pitched a tantie and fired the business-managers of the ride, and has told the lawyers representing him against Disney that he intends to drop the suit."

"Is there a question in there?"

"Oh, there are many questions in there, my darling. For starters, I wondered how it could possibly be true if you haven't written about it on your little 'blog' --" even over the phone, she could hear the sarcastic quotes. "-- You seem to be quite comprehensive in documenting the undertakings of your friends down there in Florida."

"Are you asking me to comment on why I haven't commented?"

"For starters."

"Have you approached Perry for a comment?"

"I'm afraid he was rather abrupt. And I couldn't reach his Valkyrie of the Midwest, either. So I'm left calling on you, Suzanne. Any comment?"

Suzanne stared across the road at the ride. She'd been gassed there, chased by armed men, watched a war there.

"The ride doesn't have much formal decision-making process," she said finally. "That means that words like 'fired' don't really apply here. The boys might have a disagreement about the best way to proceed, but if that's the case, you'll have to talk to them about it."

"Are you saying that you don't know if your boyfriend's best friend is fighting with his business partners? Don't you all live together?"

"I'm saying that if you want to find out what Lester and Perry are doing, you'll have to ask Lester and Perry."

"And the living together thing?"

"We don't live together," she said. It was technically true.

"Really?" Freddy said.

"Do we have a bad connection?"

"You don't live together?"

"No."

"Where do you live then?"

"My place," she said. "Have your informants been misinforming you? I hope you haven't been paying for your information, Freddy. I suppose you don't, though. I suppose there's no end of cranks who really enjoy spiteful gossip and are more than happy to email you whatever fantasies they concoct."

Freddy tsked. "And you don't know what's happened to Kettlewell and Tjan?"

"Have you asked them?"

"I will," he said. "But since you're the ranking reporter on the scene."

"I'm just a blogger, Freddy. A busy blogger. Good afternoon."

The call left her shaking, though she was proud of how calm she'd kept her voice. What a goddamned troll. And she was going to have to write about this now.

There were ladders leaned up against the edge of the ride, and a motley crew of roofers and glaziers on them and on the roof, working to replace the gaping holes the storm had left. The workers mostly wore black and had dyed hair and lots of metal flashing from their ears and faces as they worked. A couple had stripped to the waist, revealing full-back tattoos or even more piercings and subcutaneous implants, like armor running over their spines and shoulder-blades. A couple of boom-boxes blasted out grinding, incoherent music with a lot of electronic screams.

Around the ride, the market-stalls were coming back, rebuilt from a tower of fresh-sawed lumber stacked in the parking-lot. This was a lot more efficient, with gangs of vendors quickly sawing the lumber to standard sizes, slapping each one with a positional sensor, then watching the sensor's lights to tell them when it was properly lined up with its mates, and then slipping on corner-clips that held it all together. Suzanne watched as a whole market stall came together this way, in the space of five minutes, before the vendors moved on to their next stall. It was like a high-tech version of an Amish barn-raising, performed by bandanna-clad sketchy hawkers instead of bearded technophobes.

She found Perry inside, leaning over a printer, tinkering with its guts, LED torches clipped to the temples of his glasses. He was hampered by having only one good arm, and he pressed her into service passing him tools for a good fifteen minutes before he straightened up and really looked at her.

"You come down to help out?"

"To write about it, actually."

The room was a hive of activity. A lot of goth kids of various ages and degrees of freakiness, a few of the squatter kids, some people she recognized from the second coming of Death Waits. She couldn't see Death Waits, though.

"Well, that's good." He powered up the printer and the air filled with the familiar smell of Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave. She had an eerie flashback to her first visit to this place, when they'd showed her how they could print mutated, Warhol-ized Barbie heads. "How's Lester getting on with cracking that printer?"

*Why don't you ask him yourself?* She didn't say it. She didn't know why Lester had come to her place after the flood instead of going home, why he stiffened up and sniffed when she mentioned Perry's name, why he looked away when she mentioned Hilda.

"Something about firmware."

He straightened his back more, making it pop and gave her his devilish grin, the one where his wonky eyebrow went up and down. "It's always firmware," he said, and laughed a little. Maybe they were both remembering those old days, the Boogie Woogie Elmos.

"Looks like you've got a lot of help," Suzanne said, getting out a little steno pad and a pen.

Perry nodded at it, and she was struck by how many times they'd stood like this, a few feet apart, her pen poised over her pad. She'd chronicled so much of this man's life.

"They're good people, these folks. Some of them have some carpentry or electronics experience, the rest are willing to learn. It's going faster than I thought it would. Lots of support from out in the world, too -- people sending in cash to help with replacement parts."

"Have you heard from Kettlewell or Tjan?"

The light went out of his face. "No," he said.

"How about from the lawyers?"

"No comment," he said. It didn't sound like a joke.

"Come on, Perry. People are starting to ask questions. Someone's going to write about this. Do you want your side told or not?"

"Not," he said, and disappeared back into the guts of the printer.

She stared at his back for a long while before turning on her heel, muttering, "Fuck," and walking back out into the sunshine. There'd been a musty smell in the ride, but out here it was the Florida smell of citrus and car-fumes, and sweat from the people around her, working hard, trying to wrest a living from the world.

She walked back across the freeway to the shantytown and ran into Hilda coming the other way. The younger woman gave her a cool look and then looked away, and crossed.

That was just about enough, Suzanne thought. Enough playtime with the kids. Time to go find some grownups. She wasn't here for her health. If Lester didn't want to hang out with her, if Perry had had enough of her, it was time to go do something else.

She went back to her room, where Lester was still working on his DiaB project. She took out her suitcase and packed with the efficiency of long experience. Lester didn't notice, not even when she took the blouse she'd hand-washed and hung to dry on the back of his chair, folded it and put it in her suitcase and zipped it shut.

She looked at his back working over the bench for a long time. He had a six-pack of chocolate pudding beside him, and a wastebasket overflowing with food wrappers and boxes. He shifted in his seat and let out a soft fart.

She left. She paid the landlady through the end of the week. She could send Lester an email later.

The cab took her to Miami. It wasn't until she got to the airport that she realized she had no idea where she was going. Boston? San Francisco? Petersburg? She opened her laptop and began to price out last minute tickets. The rush of travelers moved around her and she was jostled many times.

The standby sites gave her a thousand options -- Miami to JFK to Heathrow to Petersburg, Miami to Frankfurt to Moscow to Petersburg, Miami to Dallas to San Francisco.... The permutations were overwhelming, especially since she wasn't sure where she wanted to be.

Then she heard something homey and familiar: a large group of Russian tourists walking past, talking loudly in Russian, complaining about the long flight, the bad food, and the incompetence of their tour operator. She smiled to see the old men with their high-waisted pants and the old women with their bouffant hair.

She couldn't help but eavesdrop -- at their volume, she would have been hard-pressed *not* to listen in. A little boy and girl tore ass around the airport, under the disapproving glares from DHS goons, and they screamed as they ran, "Disney World! Disney World! Disney World!"

She'd never been -- she'd been to a couple of the kitschy Gulag parks in Russia, and she'd grown up with Six Flags coaster parks and Ontario Place and the CNE in Toronto, not far from Detroit. But she'd never been to The Big One, the place that even now managed to dominate the world's consciousness of theme-parks.

She asked her standby sites to find her a room in a Disney hotel instead, looking for an inclusive rate that would get her onto the rides and pay for her meals. These were advertised at roadside kiosks at 100-yard intervals on every freeway in Florida, so she suspected they were the best deal going.

A moment of browsing showed her that she'd guessed wrong. A week in Disney cost a heart-stopping sum of money -- the equivalent of six months' rent in Petersburg. How did all these Russians afford this trip? What the hell compelled people to part with these sums?

She was going to have to find out. It was research. Plus she needed a vacation.

She booked in, bought a bullet-train ticket, and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. She examined her welcome package as she waited for the train. She was staying at something called the Polynesian Resort hotel, and the brochure showed a ticky-tacky tiki-themed set of longhouses set on an ersatz white-sand beach, with a crew of Mexican and Cuban domestic workers in leis, Hawai'ian shirts, and lava-lavas waving and smiling. Her package included a complimentary luau -- the pictures made it clear this was nothing like the tourist luaus she'd attended in Maui. On top of that, she was entitled to a "character breakfast" with a wage-slave in an overheated plush costume, and an hour with a "resort counsellor" who'd help her plan her trip for maximal fun.

The bullet-train came and took on the passengers, families bouncing with anticipation, joking and laughing in every language spoken. These people had just come through a US Customs checkpoint and they were acting like the world was a fine place. She decided there must be something to this Disney business.

#

Death Waits waited, and waited and waited for the ride to come back online. He split his days between hanging out at home, writing about the story, running the fly-throughs from the other rides, watching what was happening in Brazil, answering his fan-mail; the rest of the time he spent with his new friends down at the site of the ride, encouraging them to pitch in and help Perry and Lester to get the thing back up and running. Fast, please. It was driving him bonkers not to be able to ride any longer. After everything he'd been through, he deserved a ride.

His friends were wonderful. Wonderful! Lacey especially. She was a nurse and a goddess of mercy. The money that flooded into his paypals whenever his friends let it be known that he needed more covered all his expenses. He never wanted for companionship, conversation, helpmeets, or respect. It was a wonderful life.

If only the ride would come online.

He woke next to Lacey, she asleep still, her hair spread out across the pillow in a fall of shiny black with blue highlights -- she'd given him a matching dye-job a few days before and they looked like a matched set now. He let his hands lazily trace her soft skin, the outlines of her tattoos, her implants and piercings. He felt a stirring between his legs.

Lacey yawned and woke and kissed him. "Good morning, my handsome man," she said.

"Good morning, my beautiful woman. What's the plan for today?"

"Whatever you want," she said.

"Breakfast, then down to the ride," he said. "I'll do my email and writing there today."

"Something before breakfast?" she asked, with a lopsided smile that was adorable.

"Oh yes, please," he said, his voice breathy.

#

The smell at the Wal-Mart was overpowering. It was one part sharp mold, one part industrial disinfectant, a citrus smell that made your eyes water and your sinuses burn.

"I've rented some big blowers," Perry said. "They'll help air the place out. If that doesn't work, I might have to resurface the floor, which would be rough -- it could take a week to get that done properly."

"A week?" Death said. Jesus. No way. Not another week. He didn't know it for sure, but he had a feeling that a lot of these people would stop showing up eventually if there was no ride for them to geek out over. He sure would.

"You smell that? We can't close the doors and the windows and leave it like this."

Death's people, standing around them, listening in, nodded. It was true. You'd melt people's lungs if you shut them up with these fumes.

"How can I help?" Death said. It was his constant mantra with Perry. Sometimes he didn't think Perry liked him very much, and it was good to keep on reminding him that Death and his buddies were here to be part of the solution. That Perry needed them.

"The roof is just about done, the robots are back online. The dividers should be done today. I've got the chairs stripped down for routine maintenance, I could use a couple people for that."

"What's Lester working on?" Death said.

"You'd have to ask him."

Death hadn't seen Lester in days, which was weird. He hoped Lester didn't dislike him. He worried a lot about whether people liked him these days. He'd thought that Sammy liked him, after all.

"Where is he?"

"Don't know."

Perry put dark glasses on.

Death Waits took the hint. "Come on," he said to Lacey, who patted him on the hand as he lifted up in his chair and rolled out to the van. "Let's just call him."

"Lo?"

"It's Death Waits. We're down at the ride, but there's not much to do around here. I thought maybe we could help you with whatever you were working on?"

"What do you know about what I'm working on?" Lester said.

"Um. Nothing."

"So how do you know you want to help?"

Death Waits closed his eyes. He wanted to help these two. They'd made something important, didn't they know that?

"What are you working on?"

"Nothing," Lester said.

"Come on," Death said. "Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute."

Lester snorted. "Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards, turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I'll meet you there."

"You mean go into the --" Death didn't know what it was called. He always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney's extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted go-away green. The weird town across the road was *right there*.

"Yeah, across the road into the shantytown."

"OK," Death said. "See you soon." He hung up and patted Lacey's hand. "We're going over there," he said, pointing into the shantytown.

"Is it safe?"

He shrugged. "I guess so." He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable -- a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless.

"Should we drive?"

"I think we can make it across," he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn't afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage.

The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells -- barbecue and Cuban spices -- and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn't make any sense to Death's eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti.

Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street -- hadn't these people heard of stranger danger -- stopped to stare at him with big shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called.

Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner.

Death hadn't known what to expect from this little town, but he certainly hadn't pictured so many little shops. He realized that he thought of shops as being somehow civilized -- tax paying, license-bearing entities with commercial relationships with suppliers, with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild.

But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop, advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating enticements -- *Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies, OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails*. He passed twenty different shops in as many steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them.

Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it would be in full sight of all these people.

It was a funny thought. He'd grown up in sparse suburbs where you'd never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their porches. Even though it was a "nice" neighborhood, there were muggings and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt like taking your life into your hands.

Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park, it felt somehow safer. Weird.

They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural -- a Mexican in a cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck, surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton shirts and blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper.

"You seem to be recovering quickly," he said, sizing up Death in his chair. "Good to see it." He seemed a little distant, which Death chalked up to being interrupted.

"It's great to see you again," Death said. "My friends and I have been coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never see you there, so I thought I'd call you."

"You'd call me."

"To see if we could help," Death said. "With whatever you're doing."

"Come in," Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for the first time the small sign that said *HOTEL ROTHSCHILD,* with a stately peacock behind it.

The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The lobby -- such as it was -- was completely filled by him, Lacey and Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it couldn't have cornered to get there.

Lester looked embarrassed. "Sorry, I didn't think of that. Um. OK, I could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We'd have to belt you in, but it's do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top floor -- it's how they get the beds into the upper stories."

"I can get up on canes," Death Waits said. "Is it safe to leave my chair outside, though?"

Lester's eyebrows went up. "Well of course -- sure it is." Death felt weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair? He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood gingerly. He'd been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes all week, but he hadn't tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn't too many floors up.

Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an effort.

"OK," he said. "All done."

"Great," Lester said. "This is what I'm working on. You talked to Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I've cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it -- just stick it on a network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it becomes an open box -- it'll accept anyone's goop. You can send it your own plans."

Death hadn't seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn't felt since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began.

"So how does this tie in to the ride?" Death asked. "I was thinking of building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress people? No, I don't think so.

"So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region liked --"

Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. "Woah, wait a second. No, no, no --" Death was used to having his friends hang on his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was talking to.

"Sorry," he said. "Got ahead of myself."

"Look," Lester said, prodding at the printer. "This thing is its own thing. We're about more than the ride here. I know you really like it, and that's very cool, but there's no way that everything I do from now on is going to be about that fucking thing. It was a lark, it's cool, it's got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them."

Death couldn't make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn't *like* the ride. How was that possible? "I don't get it," he said at last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey, too. He didn't like how this was going at all.

Lester picked up a screwdriver. "You see this? It's a tool. You can pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it." He thumped the printer. "This thing is a tool, too, but it's not *your* tool. It belongs to someone else -- Disney. It isn't interested in listening to you or obeying you. It doesn't want to give you more control over your life.

"This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own personal body, but it wasn't under my control. What's the word the academics use? 'Agency.' I didn't have any agency. It didn't matter what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and pains.

"If you don't control your life, you're miserable. Think of the people who don't get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids, mental patients. There's something inherently awful about living like that. Autonomy makes us happy."

He thumped the top of the printer again. "So here's this stupid thing, which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing that you use to better your life, but in reality, it's a tool that Disney uses to control your life. You can't program it. You can't change the channel. It doesn't even have an *off switch*. That's what gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control."

Lester's eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and the aftermath of the beating, and the life he'd lived. Lester was telling him that the ride wasn't important to him anymore, that he'd be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling of bitterness at the thought.

"So what about the ride?"

"The ride? I told you. I'm done with it. It's time to do the next thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?"

"With the ride," Death said patiently, with the manner of someone talking to a child.

Lester turned his back on Death.

"I'm done with the ride," Lester said. "I don't want to waste your time." It was clear he meant, *You're wasting my time.* He bent over the printer.

Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was all he could do to keep from crying.

#

Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned amusement, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and forth. She'd bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet Coke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo.

Now she watched the kids tear ass up and down the train, or sit mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its coffers.

The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian -- in that order -- and displayed on the porters' red coats with brass buttons were name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne -- a veteran of innumerable hotels -- could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase.

He brought her to a coach-station and saw her aboard a bus marked for the Polynesian, decorated with tiki-lamps, bamboo, and palm-fronds (she touched one and discovered that it was vinyl). He refused her tip as they saw her aboard, and then stood and waved her off with his white gloves and giant white smile. She had to chuckle as she pulled away, amazed at how effective these little touches were. She felt her muscles loosening, little involuntary chuckles rising in her throat. The coach was full of parents and children from all over the world, grinning and laughing and hugging and talking excitedly about the day ahead of them.

The coach let them off to a group of Hawai'ian-shirt-clad staff who shouted "Aloha!" at them as they debarked, and picked up their luggage with swift, cheerful, relentless efficiency. Her check-in was so painless she wasn't sure it was over until a nice young lady who looked Chechen picked up her bag for her and urged her out to the grounds, which were green and lush, like nothing she'd seen since landing in Florida. She was surrounded by the hotel structures, long-houses decorated with Polynesian masks and stalked by leggy ibises and chirping tropical birds. Before her was a white-sand beach fronting onto an artificial lake ringed with other luxury hotels: a gigantic 1970s Soviet A-frame building and a gingerbread-choked Victorian hotel. The lake was ringed with a monorail track and plied by handsome paddle-wheeler ferry-boats.

She stared gape-jawed at this until the bellhop gently tugged at her elbow, giving her a dazzling smile.

Her room was the kind of thing you'd see Lucy and Ricky checking into on honeymoon in an old *I Love Lucy* episode -- wicker ceiling fans, bamboo furniture, a huge hot-tub shaped like a seashell. Outside, a little terrace looking over the lake, with a pair of cockatoos looking quizzically at her. The bellhop waved at them and they cawed at her and flew off. Suzanne must have made a disappointed noise, because the bellhop patted her on the arm and said, "Don't worry, we feed them here, they come back all the time. Greedy birdies!"

She tipped the bellhop five bucks once she'd been given the grand tour of the room -- a tame Internet connection that was "kid-friendly" and a likewise censored video-on-demand service, delivery pizza or sushi, information on park hours, including the dazzling array of extras she could purchase. It turned out that resort guests were eligible to purchase priority passes for boarding rides ahead of the plebes, and for entering parks early and staying late. This made Suzanne feel right at home -- it was very Russian in its approach: the more you spent, the better your time was.

She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water.

Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she'd showered she found she didn't want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai'ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.

She passed the rest of the day at the Magic Kingdom, taking a ferry from the hotel's pier to the Victorian wrought-iron docks on the other side of the little artificial lake. As she cleared the turnstiles into Main Street, USA, her heart quickened. Kids rushed past her, chased by their parents' laughing calls to slow down. Balloon sellers and old-fashioned popcorn machines jostled for space in the crowd, and a brass band was marching down the street in straw boaters and red striped jackets, playing a Sousa march.

She ambled up the road, peering in the adorable little shop windows, like the shops in a fancy casino, all themed artificial facades that were, in back, all one shop, linked through the length of the street.

She reached the castle before she realized it, and saw that it was shorter than it had appeared. Turning around and looking back down Main Street, she saw that the trees lining the sides of the street had been trimmed so they got progressively smaller from the gates to the castle, creating a kind of false perspective line. She laughed now, amused by the accomplishment of the little trompe l'oeil.

She squeezed past the hordes of Asian tourists taking precisely the same picture of the castle, one after another, a phenomenon she'd observed at other famous landmarks. For some Japanese shutterbugs, the holiday photo experience was as formal as the Stations of the Cross, with each picture of each landmark rigidly prescribed by custom and unwritten law.

Now she was under the castle and headed for what her map assured her was Fantasyland. Just as she cleared the archway, she remembered her conversations with that Death Waits kid about Fantasyland: this was the part that had been made over as a goth area, and then remade as the Happiest Construction Site on Earth.

And so it was. The contrast was stark. From fairy castle to green-painted construction sidings. From smiling, well-turned out "castmembers" to construction workers with butt-crack-itis and grouchy expressions. Fantasyland was like an ugly scar on the blemish-free face of a Barbie doll.

She liked it.

Something about all that artifice, all that cunning work to cover up all the bodies a company like Disney would have buried under its manicured Main Street -- it had given her a low-level, tooth-grinding headache, a kind of anger at the falseness of it all. Here, she could see the bodies as they buried them.

Out came her camera and she went on the prowl, photographing and photographing, seeking high ground from which to catch snaps over the siding. She'd look at the satellite pics of this spot later.

Now she knew what her next project would be: she would document this scar. She'd dig up the bodies.

Just for completeness' sake, she went on some of the rides. Her super-fancy pass let her sail past the long lines of bored kids, angry dads, exhausted moms. She captured their expressions with her camera.

The rides were all right. She was sick of rides, truth be told. As an art-form, they were wildly overrated. Some of them made her sick and some of them were like mildly interesting trips through someone's collection of action-figures in a dark room. The Disney rides didn't even let you drive, like Lester's ride did, and you didn't get to vote on them.

By the time the sun had gone down, she was ready to go back to the room and start writing. She wanted to get all this down, the beauty and the terror, the commerce lurking underneath the friendly facade. As the day lengthened into night, there were more and more screaming children, more angry parents. She caught parents smacking kids, once, twice, got her camera out, caught three more.

They sent a big pupu platter up to her room with a dish of poi and a hollow pineapple filled with rum. She took her computer out onto her lanai and looked out over the lake. An ibis came by and demanded some of her dinner scraps. She obliged it and it gave her a cold look, as if determining whether she'd be good for dessert, then flew off.

She began to write.

#

Something had changed between Kettlewell and Eva since they'd left Florida with the kids. It wasn't just the legal hassles, though there were plenty of those. They'd gone to Florida with a second chance -- a chance for him to be a mover again, a chance for her to have a husband who was happy with his life again.

Now he found himself sneaking past her when she was in the living room and they slept back to back in bed with as much room between them as possible.

Ada missed Lyenitchka and spent all her time in her bedroom IMing her friend or going questing with her in their favorite game, which involved Barbies, balrogs, and buying outfits. Pascal missed all the attention he had received as the designated mascot of the two little girls.

It was not a high point in the history of the Kettlewell clan.

"Hello?"

"Landon Kettlewell?"

"Hello, Freddy," he said.

"My fame precedes me," the journalist said. Kettlewell could hear the grin in his voice. That voice was unmistakable -- Kettlewell had heard it in the occassional harassing voicemail that Suzanne forwarded on.

"How are you?"

"Oh, I'm very well sir, and kind of you to ask, yes indeed. I hear you're not doing so well, though?"

"I can't complain."

"I wish you would, though." You could tell, Freddy thought he was a funny son of a bitch. "Seriously, Mr Kettlewell. I'm calling to follow up on the story of the litigation that Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are facing for unilaterally canceling the arrangement you'd made to finance their litigation. I'm hoping that you'll give me a quote that might put this into perspective. Is the defense off? Will Gibbons and Banks be sued? Are you a party to the suit?"

"Freddy?"

"Yes, Mr Kettlewell."

"I am not a child, nor am I a fool, nor am I a sucker. I'm also not a hothead. You can't goad me into saying something. You can't trick me into saying something. I haven't hung up on you yet, but I will unless you can give me a single good reason to believe that any good could possibly come out of talking to you."

"I'm going to write this story and publish it today. I can either write that you declined to comment or I can write down whatever comment you might have on the matter. You tell me which is fairer?"

"Goodbye, Freddy."

"Wait, wait! Just wait."

Kettlewell liked the pleading note in Freddy's voice.

"What is it, Freddy?"

"Can I get you to comment on the general idea of litigation investment? A lot of people followed your lead in seeking out litigation investment opportunities. There's lots of money tied up in it these days. Do incidents like the one in Florida mean that litigation investment is a dead strategy?"

"Of course not," Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn't be talking to this man, but the question drove him bonkers. He'd invented litigation investment. "Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they've accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they've got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that's changed, and so long as that's all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work."

"But aren't Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?"

Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. "Yeah, so what?"

"Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies --"

"It's about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they'd get away scot-free or they'd make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have accumulated."

"But when a big company invests in destroying another big company --"

"Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is the *last* thing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for itself. In a market, when you topple a company that's come to complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that niche for new innovators."

"And why is that better than stability? Don't the workers at these companies deserve the security that comes from their employers' survival?"

"Oh come on, Freddy. Stop beating that drum. If you're an employee and you want to get a good deal out of an employer, you're better off if you've got fifty companies you could work for than just one."

"So you're saying that if you destroy Disney with your lawsuit, the fifty thousand people who work at Walt Disney World will be able to, what, work for those little rides like your friends have built?"

"They'll find lots of work, Freddy. If we make it possible for anyone to open an innovative little ride without worrying about getting clobbered by a big old monopolist. You like big corporations so much?"

"Yes, but it's not little innovative startups that invest in these funds, is it?"

"It's they who benefit once the fund takes up their cause."

"And how's that working out for the ride people you're meant to be helping out? They rejected you, didn't they?"

Kettlewell really hated Freddy, he realized. Not just a little -- he had a deep and genuine loathing. "Oh, for fuck's sake. You don't like little companies. You don't like big companies. You don't like workers' co-ops. What do you want us to do, Freddy? You want us to just curl up under a rock and die? You sit there and make up your funny names for things; you make your snarky little commentaries, but how much good have *you* done for the world, you complaining, sniping little troll?"

The line got very quiet. "Can I quote you?"

"You certainly can," Kettlewell huffed. In for a penny, in for a pound. "You can print that, and you can kiss my ass."

"Thank you, Mr Kettlewell," Freddy said. "I'll certainly take the suggestion under advisement."

Kettlewell stood in his home office and stared at the four walls. Upstairs, Pascal was crying. He did that a lot lately. Kettlewell breathed deeply and tried to chill out.

Someone was knocking at his door, though. He answered it tentatively. The kid he found there was well-scrubbed, black, in his twenties, and smiling amiably.

"Landon Kettlewell?"

"Who's suing me?" Kettlewell could spot a process server a mile away.

The guy shrugged and made a little you-got-me smile. "Couldn't say, sir," he said, and handed Kettlewell the envelope, holding it so that the header was clearly visible to the camera set into the lapel of his shirt.

"You want me to sign something?" Kettlewell said.

"It's all right, sir," the kid said and pointed at the camera. "It's all caught on video."

"Oh, right," Kettlewell said. "Want a cup of water? Coffee?"

"I expect you're going to be too busy to entertain, sir," the kid said, and ticked a little salute off his forehead. "But you seem like a nice guy. Good luck with it all."

Kettlewell watched him go, then closed the door and walked back to his office, opening the envelope and scanning it. No surprises there -- the shareholders in the investment syndicate that had backed Lester and Perry were suing him for making false representations about his ability to speak for them.

Tjan called him a minute later.

"They got you too, huh?" Kettlewell said.

"Just left. Wish I could say it was unexpected."

"Wish I could say I blamed them," Kettlewell said.

"Hey, you should see what the ride's been doing this week since Florida went down," Tjan said. "It's totally mutated. I think it's mostly coming from the Midwest, though those Brazilians seem to keep on logging in somehow too."

"How many rides are there in South America, anyways?"

"Brazilians of them!" Tjan said with a mirthless chuckle. "Impossible to say. They've got some kind of variant on the protocol that lets a bunch of them share one network address. I think some of them aren't even physical rides, just virtual flythroughs. Some are directly linked, some do a kind of mash-up between their current norms and other rides' current norms. It's pretty weird."

Kettlewell paced. "Well, at least someone's having a good time."

"They're going to nail us to the wall," Tjan said. "Both of us. Probably the individual ride-operators, too. They're out for blood."

"It's not like they even lost much money."

"They didn't need to -- they feel like they lost the money they might have won from Disney."

"But that was twenty years away, and highly speculative."

Tjan sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. "Landon, you're a very, very good finance person. The best I've ever met, but you really need to understand that even the most speculative investor is mostly speculating about how he's going to spend all the money you're about to make him. If investors didn't count their chickens before they hatched, you'd never raise a cent."

"Yeah," Kettlewell said. He knew it, but he couldn't soak it in. He'd won and lost so many fortunes -- his own and others' -- that he'd learned to take it all in stride. Not everyone else was so sanguine.

"So what do we do about it? I don't much want to lose everything."

"You could always go back to Russia," Kettlewell said, suddenly feeling short-tempered. Why did he always have to come up with the plan? "Sorry. You know what the lawyers are going to tell us."

"Yeah. Sue Perry and Lester."

"And we told Lester we wouldn't do that. It was probably a mistake to do this at all, you know."

"No, don't say that. The idea was a really good one. You might have saved their asses if they'd played along."

"And if I'd kept the lawyers on a shorter leash."

They both sat in glum silence.

"How about if we defend ourselves by producing evidence that they reneged on a deal we'd made in good faith. Then the bastards can sue Perry and Lester and we'll still be keeping our promise."

Kettlewell tried to picture Perry in a courtroom. He'd never been the most even-keeled dude and since he'd been shot and had his arm broken and been gassed, he was almost pathological.

"I've got a better idea," he said, growing excited as it unfolded in his mind. He had that burning sensation he got sometimes when he knew he was having a real doozy. "How about if we approach each of the individual ride co-ops and see if they'll join the lawsuit separately from the umbrella org? Play it right and we'll have the lawsuit back on, without having to get our asses handed to us and without having to destroy Perry and Lester!"

Tjan laughed. "That's -- that's... Wow! Genius. Yeah, OK, right! The Boston group is in, I'll tell you that much. I'm sure we can get half a dozen more in, too. Especially if we can get Perry to agree not to block it, which I'm sure he'll do after I have a little talk with him. This'll work!"

"Sometimes the threat of total legal destruction can have a wonderful, clarifying effect on one's mind," Kettlewell said drily. "How're the kids?"

"Lyenitchka is in a sulk. She wants to go back to Florida and she wants to see Ada some more. Plus she's upset that we never made it to Disney World."

Kettlewell flopped down on his couch. "Have you seen Suzanne's blog lately?"

Tjan laughed. "Yeah. Man, she's giving it to them with both barrels. Makes me feel sorry for 'em."

"Um, you *do* know that we're suing them for everything they've got, right?"

"Well, yes. But that's just money. Suzanne's going to take their balls."

They exchanged some more niceties and promised that they'd get together face-to-face real soon and Kettlewell hung up. From behind him, he heard someone fidgeting.

"Kids, you know you aren't supposed to come into my office."

"Sounds like things have gotten started up again." It wasn't the kids, it was Eva. He sat up. She was standing with her arms folded in the doorway of his office, staring at him.

"Yeah," he said, mumbling a little. She was really beautiful, his wife, and she put up with a hell of a lot. He felt obscurely ashamed of the way that he'd treated her. He wished he could stand up and give her a warm hug. He couldn't.

Instead, she sat beside him. "Sounds like you'll be busy."

"Oh, I just need to get all the individual co-ops on board, talk to the lawyers, get the investors off my back. Have a shareholders' meeting. It'll be fine."

Her smile was little and sad. "I'm going, Landon," she said.

The blood drained from his face. She'd left him plenty, over the years. He'd deserved it. But it had always been white-hot, in the middle of a fight, and it had always ended with some kind of reconciliation. This time, it had the feeling of something planned and executed in cold blood.

He sat up and folded his hands in his lap. He didn't know what else to do.

Her smile wilted. "It's not going to work, you and me. I can't live like this, lurching from crisis to crisis. I love you too much to watch that happen. I hate what it turns me into. You're only happy when you're miserable, you know that? I can't do that forever. We'll be part of each others' lives forever, but I can't be Mrs Stressbunny forever."

None of this was new. She'd shouted variations on this at him at many times in their relationship. The difference was that now she wasn't shouting. She was calm, assured, sad but not crying. Behind her in the hallway, he saw that she'd packed her suitcase, and the little suitcases the kids used when they travelled together.

"Where will you go?"

"I'm going to stay with Lucy, from college. She's living down the peninsula in Mountain View. She's got room for the kids."

He felt like raging at her, promising her a bitter divorce and custody suit, but he couldn't do it. She was completely right, after all. Even though his first impulse was to argue, he couldn't do it just then.

So she left, and Kettlewell was alone in his nice apartment with his phone and his computer and his lawsuits and his mind fizzing with ideas.

#

The last thing Sammy wanted was a fight. Dinah's promo was making major bank for the company -- and he was taking more and more meetings in Texas with Dinah, which was a hell of a perk. They'd shipped two million of the DiaBs, and were projecting ten million in the first quarter. Park admission was soaring and the revenue from the advertising was going to cover the entire cost of the next rev of the DiaBs, which would be better, faster, smaller and cheaper.

That business with Death Waits and the new Fantasyland and the ride -- what did it matter now? He'd been so focused on the details that he'd lost track of the big picture. Walt Disney had made his empire by figuring out how to do the next thing, not wasting his energy on how to protect the last thing. It had all been a mistake, a dumb mistake, and now he was back on track. From all appearances, the lawsuits were on the verge of blowing away, anyway. Fantasyland -- he'd turned that over to Wiener, of all people, and he was actually doing some good stuff there. Really running with the idea of restoring it as a nostalgia site aimed squarely at fatkins, with lots of food and romantic kiddie rides that no kid would want to ride in the age of the break-neck coaster.

The last thing he wanted was a fight. What he wanted was to make assloads of money for the company, remake himself as a power in the organization.

But he was about to have a fight.

Hackelberg came into his office unannounced. Sammy had some of the Imagineers in, showing him prototypes of the next model, which was being designed for more reliable shipping and easier packing. Hackelberg was carrying his cane today, wearing his ice-cream suit, and was flushed a deep, angry red that seemed to boil up from his collar.

One look from his blazing eyes was enough to send the Imagineers scurrying. They didn't even take their prototype with them. Hackelberg closed the door behind them.

"Hello, Samuel," he said.

"Nice to see you. Can I offer you a glass of water? Iced tea?"

Hackelberg waved the offers away. "They're using your boxes to print their own designs," he said.

"What?"

"Those freaks with their home-made ride. They've just published a system for printing their own objects on your boxes."

Sammy rewound the conversations he'd had with the infosec people in Imagineering about what countermeasures they'd come up with, what they were proof against. He was pissed that he was finding out about this from Hackelberg. If Lester and Perry were hacking the DiaBs, they would be talking about it nonstop, running their mouths on the Internet. Back when he was his own competitive intelligence specialist, he would have known about this project the second it began. Now he was trying to find a competitive intelligence person who knew his ass from his elbow, so far without success.

"Well, that's regrettable, obviously, but so long as we're still selling the consumables..." The goop was a huge profit-maker for the company. They bought it in bulk, added a proprietary, precisely mixed chemical that the printer could check for in its hoppers, and sold it to the DiaB users for a two thousand percent markup. If you tried to substitute a competitor's goop, the machine would reject it. They shipped out new DiaBs with only half a load of goop, so that the first purchase would come fast. It was making more money, week-on-week, than popcorn.

"The crack they're distributing also disables the checking for the watermark. You can use any generic goop in them."

Sammy shook his head and restrained himself from thumping his hand down on the desk. He wanted to scream.

"We're not suing them, are we?"

"Do you think that's wise, Samuel?"

"I'm no legal expert. You tell me. Maybe we can take stronger countermeasures with the next generation --" He gestured at the prototype on his desk.

"And abandon the two million units we've shipped to date?"

Sammy thought about it. Those families might hang on to their original two million forever, or until they wore out. Maybe he should be building them to fall apart after six months of use, to force updates.

"It's just so unfair. They're ripping us off. We spent the money on those units so that we could send our message out. What the hell is wrong with those people? Are they compulsive? Do they *have* to destroy every money-making business?"

Hackelberg sat back. "Samuel, I think it's time we dealt with them."

Sammy's mind was still off on the strategies for keeping Lester and Perry at bay, though. Sure, a six-month obsolescence curve would do it. Or they could just charge money for the DiaBs now that people were starting to understand what they were for. Hell, they could just make the most compelling stuff for a DiaB to print and maybe that would be enough.

Hackelberg tapped the tip of his cane once, sharply. Sammy came back to the conversation. "So that's settled. Filing suit today. We're going to do a discovery on them that'll split them open from asshole to throat. No more of this chickenshit police stuff -- we're going to figure out every source of income these bastards have, we're going to take away their computers, we're going down to their ISPs and getting their emails and instant messages.

"And as we've seen, they're going to retaliate. That's fine. We're not treating these people as a couple of punk pirates who go down at the first sign of trouble. Not anymore. We know that these people are the competition. We're going to make an example of them. They're the first ones to attack on this front, but they won't be the last. We're vulnerable, Samuel, but we can contain that vulnerability with enough deterrent."

Hackelberg seemed to be expecting something of Sammy, but Sammy was damned if he knew what it was. "OK," he said lamely.

Hackelberg's smile was like a jack o'lantern's. "That means that we've got to be prepared for their discovery on *us*. I need to know every single detail of this DiaB project, including the things I'd find if I went through your phone records and your email. Because they *will* be going through them. They'll be putting you and your operation under the microscope."

Sammy restrained his groan. "I'll have it for you," he said. "Give me a day or two."

He saw Hackelberg out of his office as quickly as he could, then shut the door. Hackelberg wanted everything, and that meant *everything*, including his playmates from the advertising industry -- everything. He was becoming the kind of executive who emitted strategic intelligence, rather than the kind who gathered it. That wouldn't do. That wasn't the natural order of things.

He sat down at his computer. Someone had to do the competitive intelligence work around here and it looked like it would have to be him.

#

What the World Can Learn from Disney

Suzanne Church

It's easy to dismiss Disney. They make more lawsuits than rides these days. They have a reputation for Polyannaish chirpiness. Their corporate communications veer from Corporate Passive Voice Third Person to a syrupy, condescending kiddee-speak that's calculated to drive children into a frenzy of parent-nagging screeches.

But if you haven't been to a Disney Park in a while, you don't know what you're missing. I've been in Walt Disney World for a week now, and I'm here to tell you, it's pretty good. No, it's better than that -- it's *amazing*.

You've probably heard about the attention to detail: the roofline over Fantasyland features sagging, Georgian tiles, crazy chimneys, and subtly animated gargoyles (left over from a previous, goth-ier incarnation of this part of the park). You don't see this unless you raise your eyes above the busy, intriguing facades that front the rides, above the masterfully painted signage, and higher still. In other words, unless you're someone like me, looking for details, you won't spot them. They're there as pure gold-plating, they're there because someone who took pride in his work *put them there*.

It tells you something about the people behind the scenes here. People who care about their jobs work here. It's easy to forget that when you're thinking about Disney, a company whose reputation these days has more to do with whom they sue than with what they make.

But oh, what they make. There's a safari park here, something like a zoo but without that stuff that makes you feel like you're participating in some terrible exercise that strips noble animals of their dignity for our amusement. Instead, the animals here roam free, near their hairless monkey cousins, separated from them by water features, camouflaged ditches, simulated ancient ruins [more details].

That's just one of six parks, each subdivided into six or seven "lands," each land with its own unique charm, culture, and customs. That's not counting the outlying areas: two new towns, golf courses, a velodrome, a preserved marshland that you can tour in a skiff with a local naturist. In these days of cheap fabrication, it's easy to forget what you can do with several billion dollars and the kind of hubris that leads you to dredge lakes, erect papier mache mountains, and create your own toy mass-transit system.

Of course, Disney Parks are no strangers to small scale fabrication. See their tiny, clever Disney-in-a-Box devices, which I have chronicled here from the other side. On the one hand, these things are networked volumetric printers, but on the other, they are superb category-busters that have achieved an entirely justifiable -- yet still staggering -- market penetration in just a few months.

I came here ready to be bored and disgusted and fleeced of every nickel. I am disappointed. The parks are tremendous at separating people from money, it's true. They've structured each promenade and stroll so that even a walk to the bathroom can create a Mommy-Daddy-Want-It-NOW situation. For such a happy place, there certainly are a lot of weepy children and frustrated parents.

But it's hard to fault Disney for being a business that makes a lot of money. That's the point, after all. And it can't be cheap to keep the tens of thousands of "castmembers" (yes, they really do call them that, even when they're earning minimum wage and work jobs with all the glamour of a bathroom attendant) hanging around, picking up litter and confronting every new "guest" with eerily convincing cheer.

As for "bored" and "disgusted" -- not yet. Bored -- it's impossible to imagine such a thing. For starters, the world's middle classes have converged here in a sort of bourgeois UN, and you can get a lot of pleasure out of watching a Chinese "little emperor" with doting parents in tow making friends with a tiny perfect Russian mafiyeh princess whose parents flick nervously at their nicotine inhalers and scout the building facades for hidden cameras.

Of course, if people-watching isn't your thing, there are the rides themselves, which make art out of the shoebox diorama. There are luaus, indoor scuba diving with live sharks, and an island of genuinely sleazy nightclubs where you can get propositioned for some improbable acts that are hardly family friendly. These last appear to be largely populated by the "castmembers" seeking a little after-work action.

Disgusted? I think if I were a parent, there'd be parts of the experience that drove me nuts. But once you get to know the rhythm of the place, you start to see that there are navigable pathways that don't lead through any commercial areas -- fantastic adventure playgrounds, nature hikes, petting zoos, horseback rides, sports training. And for every kid who's having a blood-sugar meltdown after consuming half a quart of high-fructose lube slathered on a cinnamon bun, there's another who is standing open-mouthed with complete bodily wonder, at some stupendous spectacle, clearly forming neuronal connections of a sort that will create the permanent predisposition to an appreciation of spectacle, wonder, and beauty.

This is the kind of place where you have to love the sin and hate the sinner. The company may sue and resort to dirty tricks, but it's also chock full of real artists making real art.

If you haven't been for a visit, you should. Honestly. Oh, by all means, also go somewhere unspoiled (if you can find it). Go camping. Go to one of the rides I've written so much about. But if you want to see the bright side of what billions can do -- the stuff you never get from outside the walls of this fortress of fun -- buy a ticket.

#

The barman at Suzanne's hotel started building her a Lapu-Lapu as she came up the stairs. The drink involved a hollow pineapple, overproof rum, and an umbrella, and she'd concluded that it contained the perfect dosage of liquid CNS depressant to unwind her after a day of battle at the parks. That day she'd spent following around the troupes of role-playing actors at Disney's Hollwood Studios: a cast of a hundred costumed players who acted out a series of interlocking comedies set in the black-and-white days of Hollywood. They were fearlessly cheeky, grabbing audience members and conscripting them in their plays.

Now she was footsore and there was still a nighttime at Epcot in her future. The barman passed her the pineapple and she thumped her lanyard against the bar twice -- once to pay for the drink and once to give him a generous tip. He was gay as a goose, but fun to look at, and he flirted with her for kicks.

"Gentleman caller for you, Suzanne," he said, tilting his head. "You temptress."

She looked in the direction indicated and took in the man sitting on the bar-stool. He didn't have the look of a harried dad and he was too old to be a love-flushed honeymooner. In sensible tropical-weight slacks and a western shirt, he was impossible to place. He smiled and gave her a little wave.

"What?"

"He came in an hour ago and asked for you."

She looked back at the man. "What's your take on him?"

"I think he works here. He didn't pay with an employee card, but he acted like it."

"OK," she said, "send out a search party if I'm not back in an hour."

"Go get him, tiger," the barman said, giving her hand a squeeze.

She carried her pineapple with her and drifted down the bar.

"Hello there," she said.

"Ms Church," the man said. He had a disarming, confident smile. "My name is Sammy Page."

She knew the name, of course. The face, too, now that she thought about it. He offered her his hand. She didn't take it. He put it down, then wiped it on his trouser-leg.

"Are you having a good time?"

"A lovely time, thank you." She sipped her drink and wished it was a little more serious and intimidating. It's hard to do frosty when you're holding a rum-filled pineapple with a paper parasol.

His smile faltered. "I read your article. I can't believe I missed it. I mean, you've been here for six days and I just figured it out today? I'm a pretty incompetent villain."

She let a little smile slip out at that. "Well, it's a big Internet."

"But I *love* your stuff. I've been reading it since, well, back when I lived in the Valley. I used to get the Merc actually delivered on paper."

"You are a walking fossil, aren't you?"

He bobbed his head. "So it comes down to this. I've been very distracted with making things besides lawsuits lately, as you know. I've been putting my energy into doing stuff, not preventing stuff. It's been refreshing."

She grubbed in her pocket and came up with a little steno book and a pencil. "Do you mind if I take notes?"

He gulped. "Can this all be on background?"

She hefted her notebook. "No," she said finally. "If there's anything that needs publishing, I'm going to have to publish it. I can respect the fact that you're speaking to me with candor, but frankly, Mr Page, you haven't earned the privilege of speaking on background."

He sipped at his drink -- a more grown-up highball, with a lone ice-cube in it, maybe a Scotch and soda. "OK, right. Well, then, on the record, but candorously. I loved your article. I love your work in general. I'm really glad to have you here, because I think we make great stuff and we're making more of it than ever. Your latest post was right on the money -- we care about our work here. That's how we got to where we are."

"But you devote a lot of your resources to other projects here, don't you? I've heard about you, Mr Page. I've interviewed Death Waits." He winced and she scribbled a note, leaving him on tenterhooks while she wrote. Something cold and angry had hold of her writing arm. "I've interviewed him and heard what he has to say about this place, what you have done."

"My hands aren't the cleanest," he said. "But I'm trying to atone." He swallowed. The barman was looking at them. "Look, can I take you for a walk, maybe? Someplace more private?"

She thought about it. "Let me get changed," she said. "Meet you in the lobby in ten."

She swapped her tennis shoes for walking sandals and put on a clean shirt and long slacks, then draped a scarf over her shoulders like a shawl. Outside, the sunset was painting the lagoon bloody. She was just about to rush back down to the lobby when she stopped and called Lester, her fingers moving of their own volition.

"Hey, you," he said. "Still having fun in Mauschwitz?"

"It keeps getting weirder here, let me tell you," she said. She told him about Sammy showing up, wanting to talk with her.

"Ooh, I'm jealous," Lester said. "He's my arch-rival, after all."

"I hadn't thought of it that way. He *is* kind of cute --"

"Hey!"

"In a slimy, sharky way. Don't worry, Lester. I miss you, you know?"

"Really?"

"Really. I think I'm about done here. I'm going to come home soon."

There was a long pause, then a snuffling sound. She realized he was crying. He slurped. "Sorry. That's great, babe. I missed you."

"I -- I missed you too. Listen, I've got to go meet this guy."

"Go, go. Call me after dinner and tell me how it goes. Meanwhile, I'm going to go violate the DiaB some more."

"Channel it, that's right."

"Right on."

Sammy met her in the lobby. "I thought we could go for a walk around the lake," he said. "There's a trail that goes all the way around. It's pretty private."

She looked at the lake. At twelve o'clock, the main gates of the Magic Kingdom; at three, the retro A-frame Contemporary hotel, at nine, the wedding-cake Grand Floridian Resort.

"Lead on," she said. He led her out onto the artificial white-sand beach and around, and a moment later they were on a pathway paved with octagonal tiles, each engraved with the name of a family and a year.

"I really liked your article."

"You said that."

They walked a while longer. "It reminded me of why I came here. I worked for startups, and they were fun, but they were ephemeral. No one expected something on the Web to last for half a century. Maybe the brand survives, but who knows? I mean, who remembers Yahoo! anymore? But for sure, anything you built then would be gone in a year or two, a decade tops.

"But here..." He waved his hands. They were coming around the bend for the Contemporary now, and she could see it in all its absurd glory. It had been kept up so that it looked like it might have been erected yesterday, but the towering white A-frame structure with the monorail running through its midriff was clearly of another era. It was like a museum piece, or a bit of artillery on the field at a civil war reenactment.

"I see."

"It's about the grandiosity, the permanence. The belief in doing something -- anything -- that will endure."

"You didn't need to bring me someplace private to tell me that."

"No, I didn't." He swallowed. "It's hard because I want to tell you something that will compromise me if I say it."

"And I won't let you off the hook by promising to keep it confidential."

"Exactly."

"Well, you're on the horns of a dilemma then, aren't you?" The sun was nearly set now, and stones at their feet glittered from beneath, sprinkled with twinkling lights. It made the evening, scented with tropical flowers and the clean smell of the lake, even more lovely. A cool breeze fluffed her hair.

He groaned. She had to admit it, she was enjoying this. Was it any less than this man deserved?

"Let me try this again. I have some information that, if I pass it on to you, could save your friends down in Hollywood from terrible harm. I can only give you this information on the condition that you take great pains to keep me from being identified as the source."

They'd come to the Magic Kingdom now. Behind them, the main gates loomed, and a pufferbelly choo-choo train blew its whistle as it pulled out of the station. Happy, exhausted children ran across the plaza, heading for the ferry docks and the monorail ramps. The stones beneath her feet glittered with rainbow light, and tropical birds called to each other from the Pirates of the Caribbean Adventure Island in the middle of the lake.

"Hum," she said. The families laughed and jostled each other. "Hum. OK, one time only. This one is off the record."

Sammy looked around nervously. "Keep walking," he said. "Let's get past here and back into the private spots."

*But it's the crowds that put me in a generous mood.* She didn't say it. She'd give him this one. What harm could it do? If it was something she had to publish, she could get it from another source.

"They're going to sue your friends."

"So what else is new?"

"No, personally. They're going to the mattresses. Every trumped up charge they can think of. But the point here isn't to get the cops to raid them, it's to serve discovery on every single communication, every document, every file. Open up everything. Root through every email until they find something to hang them with."

"You say 'they' -- aren't *you* 'they'?"

It was too dark to see his face now, but she could tell the question made him uncomfortable.

"No. Not anymore." He swallowed and looked out at the lake. "Look, I'm doing something now -- something... *amazing*. The DiaB, it's breaking new ground. We're putting three-d printers into every house in America. What your friend Lester is doing, it's actually *helping* us. We're inventing a whole new --"

"Business?"

"No, not just a business. A world. It's what the New Work was missing -- a three-d printer in every living room. A killer app. There were personal computers and geeks for years before the spreadsheet came along. Then there was a reason to put one in every house. Then we got the Internet, the whole software industry. A new world. That's where we're headed. It's all I want to do. I don't want to spend the rest of my life suing people. I want to *do stuff*."

He kicked at the rushes that grew beside the trail. "I want to be remembered for that. I want *that* to be my place in the history books -- not a bunch of lawsuits."

Suzanne walked along beside him in silence for a time. "OK, so what do you want me to do about it?"

"I thought that if --" He shut up. "Look, I tried this once before. I told that Freddy bastard everything in the hopes that he'd come onto my side and help me out. He screwed me. I'm not saying you're Freddy, but --"

Suzanne stopped walking. "What do you want from me, sir? You have hardly been a friend to me and mine. It's true that you've made something very fine, but it's also true that you helped sabotage something every bit as fine. You're painting yourself as the victim of some mysterious 'them.' But as near as I can work out, the only difference between you and 'them' is that you're having a little disagreement with them. I don't like to be used as part of your corporate head-games and power-struggles."

"Fine," he said. "Fine. I deserve that. I deserve no better. Fine. Well, I tried."

Suzanne refused to soften. Grown men sulking did not inspire any sympathy in her. Whatever he wanted to tell her, it wasn't worth going into his debt.

He gave a shuddering sigh. "Well, I've taken you away from your evening of fun. Can I make it up to you? Would you like to come with me on some of my favorite rides?"

This surprised her a little, but when she thought about it, she couldn't see why not. "Sure," she said.

#

Taking a guest around Disney World was like programming a playlist for a date or a car-trip. Sammy had done it three or four times for people he was trying to win over (mostly women he was trying to screw) and he refined his technique every time.

So he took her to the Carousel of Progress. It was the oldest untouched ride in the park, a replica of the one that Walt himself had built for GE at the 1964 World's Fair. There had been attempts to update it over the years, but they'd all been ripped out and the show restored to its mid-sixties glory.

It was a revolving theater where robots danced and sang and talked through the American Century, from the last days of the coal stove up to the dawn of the space age. It had a goofy, catchy song, cornball jokes, and he relished playing guide and telling his charges about the time that the revolving theater had trapped a careless castmember in its carousel and crushed her to death. That juxtaposition of sunny, goofy American corporate optimism and the macabre realities of operating a park where a gang of half-literate minimum-wage workers spent their days shovelling the world's rich children into modified threshing machines -- it was delicious.

Suzanne's body language told him the whole story from the second she sat down, arms folded, a barely contained smirk on her lips. The lights played over the GE logo, which had acquired an even more anachronistic luster since the last time he'd been. Now that GE had been de-listed from the NYSE, it was only a matter of time before they yanked the sponsorship, but for now, it made the ride seem like it was part time-machine. Transported back to the corporate Pleistocene, when giant dinocorps thundered over the plains.

The theater rotated to the first batch of singing, wise-cracking robots. Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head bemusedly. Out came the second batch, the third -- now they were in the fabulous forties and the Andrews Sisters played while grandma and grandpa robot watched a bulging fish-eye TV and sister got vibrated by an electric slimming belt. The jokes got worse, the catchy jingle -- "There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every daaaaay!" -- got repeated with more vigor.

"It's like an American robot performance of *Triumph of the Will*," she whispered to him, and he cracked up. They were the only two in the theater. It was never full, and he himself had taken part in spitball exercises brainstorming replacements, but institutionally, Disney Parks couldn't bring itself to shut it down. There was always some excuse -- rabid fans, historical interest, competing priorities -- but it came down to the fact that no one wanted to bring the axe down on the robot family.

The final segment now, the whole family enjoying a futuristic Christmas with a high-tech kitchen whose voice-activated stove went haywire. All the robots were on stage for the segment, and they exhorted the audience to sing and clap along. Sammy gave in and clapped, and a second later, Suzanne did, too, laughing at the silliness of it all. When the house lights came up and the bored -- but unsquashed -- castmember spieled them out of the ride, Sammy had a bounce in his step and the song in his head.

"That was *terrible*!" Suzanne said.

"Isn't it great?"

"God, I'll never get that song out of my head." They moved through the flashing lights of Tomorrowland.

"Look at that -- no line on Space Mountain," Sammy said, pointing.

So they rode Space Mountain -- twice. Then they caught the fireworks. Then Sammy took her over to Tom Sawyer Island on a maintenance boat and they sat up in the tree house and watched as the park heaved and thronged, danced and ran, laughed and chattered.

"Hear the rustling?"

"Yeah, what is that, rabbits or something?"

"Giant rats." Sammy grinned in the dark. "Giant, feral rats."

"Come on, you're joking."

"Cross my heart. We drain the lake every now and then and they migrate to the island. No predators. Lots of dropped french fries -- it's ratopia here. They get as big as cats. Bold little fuckers too. No one likes to be here alone at night."

"What about us?"

"We're together."

The rustling grew louder and they held their breath. A bold rat like a raccoon picked its way across the path below them. Then two more. Suzanne shivered and Sammy did, too. They were huge, feral, menacing.

"Want to go?"

"Hell *yes*," she said. She fumbled in her purse and came out with a bright little torch that shone like a beacon. You weren't supposed to use bright lights on the island after hours while the rest of the park was open, but Sammy was glad of it.

Back on the mainland, they rode Big Thunder Mountain and moseyed over to the new, half-rebuilt Fantasyland. The zombie maze was still open, and they got lost in it amid the groans, animatronic shamblers, and giggling kids running through the hedges.

Something happened in the maze. Between entering it and leaving it, they lost their cares. Instead of talking about the park and Hackelberg, they talked about ways of getting out of the maze, talked about which zombie was coming next, about the best zombie movies they'd ever seen, about memorable Halloweens. As they neared the exit, they started to strategize about the best ride to go on next. Suzanne had done the Haunted Mansion twice when she first arrived and now --

"Come on, it's such a cliche," Sammy said. "Anyone can be a Haunted Mansion fan. It's like being a Mickey fan. It takes real character to be a Goofy fan."

"You're a Goofy fan, I take it?"

"Indeed. And I'm also a Jungle Cruise man."

"More corny jokes?"

"'We've been *dying* to have you' -- talk about cornball humor."

They rode both. The park was closing, and all around them, people were streaming away from the rides. No lines at all, not even in front of the rollercoasters, not even in front of Dumbo, not even in front of the ultra-violent fly-over of the world of the zombies (nee Peter Pan's Flight, and a perennial favorite).

"You know, I haven't just *enjoyed* the park like this in years." He was wearing a huge foam Goofy hat that danced and bobbed on his head, trying to do little pas-de-deux with the other Goofy hats in the vicinity. It also let out the occassional chuckle and snatch of song.

"Shut up," Suzanne said. "Don't talk about magic. Live magic."

They closed the park, letting themselves get herded off of Main Street along with the last stragglers. He looked over his shoulder as they moved through the arches under the train-station. The night crew was moving through the empty Main Street, hosing down the streets, sweeping, scrubbing. As he watched, the work lights came on, throwing the whole thing into near-daylight illumination, making it seem less like an enchanted wonderland and more like a movie set, an artifice. A sham.

It was one in the morning and he was exhausted. And Hackelberg was going to sue.

"Sammy, what do you want me to do, blackmail him?"

"I don't know -- sure. Why not? You could call him and say, 'I hear you're working on this lawsuit, but don't you think it's hypocritical when you've been doing all this bad stuff --'"

"I don't blackmail people."

"Fine. Tell your friends, then. Tell some lawyers. That could work."

"Sammy, I think we're going to have to fight this suit on its merits, not on the basis of some sneaky intel. I appreciate the risk you're putting yourself to --"

"We ripped off some of Lester's code for the DiaB." He blurted it out, not believing he was hearing himself say it. "I didn't know it at the time. The libraries were on the net and my guys were in a hurry, and they just imported it into the build and left it there -- they rewrote it with the second shipment, but we put out a million units running a library Lester wrote for volumetric imaging. It was under some crazy viral open source license and we were supposed to publish all our modifications, and we never did."

Suzanne threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. Sammy found himself laughing along with her.

"OK," she said. "OK. That's a good one. I'll tell Lester about it. Maybe he'll want to use it. Maybe he'll want to sue."

Sammy wanted to ask her if she'd keep his name out of it, but he couldn't ask. He'd gone to Hackelberg with the info as soon as he'd found out and they'd agreed to keep it quiet. The Imagineers responsible had had a very firm talking to, and had privately admitted to a curious and aghast Sammy over beers that everyone everywhere did this all the time, that it was so normal as to be completely unremarkable. He was pretty sure that a judge wouldn't see it that way.

Suzanne surprised him by giving him a strong, warm hug. "You're not the worst guy in the world, Sammy Page," she said. "Thanks for showing me around your park."

#

Kettlewell had been almost pathetic in his interest in helping Lester out. Lester got the impression that he'd been sitting around his apartment, moping, ever since Eva had taken the kids and gone. As Lester unspooled the story for him -- Suzanne wouldn't tell him how she'd found this out, and he knew better than to ask -- Kettlewell grew more and more excited. By the time Lester was through, he was practically slobbering into the phone.

"Oh, oh, oh, this is going to be a *fun* phoner," he said.

"You'll do it, then? Even after everything?"

"Does Perry know you've called me?"

Lester swallowed. "No," he said. "I don't talk to Perry much these days."

Kettlewell sighed. "What the hell am I going to do with you two?"

"I'm sorry," Lester said.

"Don't be sorry. Be happy. Someone should be happy around here."

#

Herve Guignol chaired the executive committee. Sammy had known him for years. They'd come east together from San Jose, where Guignol had run the entertainment side of eBay. They'd been recruited by Disney Parks at the same time, during the hostile takeover and breakup, and they'd had their share of nights out, golf games, and stupid movies together.

But when Guignol was wearing his chairman's hat, it was like he was a different person. The boardroom was filled with huge, ergonomic chairs, the center of the table lined with bottles of imported water and trays of fanciful canapes in the shapes of Disney characters. Sammy sat to Guignol's left and Hackelberg sat to his right.

Guignol brought the meeting to order and the rest of the committee stopped chatting and checking email and looked expectant. At the touch of a button, the door swung shut with an authoritative clunk and shutters slid down over the window.

"Welcome, and thank you for attending on such short notice. You know Augustus Hackelberg; he has something to present to you."

Hackelberg climbed to his feet and looked out at them. He didn't look good.

"An issue has arisen --" Sammy loved the third person passive voice that dominated corporate meetings. Like the issue had arisen all on its own, spontaneously. "A decision that was taken has come back to bite us." He explained about the DiaBs and the code, laying it out more or less as it happened, though of course he downplayed his involvement in advising Sammy to go ahead and ship.

The committee asked a few intense questions, none directed at Sammy, who kept quiet, though he instinctively wanted to defend his record. They took a break after an hour, and Sammy found himself in a corner with Guignol.

"What do you think?" Sammy asked him.

Guignol grimaced. "I think we're pretty screwed. Someone is going to have to take a fall for this, you know. It's going to cost us a fortune."

Sammy nodded. "Well, unless we just settle with them," he said. "You know -- we drop the suit we just filed and they drop theirs...." He had hoped that this would come out on its own, but it was clear that Hackelberg wasn't going to offer it up himself. He was too in love with the idea of getting his hands on Perry and Lester.

Guignol rocked his head from side to side. "You think they'd go for it?"

Sammy dropped his voice to a whisper and turned away from the rest of the room to confound any lip-readers. "I think they've *offered* to do that."

Guignol cut his eyes over to Hackelberg and Sammy nodded, imperceptibly.

Guignol moved away, leaving Sammy to eat a Mickey head built from chunks of salmon and hamachi. Guignol moved among the committee, talking to a few members. Sammy recognized the behavior -- consolidating power. Hard to remember that this was the guy he'd played savage, high-stakes games of putt-putt golf with.

The meeting reconvened. No one looked at Sammy. They all looked at Hackelberg.

"What about trying to settle the suit?" Guignol said.

Hackelberg flushed. "I don't know if that's possible --"

"What about if we offer to settle in exchange for dropping the suit we've just filed?"

Hackelberg's hands squeezed the side of the table. "I don't think that that would be a wise course of action. This is the opportunity we've been waiting for -- the chance to crack them wide open and see what's going on inside. Discover just what they've taken from us and how. Out them for all their bad acts."

Guignol nodded. "OK, that's true. Now, as I understand it, every DiaB we shipped with this Banks person's code on it is a separate act of infringement. We shipped a million of them. What's the potential liability per unit?"

"Courts usually award --"

Guignol knocked quietly on the table. "What's the *potential liability* -- what's the size of the bill a court *could* hand down, if a jury was involved? If, say, this became part of someone's litigation portfolio."

Hackelberg looked away. "It's up to five hundred thousand per separate act of infringement."

Guignol nodded. "So, we're looking at a ceiling on the liability at $500 billion, then?"

"Technically, yes. But --"

"I propose that we offer a settlement, quid-pro-quo with this Banks person. We drop our suit if he indemnifies us from damages for his."

"Seconded," said someone at the table. Things were picking up steam. Sammy bit the inside of his cheek to keep his smile in check.

"Wait," Hackelberg said. "Gentlemen and lady, please. While it's true that damages can technically run to $500,000 per infringement, that simply isn't done. Not to entities like this firm. Listen, we *wrote* that law so we could sue people who took from *us*. It won't be used against us. We will face, at worst, a few hundred dollars per act of infringement. Still a sizable sum of money, but in the final analysis --"

"Thank you," Guignol said. "All in favor of offering a settlement?"

It was unanimous -- except for Hackelberg.

#

Sammy got his rematch with Hackelberg when the quarterly financials came out. It was all that black ink, making him giddy.

"I don't want to be disrespectful," he said, knowing that in Hackelberg's books, there could be nothing more disrespectful than challenging him. "But we need to confront some business realities here."

Hackelberg's office was nothing like Sammy had expected -- not a southern gentleman's study lined with hunting trophies and framed ancestral photos. It was as spare as the office of a temp, almost empty save for a highly functional desk, built-in bookcases lined with law-books, and a straight-backed chair. It was ascetic, severe, and it was more intimidating than any dark-wood den could hope to be.

Hackelberg's heavy eyelids drooped a little, the corners of his eyes going down with them. It was like staring down a gator. Sammy resisted the urge to look away.

"The numbers don't lie. DiaB is making us a fortune, and most of it's coming from the platform, not the goop and not the increased visitor numbers. We're making money because other people are figuring out ways to use our stuff. It's our fastest-growing revenue source and if it continues, we're going to end up being a DiaB company with a side-business in theme-parks.

"That's the good news. The bad news is that these characters in the ghost mall have us in their crosshairs. They're prying us open faster than we can lock ourselves down. But here's another way of looking at it: every time they add another feature to the DiaB, they make owning a DiaB more attractive, which makes it easier for us to sell access to the platform to advertisers."

Hackelberg held up his hands. "Samuel, I think I've heard enough. Your job is to figure out new businesses for us to diversify into. My job is to contain our liability and protect our brand and investors. It sounds a lot to me like you're saying that you want me to leave off doing my job so that you can do yours."

Sammy squirmed. "No, that's not it at all. We both want to protect the business. I'm not saying that you need to give these guys a free ride. What I'm saying is, suing these guys is *not* good for our business. It costs us money, goodwill -- it distracts us from doing our jobs."

Hackelberg leaned back and looked coolly into Sammy's eyes. "What are you proposing as an alternative, then?"

The idea had come to Sammy in the shower one morning, as he mentally calculated the size of his coming quarterly bonus. A great idea. Out of the box thinking. The right answer to the question that no one had thought to ask. It had seemed so *perfect* then. Now, though --

"I think we should buy them out."

Hackelberg's thin, mirthless grin made his balls shrivel up.

Sammy held up his hands. "Here, look at this. I drew up some figures. What they're earning. What we earn from them. Growth estimates over the next five quarters. It's not just some random idea I had in the shower. This makes *sense*." He passed over a sheaf of papers, replete with pie-charts.

Hackelberg set it down in the center of his desk, perfectly square to the corners. He flipped through the first five pages, then squared the stack up again.

"You've done a lot of work here, Samuel. I can really see that."

He got up from his straight-backed chair, lifted Sammy's papers between his thumb and forefinger, and crossed to the wall. There was a shredder there, its maw a wide rectangle, the kind of thing that you can stick entire hardcover books (or hard drives) into. Calmly, Hackelberg fed Sammy's paper into the shredder, fastidiously holding the paper-clipped corner between thumb and forefinger, then dropping the corner in once the rest had been digested.

"I won't ask you for your computer," he said, settling back into his chair. "But I expect that you will back up your other data and then send the hard-drive to IT to be permanently erased. I don't want any record of this, period. I want this done by the end of business today."

Sammy's mouth hung open. He shut it. Then he opened it again.

Abruptly, Hackelberg stood, knocking his chair to the ground behind him.

"Not one word, do you understand me? Not one solitary word, you goddamned idiot! We're in the middle of being sued by these people. I *know* you know this, since it's your fault that it's happening. I know that you know that the stakes are the *entire* company. Now, say a jury were to discover that we were considering buying these assholes out? Say a jury were to decide that our litigation was a base stratagem to lower the asking price for their, their *company* --" The word dripped with sarcasm -- "what do you suppose would happen? If you had the sense of a five year old, you'd have known better than to do this. Good Christ, Page, I should have security escort you to the gate.

"Turn on your heel and go weep in the corridor. Don't stand in my office for one more second. Get your computer to IT by 2PM. I will check. That goes for anyone you worked with on this, anyone who has a copy of this information. Now, leave." Sammy stood rooted in place. "LEAVE, you ridiculous little dog's-pizzle, get out of my sight!"

Sammy drew in a deep breath. He thought about saying something like, *You can't talk to me like that*, but it was very likely that Hackelberg could talk to him just like that. He felt light-headed and a little sick, and he backed slowly out of the office.

Standing in the corridor, he began to shake. He pounded the elevator button, and felt the eyes of Hackelberg's severe secretary burning into his back. Abruptly, he turned away and yanked open the staircase door so hard it smashed into the wall with a loud bang. He took the stairs in a rush of desperate claustrophobia, wanting more than anything to get outside, to breathe in the fresh air.

He stumbled on the way down, falling a couple of steps and smashing into the wall on the landing. He stood, pressed against the wall, the cold cinder block on his cheek, which felt like it might be bruised. The pain was enough to bring him back to his senses.

This is ridiculous. He had the right answer. Hackelberg was wrong. Hackelberg didn't run the company. Yes, it was hard to get anything done without his sign-off, but it wasn't impossible. Going behind Hackelberg's back to the executive committee could cost him his job, of course.

Of course.

Sammy realized that he didn't actually *care* if he lost his job. Oh, the thought made his chest constrict and thoughts of living in a refrigerator box materialize in his mind's eye, but beyond that, he really didn't care. It was such a goddamned roller-coaster ride -- Sammy smiled grimly at the metaphor. You guess right, you end up on top. You guess wrong, you bottom out. He spent half his career lording it over the poor guessers and the other half panicking about a bad guess he'd made. He thought of Perry and Lester, thought of that night in Boston. He'd killed their ride and the party had gone on all the same. They had something, in that crazy shantytown, something pure and happy, some camaraderie that he'd always assumed he'd get someday, but that had never materialized.

If this was his dream job, how much worse would unemployment really be?

He would go to the executive committee. He would not erase his numbers. He set off for his office, moving quickly, purposefully, head up. A last stand, how exciting, why not?

He piloted the little golf-cart down the back road and was nearly at his building's door when he spotted the security detail. Three of them, in lightweight Disney cop uniforms, wearing ranger hats and looking around alertly. Hackelberg must have sent them there to make sure that he followed through with deleting his data.

He stopped the golf cart abruptly and reversed out of the driveway before the guards spotted him. He needed to get his files somewhere that Hackelberg wouldn't be able to retrieve them. He zipped down the service roads, thinking furiously.

The answer occurred to him in the form of a road-sign for the Polynesian hotel. He turned up its drive and parked the golf-cart. As he stepped out, he removed his employee badge and untucked his shirt. Now he was just another sweaty fresh-arrived tourist, Dad coming in to rendezvous with Mom and the kids, back from some banal meeting that delayed his arrival, hasn't even had time to change into a t-shirt.

He headed straight for the sundries store and bought a postage-paid Walt Disney World postcard with a little magnetic patch mounted on one corner. You filled up the memory with a couple hours' worth of video and as many photos as you wanted and mailed it off. The pixelated display on the front played a slide show of the images -- at least once a year, some honeymoon couple would miss this fact and throw a couple racy bedroom shots in the mix, to the perennial delight of the mail room.

He hastily wrote some banalities about the great time he and the kids were having in Disney World, then he opened his computer and looked up the address that the Church woman had checked in under. He addressed it, simply, to "Suzanne," to further throw off the scent, then he slipped it into a mail-slot with a prayer to the gods of journalist shield laws.

He walked as calmly as he could back to his golf-cart, clipping on his employee badge and tucking his shirt back in. Then he motored calmly to his office building. The Disney cops were sweating under the mid-day sun.

"Mr Page?"

"Yes," he said.

"I'm to take your computer to IT, sir."

"I don't think so," Sammy said, with perfect calm. "I think we'll GO up to my office and call a meeting of the executive committee instead."

The security guard was young, Latino, and skinny. His short back-and-sides left his scalp exposed to the sun. He took his hat off and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, exposing a line of acne where his hat-band irritated the skin. It made Sammy feel sorry for the kid -- especially considering that Sammy earned more than 20 times the kid's salary.

"This really isn't your job, I know," Sammy said, wondering where all this sympathy for the laboring classes had come from, anyway? "I don't want to make it hard for you. We'll go inside. You can hang on to the computer. We'll talk to some people. If they tell you to go ahead, you go ahead. Otherwise, we go see them, all right?"

He held his computer out to the kid, who took it.

"Let's go up to my office now," he said.

The kid shook his head. "I'm supposed to take this --"

"I know, I know. But we have a deal." The kid looked like he would head out anyway. "And there are backups in my office, so you need to come and get those, too."

That did it. The kid looked a little grateful as they went inside, where the air conditioning was blowing icy cold.

"You should have waited in the lobby, Luis," Sammy said, reading the kid's name off his badge. "You must be boiled."

"I had instructions," Luis said.

Sammy made a face. "They don't sound like very reasonable instructions. All the more reason to sort this out, right?"

Sammy had his secretary get Luis a bottle of cold water and a little plate of grapes and berries out of the stash he kept for his visitors, then he called Guignol from his desk phone.

"It's Sammy. I need to call an emergency meeting of the exec committee," he said without preamble.

"This is about Hackelberg, isn't it?"

"He's already called you?"

"He was very persuasive."

"I can be persuasive, too. Give me a chance."

"You know what will happen if you push this?"

"I might save the company."

"You might," Guignol said. "And you might --"

"I know," Sammy said. "What the hell, it's only a career."

"You can't keep your data -- Hackelberg is right about that."

"I can send all the backups and my computer to your office right now."

"I was under the impression that they were all on their way to IT for disposal."

"Not yet. There's a security castmember in my office with me named Luis. If you want to call dispatch and have them direct him to bring this stuff to you instead --"

"Sammy, do you understand what you're doing here?"

Sammy suppressed a mad giggle. "I do," he said. "I understand exactly what I'm doing. I want to help you all understand that, too."

"I'm calling security dispatch now."

A moment later, Luis's phone rang and the kid listened intently, nodding unconsciously. Once he'd hung up, Sammy passed him his backups, hardcopy and computer. "Let's go," he said.

"Right," Luis said, and led the way.

It was a short ride to the casting office building, where Guignol had his office. The wind felt terrific on his face, drying his sweat. It had been a long day.

When they pulled up, Sammy let Luis lead the way again, badging in behind him, following him up to the seventh-floor board-room. at the end of the Gold Coast where the most senior offices were.

Guignol met them at the door and took the materials from Luis, then ushered Sammy in. Sammy caught Luis's eye, and Luis surprised him by winking and slipping him a surreptitious thumbs-up, making Sammy feel like they shared a secret.

There were eight on the executive committee, but they travelled a lot. Sammy had expected to see no more than four. There were two. And Hackelberg, of course. The lawyer was the picture of saurian calm.

Sammy sat down at the table and helped himself to a glass of water, watching a ring pool on the table's polished and waxed wooden surface.

"Samuel," Hackelberg said, shaking his head. "I hoped it wouldn't come to this."

Sammy took a deep breath, looking for that don't-give-a-shit calm that had suffused him before. It was there still, not as potent, but there. He drew upon it.

"Let's put this to the committee, shall we? I mean, we already know how we feel."

"That won't be necessary," Hackelberg said. "The committee has already voted on this."

Sammy closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked at Hackelberg, who was smiling grimly, a mean grin that went all the way to the corners of his eyes.

Sammy looked around at Guignol and the committee members. They wouldn't meet his eye. Guignol gestured Luis into the room and handed him Sammy's computer, papers, and backups. He leaned in and spoke quietly to him. Luis turned and left.

Guignol cleared his throat. "There's nothing else to discuss, then," he said. "Thank you all for coming."

In his heart, Sammy had known this was coming. Hackelberg would beat him to the committee -- never let him present his side. Watching the lawyer get up stiffly and leave with slow, dignified steps, Sammy had a moment's intuition about what it must be like to be that man -- possessed of a kind of cold, furious power that came from telling everyone that not obeying you to the letter would put them in terrible danger. He knew that line of reasoning: It was the same one he got from the TSA at the airport before they bent him over and greased him up. *You can't understand the grave danger we all face. You must obey me, for only I can keep it at bay.*

He waited for the rest of the committee to file out. None of them would meet his eye. Then it was just him and Guignol. Sammy raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands, miming *What happens now?*

"You won't be able to get anything productive done until IT gets through with your computer. Take some time off. Call up Dinah and see if she wants to grab some holiday time."

"We split," Sammy said. He drank his water and stood up. "I've just got one question before I go."

Guignol winced but stood his ground. "Go ahead," he said.

"Don't you want to know what the numbers looked like?"

"It's not my job to overrule legal --"

"We'll get to that in a second. It's not the question. The question is, don't you *want to know*?"

Guignol sighed. "You know I want to know. Of course I want to know. This isn't about me and what I want, though. It's about making sure we don't endanger the shareholders --"

"So ignoring this path, sticking our heads in the sand, that's *good* for the shareholders?"

"No, of course it's not good for the shareholders. But it's better than endangering the whole company --"

Sammy nodded. "Well, how about if we both take some time off and drive down to Hollywood. It'd do us some good."

"Sammy, I've got a job to do --"

"Yeah, but without your computer..."

Guignol looked at him. "What did you do?"

"It's not what I did. It's what I might have done. I'm going to be a good boy and give Hackelberg a list of everyone I might have emailed about this. All those people are losing their computers to the big magnet at IT."

"But you never emailed me about this --"

"You sure? I might have. It's the kind of thing I might have done. Maybe your spam-filter ate it. You never know. That's what IT's for."

Guignol looked angry for a moment, then laughed. "You are such a shithead. Fuck that lawyer asshole anyway. What are you driving these days?"

"Just bought a new Dell Luminux," Sammy said, grinning back. "Rag-top."

"When do we leave?"

"I'll pick you up at 6AM tomorrow. Beat the morning traffic."

#

Suzanne was getting sick of breakfast in bed. It was hard to imagine that such a thing was possible, but there it was. Lester stole out from between the covers before 7AM every day, and then, half an hour later, he was back with a laden tray, something new every day. She'd had steaks, burritos, waffles, home-made granola, fruit-salad with Greek yogurt, and today there were eggs Benedict with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. The tray always came with a French press of fresh-ground Kona coffee, a cloth napkin, and her computer, so she could read the news.

In theory, this was a warm ritual that ensured that they had quality time together every day, no matter what. In practice, Lester was so anxious about the food and whether she was enjoying it that she couldn't really enjoy it. Plus, she wasn't a fatkins, so three thousand calorie breakfasts weren't good for her.

Most of all, it was the pressure to be a happy couple, to have cemented over the old hurts and started anew. She felt it every moment, when Lester climbed into the shower with her and soaped her back, when he brought home flowers, and when he climbed into bed with her in the morning to eat breakfast with her.

She picked at her caviar and blini glumly and poked at her computer. Beside her, Lester hoovered up three thousand calories' worth of fried dough and clattered one-handed on his machine.

"This is delicious, babe, thanks," she said, with as much sincerity as she could muster. It was really generous and nice of him to do this. She was just a bitter old woman who couldn't be happy no matter what was going on in her life.

There was voicemail on her computer, which was unusual. Most people sent her email. This originated from a pay phone on the Florida Turnpike.

"Ms Church, this is -- ah, this is a person whom you recently had the acquaintance of, while on your holidays. I have a confidential matter to discuss with you. I'm travelling to your location with a colleague today and should arrive mid-morning. I hope you can make some time to meet with me."

She listened to it twice. Lester leaned over.

"What's that all about?"

"You're not going to believe it. I think it's that Disney guy, the guy I told you about. The one Death used to work for."

"He's coming *here*?"

"Apparently."

"Woah. Don't tell Perry."

"You think?"

"He'd tear that guy's throat out with his teeth." Lester took a bite of blini. "I might help."

Suzanne thought about Sammy. He hadn't been the sort of person she could be friends with, but she'd known plenty of his kind in her day, and he was hardly the worst of the lot. He barely rated above average on the corporate psychopath meter. Somewhere in there, there was a real personality. She'd seen it.

"Well, then I guess I'd better meet with him alone."

"It sounds like he wants a doctor-patient meeting anyway."

"Or confessor-penitent."

"You think he'll leak you something."

"That's a pretty good working theory when it comes to this kind of call."

Lester ate thoughtfully, then reached over and hit a key on her computer, replaying the call.

"He sounds, what, giddy?"

"That's right, he does, doesn't he. Maybe it's good news."

Lester laughed and took away her dishes, and when he came back in, he was naked, stripped and ready for the shower. He was a very handsome man, and he had a devilish grin as he whisked the blanket off of her.

He stopped at the foot of the bed and stared at her, his grin quirking in a way she recognized instantly. She didn't have to look down to know that he was getting hard. In the mirror of his eyes, she was beautiful. She could see it plainly. When she looked into the real mirror at the foot of the bed, draped with gauzy sun-scarves and crusted around the edges with kitschy tourist magnets Lester brought home, she saw a saggy, middle-aged woman with cottage-cheese cellulite and saddle-bags.

Lester had slept with more fatkins girls than she could count, women made into doll-like mannequins by surgery and chemical enhancements, women who read sex manuals in public places and boasted about their Kegel weight-lifting scores.

But when he looked at her like that, she knew that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever loved, that he would do anything for her. That he loved her as much as he could ever love anyone.

*What the hell was I complaining about?* she thought as he fell on her like a starving man.

#

She met Sammy in their favorite tea-room, the one perched up on a crow's nest four storeys up a corkscrew building whose supplies came up on a series of dumbwaiters and winches that shrouded its balconies like vines.

She staked out the best table, the one with the panoramic view of the whole shantytown, and ordered a plate of the tiny shortbread cakes that were the house specialty, along with a gigantic mug of nonfat decaf cappuccino.

Sammy came up the steps red-faced and sweaty, wearing a Hawai'ian shirt and Bermuda shorts, like some kind of tourist. Or like he was on holidays? Behind him came a younger man, with severe little designer glasses, dressed in the conventional polo-shirt and slacks uniform of the corporate exec on a non-suit day.

Suzanne sprinkled an ironic wave at them and gestured to the mismatched school-room chairs at her table. The waitress -- Shayna -- came over with two glasses of water and a paper napkin dispenser. The men thanked her and mopped their faces and drank their water.

"Good drive?"

Sammy nodded. His friend looked nervous, like he was wondering what might have been swimming in his water glass. "This is some place."

"We like it here."

"Is there, you know, a bathroom?" the companion asked.

"Through there." Suzanne pointed.

"How do you deal with the sewage around here?"

"Sewage? Mr Page, sewage is *solved*. We feed it into our generators and the waste heat runs our condenser purifiers. There was talk of building one big one for the whole town, but that required way too much coordination and anyway, Perry was convinced that having central points of failure would be begging for a disaster. I wrote a series on it. If you'd like I can send you the links."

The Disney exec made some noises and ate some shortbread, peered at the chalk-board menu and ordered some Thai iced tea.

"Look, Ms Church -- Suzanne -- thank you for seeing me. I would have understood completely if you'd told me to go fuck myself."

Suzanne smiled and made a go-on gesture.

"Before my friend comes back from the bathroom, before we meet up with anyone from your side, I just want you to know this. What you've done, it's changed the world. I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for you."

He had every appearance of being completely sincere. He was a little road-crazed and windblown today, not like she remembered him from Orlando. What the hell had happened to him? What was he here for?

His friend came back and Sammy said, "I ordered you a Thai iced tea. This is Suzanne Church, the writer. Ms Church, this is Herve Guignol, co-director of the Florida regional division of Disney Parks."

Guignol was more put-together and stand-offish than Sammy. He shook her hand and made executive sounding grunts at her. He was young, and clearly into playing the role of exec. He reminded Suzanne of fresh Silicon Valley millionaires who could go from pizza-slinging hackers to suit-wearing biz-droids who bullshitted knowledgeably about EBITDA overnight.

*What the hell are you two here for?*

"Mr Page --"

"Sammy, call me Sammy, please. Did you get my postcard?"

"That was from you?" She'd not been able to make heads or tails of it when it arrived in the mail the day before and she'd chucked it out as part of some viral marketing campaign she didn't want to get infected by.

"You got it?"

"I threw it out."

Sammy went slightly green.

"But it'll still be in the trash," she said. "Lester never takes it out, and I haven't."

"Um, can we go and get it now, all the same?"

"What's on it?"

Sammy and Guignol exchanged a long look. "Let's pretend that I gave you a long run-up to this. Let's pretend that we spent a lot of time with me impressing on you that this is confidential, and not for publication. Let's pretend that I charmed you and made sure you understood how much respect I have for you and your friends here --"

"I get it," Suzanne said, trying not to laugh. *Not for publication* -- really!

"OK, let's pretend all that. Now I'll tell you: what's on that postcard is the financials for a Disney Parks buyout of your friends' entire operation here. DiaBolical, the ride, all of it."

Suzanne had been expecting a lot of things, but this wasn't one of them. It was loopy. Daffy. Not just weird, but inconceivable. As though he'd said, "I sent you our plans to carve your portrait on the moon's surface with a green laser." But she was a pro. She kept her face still and neutral, and calmly swallowed her cappuccino.

"I see."

"And there are -- there are people at Disney who feel like this idea is so dangerous that it doesn't even warrant discussion. That it should be suppressed."

Guignol cleared his throat. "That's the consensus," he said.

"And normally, I'd say, hey, sure, the consensus. That's great. But I'll tell you, I drew up these numbers because I was curious, I'm a curious guy. I like to think laterally, try stuff that might seem silly at first. See where it goes. I've had pretty good instincts."

Guignol and Suzanne snorted at the same time.

"And an imperfect record," Sammy said. Suzanne didn't want to like him, but there was something forthright about him that she couldn't help warming to. There was no subtlety or scheming in this guy. Whatever he wanted, you could see it right on his face. Maybe he was a psycho, but he wasn't a sneak.

"So I ran these numbers for my own amusement, to see what they would look like. Assume that your boys want, say, 30 times gross annual revenue for a buyout. Say that this settles our lawsuit -- not theirs, just ours, so we don't have to pay for the trademark suit to go forward. Assume that they generate one DiaBolical-scale idea every six months --" Suzanne found herself nodding along, especially at this last one. "Well, you make those assumptions and you know what comes out of it?"

Suzanne let the numbers dance behind her own eyelids. She'd followed all the relevant financials closely for years, so closely that they were as familiar as her monthly take-home and mortgage payments had been, back when she had a straight job and a straight life.

"Well, you'd make Lester and Perry *very* wealthy," she said. "After they vested out, they'd be able to live off the interest alone."

Sammy nodded judiciously. His sidekick looked alarmed. "Yup. And for us?"

"Well, assuming your last quarterly statement was accurate --"

"We were a little conservative," Sammy said. The other man nodded reflexively.

*You were very conservative,* she thought. *DiaB's making you a fortune and you didn't want to advertise that to the competition.*

"Assuming that, well, you guys earn back your investment in, what, 18 months?"

"I figure a year. But 18 months would be good."

"If you vest the guys out over three years, that means --"

"100 percent ROI, plus or minus 200 percent," Sammy said. "For less money than we'll end up spending on our end of the lawsuit."

Guignol was goggling at them both. Sammy drank his Thai iced-tea, slurping noisily. He signalled for another one.

"And you sent me these financials on a postcard?"

"There was some question about whether they'd be erased before I could show them to anyone, and I knew there was no way I'd be given the chance to re-create them independently. It seemed prudent to have a backup copy."

"A backup copy in my hands?"

"Well, at least I knew you wouldn't give it up without a fight." Sammy shrugged and offered her a sunny smile.

"We'd better go rescue that postcard from the basket before Lester develops a domestic instinct and takes out the trash, then," Suzanne said, pushing away from the table. Shayna brought the bill and Sammy paid it, overtipping by a factor of ten, which endeared him further to Suzanne. She couldn't abide rich people who stiffed on the tip.

Suzanne walked them through the shantytown, watching their reactions closely. She liked to take new people here. She'd witnessed its birth and growth, then gone away during its adolescence, and now she got to enjoy its maturity. Crowds of kids ran screeching and playing through the streets, adults nodded at them from their windows, wires and plumbing and antennas crowded the skies above them. The walls shimmered with murals and graffiti and mosaics.

Sammy treated it like he had his theme park, seeming to take in every detail with a connoisseur's eye; Guignol was more nervous, clearly feeling unsafe amid the cheerful lawlessness. They came upon Francis and a gang of his kids, building bicycles out of stiffened fabric and strong monofilament recycled from packing crates.

"Ms Church," Francis said gravely. He'd given up drinking, maybe for good, and he was clear-eyed and charming in his engineer's coveralls. The kids -- boys *and* girls, Suzanne noted approvingly -- continued to work over the bikes, but they were clearly watching what Francis was up to.

"Francis, please meet Sammy and his colleague, Herve. They're here for a story I'm working on. Gentlemen, Francis is the closest thing we have to a mayor around here."

Francis shook hands all around, but Sammy's attention was riveted on the bicycles.

Francis picked one up with two fingers and handed it to him. "Like it? We got the design from a shop in Liberia, but we made our own local improvements. The trick is getting the stiffener to stay liquid long enough to get the fabric stretched out in the right proportion."

Sammy took the frame from him and spun it in one hand like a baton. "And the wheels?"

"Mostly we do solids, which stay in true longer. We use the carbon stiffener on a pre-cut round of canvas or denim, then fit a standard tire. They go out of true after a while. You just apply some solvent to them and they go soft again and you re-true them with a compass and a pair of tailor's shears, then re-stiffen them. You get maybe five years of hard riding out of a wheel that way."

Sammy's eyes were round as saucers. He took one of the proffered wheels and spun it between opposing fingertips. Then, grinning, he picked up another wheel and the bike-frame and began to *juggle* them, one-two-three, hoop-la! Francis looked amused, rather than pissed -- giving up drink had softened his temper. His kids stopped working and laughed. Sammy laughed too. He transferred the wheels to his left hand, then tossed the frame high the air, spun around and caught it and then handed it all back to Francis. The kids clapped and he took a bow.

"I didn't know you had it in you," Guignol said, patting him on the shoulder.

Sammy, sweating and grinning like a fool, said, "Yeah, it's not something I get a lot of chances to do around the office. But did you see that? It was light enough to juggle! I mean, how exciting is all this?" He swept his arm around his head. "Between the sewage and the manufacturing and all these kids --" He broke off. "What do you do about education, Suzanne?"

"Lots of kids bus into the local schools, or ride. But lots more home-school these days. We don't get a very high caliber of public school around here."

"Might that have something to do with all the residents who don't pay property tax?" Guignol said pointedly.

Suzanne nodded. "I'm sure it does," she said. "But it has more to do with the overall quality of public education in this state. 47th in the nation for funding."

They were at her and Lester's place now. She led them through the front door and picked up the trash-can next to the little table where she sorted the mail after picking it up from her PO box at a little strip mall down the road.

There was the postcard. She handed it silently to Sammy, who held it for a moment, then reluctantly passed it to Guignol. "You'd better hang on to it," he said, and she sensed that there was something bigger going on there.

"Now we go see Lester," Suzanne said.

He was behind the building in his little workshop, hacking DiaBolical. There were five different DiaBs running around him, chugging and humming. The smell of goop and fuser and heat filled the room, and an air-conditioner like a jet-engine labored to keep things cool. Still, it was a few degrees warmer inside than out.

"Lester," Suzanne shouted over the air-conditioner din, "we have visitors."

Lester straightened up from his keyboard and wiped his palms and turned to face them. He knew who they were based on his earlier conversation with Suzanne, but he also clearly recognized Sammy.

"You!" he said. "You work for Disney?"

Sammy blushed and looked away.

Lester turned to Suzanne. "This guy used to come up, what, twice, three times a week."

Sammy nodded and mumbled something. Lester reached out and snapped off the AC, filling the room with eerie silence and stifling heat. "What was that?"

"I'm a great believer in competitive intelligence."

"You work for Disney?"

"They both work for Disney, Lester," Suzanne said. "This is Sammy and Herve." *Herve doesn't do much talking,* she mentally added, *but he seems to be in charge*.

"That's right," Sammy said, seeming to come to himself at last. "And it's an honor to formally meet you at last. I run the DiaB program. I see you're a fan. I've read quite a bit about you, of course, thanks to Ms Church here."

Lester's hands closed and opened, closed and opened. "You were, what, you were sneaking around here?"

"Have I mentioned that I'm a great fan of *your work*? Not just the ride, either. This DiaBolical, well, it's --"

"What are you doing here?"

Suzanne had expected something like this. Lester wasn't like Perry, he wouldn't go off the deep-end with this guy, but he wasn't going to be his best buddy, either. Still, someone needed to intervene before this melted down altogether.

"Lester," she said, putting her hand on his warm shoulder. "Do you want to show these guys what you're working on?"

He blew air through his nose a couple times, then settled down. He even smiled.

"This one," he said, pointing to a DiaBolical, "I've got it running an experimental firmware that lets it print out hollow components. They're a lot lighter and they don't last as long. But they're also way less consumptive on goop. You get about ten times as much printing out of them."

Suzanne noted that this bit of news turned both of the Disney execs a little green. They made a lot of money selling goop, she knew.

"This one," Lester continued, patting a DiaB that was open to the elements, its imps lounging in its guts, "we mix some serious epoxy in with it, some carbon fibers. The printouts are practically indestructible. There are some kids around here who've been using it to print parts for bicycles --"

"Those were printed on *this*?" Sammy said.

"We ran into Francis and his gang," Suzanne explained.

Lester nodded. "Yeah, it's not perfect, though. The epoxy clogs up the works and the imps really don't like it. I only get two or three days out of a printer after I convert it. I'm working on changing the mix to fix that, though."

"After all," Guignol noted sourly, "it's not as if you have to pay for new DiaBs when you break one."

Lester smiled nastily at him. "Exactly," he said. "We've got a great research subsidy around here."

Guignol looked away, lips pursed.

"This one," Lester said, choosing not to notice, "this one is the realization of an age-old project." He pointed to the table next to it, where its imps were carefully fitting together some very fine parts.

Sammy leaned in close, inspecting their work. After a second, he hissed like a teakettle, then slapped his knee.

Now Lester's smile was more genuine. He loved it when people appreciated his work. "You figured it out?"

"You're printing DiaBs!"

"Not the whole thing," Lester said. "A lot of the logic needs an FPGA burner. And we can't do some of the conductive elements, either. But yeah, about 90 percent of the DiaB can be printed in a DiaB."

Suzanne hadn't heard about this one, though she remembered earlier attempts, back in the golden New Work days, the dream of self-replicating machines. Now she looked close, leaning in next to Sammy, so close she could feel his warm breath. There was something, well, *spooky* about the imps building a machine using another one of the machines.

"It's, what, it's like it's alive, and reproducing itself," Sammy said.

"Don't tell me this never occurred to you," Lester said.

"Honestly? No. It never did. Mr Banks, you have a uniquely twisted, fucked up imagination, and I say that with the warmest admiration."

Guignol leaned in, too, staring at it.

"It's so obvious now that I see it," he said.

"Yeah, all the really great ideas are like that," Lester said.

Sammy straightened up and shook Lester's hand. "Thank you for the tour, Lester. You have managed to simultaneously impress and depress me. You are one sharp motherfucker."

Lester preened and Suzanne suppressed a giggle.

Sammy held his hand up like he was being sworn in. "I'm dead serious, man. This is amazing. I mean, we manage some pretty out-of-the-box thinking at Disney, right? We may not be as nimble as some little whacked out co-op, but for who we are -- I think we do a good job.

"But you, man, you blow us out of the water. This stuff is just *crazy*, like it came down from Mars. Like it's from the future." He shook his head. "It's humbling, you know."

Guignol looked more thoughtful than he had to this point. He and Lester stared at Sammy, wearing similar expressions of bemusement.

"Let's go into the apartment," Suzanne said. "We can sit down and have a chat."

They trooped up the stairs together. Guignol expressed admiration for the weird junk-sculptures that adorned each landing, made by a local craftswoman and installed by the landlord. They sat around the living room and Lester poured iced coffee out of a pitcher in the fridge, dropping in ice-cubes molded to look like legos.

They rattled their drinks and looked uncomfortably at one another. Suzanne longed to whip out her computer and take notes, or at least a pad, or a camera, but she restrained himself. Guignol looked significantly at Sammy.

"Lester, I'm just going to say it. Would you sell your business to us? The ride, DiaBolical, all of it? We could make you a very, very rich man. You and Perry. You would have the freedom to go on doing what you're doing, but we'd put it in our production chain, mass-market the hell out of it, get it into places you've never seen. At its peak, New Work -- which you were only a small part of, remember -- touched 20 percent of Americans. *90 percent* of Americans have been to a Disney park. We're a bigger tourist draw than *all of Great Britain.* We can give your ideas legs."

Lester began to chuckle, then laugh, then he was doubled over, thumping his thighs. Suzanne shook her head. In just a few short moments, she'd gotten used to the idea, and it was growing on her.

Guignol looked grim. "It's not a firm offer -- it's a chance to open a dialogue, a negotiation. Talk the possibility over. A good negotiation is one where we both start by saying what we want and work it over until we get to the point where we're left with what we both need."

Lester wiped tears from his eyes. "I don't think that you grasp the absurdity of this situation, fellas. For starters, Perry will never go for it. I mean *never.*" Suzanne wondered about that. And wondered whether it mattered. The two had hardly said a word to each other in months.

"What's more, the rest of the rides will never, never, *never* go in for it. That's also for sure.

"Finally, what the fuck are you talking about? Me go to work for you? Us go to work for you? What will you do, stick Mickey in the ride? He's already in the ride, every now and again, as you well know. You going to move me up to Orlando?"

Sammy waggled his head from side to side. "I have a deep appreciation for how weird this is, Lester. To tell you the truth, I haven't thought much about your ride or this little town. As far as I'm concerned, we could just buy it and then turn around and sell it back to the residents for one dollar -- we wouldn't want to own or operate any of this stuff, the liability is too huge. Likewise the other rides. We don't care about what you did *yesterday* -- we care about what you're going to do tomorrow.

"Listen, you're a smart guy. You make stuff that we can't dream of, that we lack the institutional imagination to dream of. We need *that*. What the hell is the point of fighting you, suing you, when we can put you on the payroll? And you know what? Even if we throw an idiotic sum of money at you, even if you never make anything for us, we're still ahead of the game if you stop making stuff *against* us.

"I'm putting my cards on the table here. I know your partner is going to be even harder to convince, too. None of this is going to be easy. I don't care about easy. I care about what's right. I'm sick of being in charge of sabotaging people who make awesome stuff. Aren't you sick of being sabotaged? Wouldn't you like to come work some place where we'll shovel money and resources at your projects and keep the wolves at bay?"

Suzanne was impressed. This wasn't the same guy whom Rat-Toothed Freddy had savaged. It wasn't the same guy that Death Waits had described. He had come a long way. Even Guignol -- whom, she suspected, needed to be sold on the idea almost as much as Lester -- was nodding along by the end of it.

Lester wasn't though: "You're wasting your time, mister. That's all there is to it. I am not going to go and work for --" a giggle escaped his lips "-- Disney. It's just --"

Sammy held his hands up in partial surrender. "OK, OK. I won't push you today. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy. I'm a patient guy." Guignol snorted. "I don't want to lean on you here."

They took their leave, though Suzanne found out later that they'd taken a spin around the ride before leaving. Everyone went on the ride.

Lester shook his head at the door behind them.

"Can you believe that?"

Suzanne smiled and squeezed his hand. "You're funny about this, you know that? Normally, when you encounter a new idea, you like to play with it, think it through, see what you can make of it. With this, you're not even willing to noodle with it."

"You can't seriously think that this is a good idea --"

"I don't know. It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Become a millionaire, get to do whatever you want? It'll sure make an interesting story."

He goggled at her.

"Kidding," she said, thinking, *It would indeed make an interesting story, though.* "But where are you going from here? Are you going to stay here forever?"

"Perry would never go for it --" Lester said, then stopped.

"You and Perry, Lester, how long do you think that's going to last."

"Don't you go all Yoko on me, Suzanne. We've got one of those around here already --"

"I don't like this Yoko joke, Lester. I never did. Hilda doesn't want to drive Perry away from you. She wants to make the rides work. And it sounds like that's what Perry wants, too. What's wrong with them doing that? Especially if you can get them a ton of money to support it?"

Lester stared at her, open-mouthed. "Honey --"

"Think about it, Lester. Your most important virtue is your expansive imagination. Use it."

She watched this sink in. It did sink in. Lester listened to her, which surprised her every now and again. Most relationships seemed to be negotiations or possibly competitions. With Lester it was a conversation.

She gave him a hug that seemed to go on forever.

#

Sammy was glad he was driving. The mood Guignol was in, he'd have wrecked the car. "That was *not* the plan, Sammy," he said. "The plan was to get the data, talk it over --"

"The first casualty of any battle is the battle-plan," Sammy said, threading them through the press of tourist busses and commuter cars.

"I thought the first casualty was the truth."

They'd spent too long at the ride, then gotten stuck in the afternoon rush hour out of Miami. "That too. Look, I'm proposing to spend a tenth of the profits from the DiaB on this venture. In any other circumstance, I would do it with a *purchase order*. The only reason it's a big deal is --"

"That it carries enough legal liability to destroy the company. Sammy, didn't you listen to Hackelberg?"

"The reason I still work at Disney is that it's the kind of company where the lawyers don't *always* set the agenda."

Guignol drummed his hands on the dashboard. Sammy pulled over and gassed up. At the next pump was a minivan with Kansas plates. Dad was a dumpy Korean guy, Mom was a dumpy white midwesterner with a country-and-western denim jacket, and the back seat was filled with vibrating children, two girls and a boy. The kids were screaming and fighting, the girls trying to draw on the boy's face with candy-flavored lipstick and kiddie mascara, the boy squirming mightily and lashing out at them with his gameboy.

Dad and Mom were having their own heated discussion as Dad gassed up, Sammy eavesdropped enough to hear that they were fighting over Dad's choice of taking the toll roads instead of the cheaper, slower alternative route. The kids were shouting so loud, though --

"You keep that up and we're not going to Disney World!"

It was the magic sentence, the litmus test for Disney's currency. As it rose and fell, so did the efficacy of the threat. If Sammy could, he'd take a video of the result every time this was uttered.

The kids looked at Dad and shrugged. "Who cares?" the eldest sister said, and grabbed the boy again.

Sammy turned to Guignol and waggled his eyebrows. Once he was back in the car, he said, "You know, it's risky doing anything. But riskiest of all is doing nothing."

Guignol shook his head and pulled out his computer.

He spent a lot of time looking at the numbers while Sammy fought traffic. Finally he closed his computer, put his head back and shut his eyes. Sammy drove on.

"You think this'll work?" Guignol said.

"Which part?

"You think if you buy these guys out --"

"Oh, that part. Sure, yeah, slam dunk. They're cheap. Like I say, we could make back the whole nut just by settling the lawsuit. The hard part is going to be convincing them to sell."

"And Hackelberg."

"That's your job, not mine."

Guignol slid the seat back so it was flat as a bed. "Wake me when we hit Orlando."

#

It took IT three days to get Sammy his computer back. His secretary managed as best as she could, but he wasn't able to do much without it.

When he got it back at last, he eagerly downloaded his backlog of mail. It beggared the imagination. Even after auto-filtering it, there were hundreds of new messages, things he had to pay real attention to. When he was dealing with this stuff in little spurts every few minutes all day long, it didn't seem like much, but it sure piled up.

He enlisted his secretary to help him with sorting and responding. After an hour she forwarded one back to him with a bold red flag.

It was from Freddy. He got an instant headache, the feeling halfway between a migraine and the feeling after you bang your head against the corner of a table.

:: Sammy, I'm disappointed in you. I thought we were friends. Why do I have to learn about your bizarre plan to buy out Gibbons and Banks from strangers. I do hope you'll give me a comment on the story?

He'd left the financials with Guignol, who had been discreetly showing them around to the rest of the executive committee in closed door, off-site meetings. One of them must have blabbed, though -- or maybe it was a leak at Lester's end.

He tasted his lunch and bile as his stomach twisted. It wasn't fair. He had a real chance of making this happen -- and it would be a source of genuine good for all concerned.

He got halfway through calling Guignol's number, then put the phone down. He didn't know who to call. He'd put himself in an unwinnable position. As he contemplated the article that Freddy would probably write, he realized that he would almost certainly lose his job over this, too. Maybe end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Man, that seemed to be his natural state at Disney. Maybe he was in the wrong job.

He groaned and thumped himself on the forehead. All he wanted to do was have good ideas and make them happen.

Basically, he wanted to be Lester.

Then he knew who he had to call.

"Ms Church?"

"We're back to that, huh? That's probably not a good sign."

"Suzanne then."

"Sammy, you sound like you're about to pop a testicle. Spit it out."

"Do you think I could get a job with Lester?"

"You're not joking, are you?"

"Freddy found out about the buyout offer."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"So I'm gonna be in search of employment. All I ever wanted to do was come up with cool ideas and execute them --"

"Shush now. Freddy found out about this, huh? Not surprising. He's got a knack for it. It's just about his only virtue."

"Urgh."

"However, it's also his greatest failing. I've given this a lot of thought, since my last run in with Rat-Toothed Freddy."

"You call him that to his face?"

"Not yet. But I look forward to it. Tell you what, give me an hour to talk to some people here, and I'll get back to you."

An hour? "An hour?"

"He'll keep you squirming for at least that long. He loves to make people squirm. It's good journalism -- shakes loose some new developments."

"An hour?"

"Have you got a choice?"

"An hour, then."

#

Suzanne didn't knock on Lester's door. Lester would fall into place, once Perry was in.

She found him working the ride, Hilda back in the maintenance bay, tweaking some of the robots. His arm was out of the cast, but it was noticeably thinner than his good left arm, weak and pale and flabby.

"Hello, Suzanne." He was formal, like he always was these days, and it saddened her, but she pressed on.

"Perry, we need to shut down for a while, it's urgent."

"Suzanne, this is a busy time, we just can't shut down --"

She thumped her hand on his lemonade-stand counter. "Cut it out, Perry. I have never been an alarmist, you know that. I understand intimately what it means to shut this place down. Look, I know that things haven't been so good between us, between *any* of us, for a long time. But I am your dear friend, and you are mine, no matter what's going on at this second, and I'm telling you that you need to shut this down and we need to talk. Do it, Perry."

He gave her a long, considering look.

"Please?"

He looked at the little queue of four or five people, pretending not to eavesdrop, waiting their turn.

"Sorry, folks, you heard the lady. Family emergency. Um, here --" He rummaged under the counter, came up with scraps of paper. "Mrs Torrence's tearoom across the street -- they make the best cappuccino in the hood, and the pastries are all baked fresh. On me, OK?"

"Come on," Suzanne said. "Time's short."

She accompanied him to the maintenance bay and they pulled the doors shut behind them. Hilda looked up from her robot, wiping her hands on her shorts. She was really lovely, and the look on her face when she saw Perry was pure adoration. Suzanne's heart welled up for the two of them, such a perfect picture of young love.

Then Hilda saw Suzanne, and her expression grew guarded, tense. Perry took Hilda's hand.

"What's this about, Suzanne?" he said.

"Let me give this to you in one shot, OK?" They nodded. She ran it down for them. Sammy and Guignol, the postcard and the funny circumstances of their visit -- the phone call.

"So here's the thing. He wants to buy you guys out. He doesn't want the ride or the town. He just wants -- I don't know -- the *creativity*. The PR win. He wants peace. And the real news is, he's over a barrel. Freddy's forcing his hand. If we can make that problem go away, we can ask for *anything*."

Hilda's jaw hung slack. "You have to be kidding --"

Perry shushed her. "Suzanne, why are you here? Why aren't you talking to Lester about this? Why hasn't Lester talked to me about this. I mean, just what the fuck is going on?"

She winced. "I didn't talk to Lester because I thought he'd be easier to sell on this than you are. This is a golden opportunity and I thought that you would be conflicted as hell about it and I thought if I talked to you first, we could get past that. I don't really have a dog in this fight, except that I want all parties to end up not hating each other. That's where you're headed now -- you're melting down in slow motion. How long since you and Lester had a conversation together, let alone a real meal? How long since we all sat around and laughed? Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.

"You two *were* the New Work. Lots of people got blisteringly rich off of New Work, but not you. Here's a chance for you to get what you deserve for a change. You solve this -- and you *can* solve it, and not just for you, but for that Death kid, you can get him justice that the courts will take fifteen years to deliver."

Perry scowled. "I don't care about money --"

"Yes, that's admirable. I have one other thing; I've been saving it for last, waiting to see if you'd come up with it on your own."

"What?"

"Why is time of the essence?"

"Because Freddy's going to out this dirtball --"

"And how do we solve that?"

Hilda grinned. "Oh, this part I like."

Suzanne laughed. "Yeah."

"What?" Perry said.

"Freddy's good at intelligence gathering, but he's not so good at distinguishing truth from fiction. In my view, this presents a fascinating opportunity. Depending on what we leak to him and how, we can turn him into --"

"A laughing stock?"

"A puddle of deliquesced organ meat."

Perry began to laugh. "You're saying that you think that we should do this deal for *spite*?"

"Yeah, that's the size of it," Suzanne said.

"I love it," he said.

Hilda laughed too. Suzanne extended her hand to Perry and he shook it. Then she shook with Hilda.

"Let's go find Lester."

#

By the time the call came, Sammy was ready to explode. He got in a golf cart and headed to the Animal Kingdom Lodge, which backed onto the safari park portion of the Animal Kingdom. He snuck himself onto the roof of the grand hotel, which had a commanding view of the artificial savanna. He watched a family of giraffes graze, using the zoom on his phone to resolve the hypnotic patterns of the little calf. It calmed him. But the sound of his phone ringing startled him so much he nearly did a half-gainer off the roof. Heart hammering, he answered it.

"Is this Sammy?"

"Yes," he said.

"Landon Kettlewell," the voice on the other side said. Sammy knew the name, of course. But he hadn't been expecting a call from him.

"Hello, Mr Kettlewell."

"The boys have asked me to negotiate this deal for them. It makes sense -- it'll be hard to make this happen without my contributions. I hope you agree."

"It does make sense," Sammy said noncommittally. This wasn't the best day of his life. The giraffes were moving off, but a flock of cranes was wheeling overhead in quiet splendor.

"I'll tell you where we're at. We're going to do a deal with you, a fair one. But a condition of the deal is that we are going to destroy Freddy."

"What?"

"We're going to leak him bad intel on the deal. Lots of it. Give him a whole story. Wait until he publishes it, and then --"

Sammy sat down on the roof. This was going to be a long conversation.

#

Perry ground his teeth and squeezed his beer. The idea of doing this in a big group had seemed like a good idea. Dirty Max's was certainly full of camaraderie, the smell of roasting meat and the chatter of nearly a hundred voices. He heard Hilda laughing at something Lester said to her, and there were Kettlewell and his kids, fingers and faces sticky with sauce.

Lester had set up the projector and they'd hung sheets over one of the murals for a screen, and brought out a bunch of wireless speakers that they'd scattered around the courtyard. It looked, smelled, sounded, and tasted like a carnival.

But Perry couldn't meet anyone's eye. He just wanted to go home and get under the covers. They were about to destroy Freddy, which had also seemed like a hell of a lark at the time, but now --

"Perry." It was Sammy, up from Orlando, wearing the classic Mickey-gives-the-finger bootleg tee.

"Can you get fired for that?" Perry pointed.

Sammy shook his head. "Actually, it's official. I had them produced last year -- they're a big seller. If you can't beat 'em... Here --" He dug in the backpack he carried and pulled out another. "You look like a large, right?"

Perry took it from him, held it up. Shrugging, he put down his beer and skinned his tee, then pulled on the Mickey-flips-the-bird. He looked down at his chest. "It's a statement."

"Have you and Lester given any thought to where you're going to relocate, after?"

Perry drew in a deep breath. "I think Lester wants to come to Orlando. But I'm going to go to Wisconsin. Madison."

"You're what now?"

Perry hadn't said anything about this to anyone except Hilda. Something about this Disney exec, it made him want to spill the beans. "I can't go along with this. I'm going to bow out. Do something new. I've been in this shithole for what feels like my whole life now."

Sammy looked poleaxed. "Perry, that wasn't the deal --"

"Yeah, I know. But think about this: do you want me there if I hate it, resent it? Besides, it's a little late in the day to back out."

Sammy reeled. "Christ almighty. Well, at least you're not going to end up my employee."

Francis -- who had an uncanny knack for figuring out the right moment to step into a conversation -- sidled over. "Nice shirt, Perry."

"Francis, this is Sammy." Francis had a bottle of water and a plate of ribs, so he extended a friendly elbow.

"We've met -- showed him the bicycle factory."

Sammy visibly calmed himself. "That's right, you did. Amazing, just amazing."

"All this is on Sammy," Perry said, pointing at the huge barbecue smoker, the crowds of sticky-fingered gorgers. "He's the Disney guy."

"Hence the shirts, huh?"

"Exactly."

"So what's the rumpus, exactly?" Francis asked. "It's all been hush-hush around here for a solid week."

"I think we're about to find out," Perry said, nodding at the gigantic screen, which rippled in the sultry Florida night-breeze, obscured by blowing clouds of fragrant smoke. It was lit up now, showing CNNfn, two pan-racial anchors talking silently into the night.

The speakers popped to life and gradually the crowd noises dimmed. People moved toward the screen, all except Francis and Perry and Sammy, who hung back, silently watching the screen.

"-- guest on the show is Freddy Niedbalski, a technology reporter for the notorious British technology publication *Tech Stink*. Freddy has agreed to come on *Countdown* to break a story that will go live on *Tech Stink*'s website in about ten minutes." The camera zoomed out to show Freddy, sitting beside the anchor desk in an armchair. His paunch was more pronounced than it had been when Perry had seen him in Madison, and there was something wrong with his makeup, a color mismatch that made him look like he'd slathered himself with Man-Tan. Still, he was grinning evilly and looking like he could barely contain himself.

"Thank you, Tania-Luz, it's a pleasure."

"Now, take us through the story. You've been covering it for a long time, haven't you?"

"Oh yes. This is about the so-called 'New Work' cult, and its aftermath. I've broken a series of scandals involving these characters over the years -- weird sex, funny money, sweatshop labor. These are the people who spent all that money in the New Work bubble, and then went on to found an honest-to-God slum that they characterized as a 'living laboratory.'" -- out came the sarcastic finger-quotes -- "but, as near as anyone can work out was more of a human subject experiment gone mad. They pulled off these bizarre stunts with the help of some of the largest investment funds on the planet."

Perry looked around at the revellers. They were chortling, pointing at each other, mugging for the camera. Freddy's words made Perry uncomfortable -- maybe there was something to what he said. But there was Francis, unofficial mayor of the shantytown, smiling along with the rest. They hadn't been perfect, but they'd left the world a better place than they'd found it.

"There are many personalities in this story, but tonight's installment has two main players: a venture capitalist named Landon Kettlewell and a Disney Parks senior vice president called Sammy Page. Technically, these two hate each others' guts --" Sammy and Kettlewell toasted each other through the barbecue smoke. "But they've been chumming up to one another lately as they brokered an improbable deal to shaft everyone else in the sordid mess."

"A deal that you've got details on for us tonight?"

"Exactly. My sources have turned up reliable memos and other intelligence indicating that the investors behind the shantytown are about to *take over Disney Parks*. It all stems from a lawsuit that was brought on behalf of a syndicate of operators of bizarre, trademark infringing rides that were raided off the backs of complaints from Disney Parks. These raids, and a subsequent and very suspicious beating of an ex-Disney Park employee, led to the creation of an investment syndicate to fund a monster lawsuit against Disney Parks, one that could take the company down.

"The investment syndicate found an unlikely ally in the person of Sammy Page, the senior VP from Disney Parks, who worked with them to push through a plan where they would settle the lawsuit in exchange for a controlling interest in Disney Parks."

The anchors looked suitably impressed. Around the screen, the partiers had gone quiet, even the kids, mesmerized by Freddy's giant head, eyes rolling with irony and mean humor.

"And that's just for starters. The deal required securing the cooperation of the beaten-up ex-Disney employee, who goes by the name of 'Death Waits' -- no, really! -- and *he* required that he be made a vice president of the new company as well, running the 'Fantasyland' section of the Florida park. In the new structure, the two founders of the New Work scam, Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are to oversee the Disneyfication of the activist rides around the country, selling out their comrades, who signed over control of their volunteer-built enterprises as part of the earlier lawsuit."

The male anchor shook his head. "If this is true, it's the strangest turn in American corporate history."

"Oh yes," Freddy said. "These people are like some kind of poison, a disease that affects the judgement of all those around them --"

"If it's true," the male anchor continued, as if Freddy hadn't spoken. "But is it? Our next guest denies all of this, and claims that Mr Niedbalski has his facts all wrong. Tjan Lee Tang is the chairman of Massachusetts Ride Theorists, a nonprofit that operates three of the spin-off rides in New England. He is in our Boston studios. Welcome, Mr Tang."

Freddy's expression was priceless: a mixture of raw terror and contempt. He tried to cover it, but only succeeded in looking constipated. On the other half of the split-screen, Tjan beamed sunnily at them.

"Hi there!" he said. "Greetings from the blustery Northeast."

"Mr Tang, you've heard what our guest has to say about the latest developments in the extraordinary story of the rides you helped create. Do you have any comment?"

"I certainly do. Freddy, old buddy, you've been had. Whomever your leak was in Disney, he was putting you on. There is not one single word of truth to anything you had to say." He grinned wickedly. "So what else is new?"

Freddy opened his mouth and Tjan held up one hand. "No, wait, let me finish. I know it's your schtick to come after us this way, you've been at it for years. I think it's because you have an unrequited crush on Suzanne Church.

"Here's what's really happening. Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons have taken jobs with Disney Parks as part of a straightforward deal. They're going to do research and development there, and Disney is settling its ongoing lawsuit with us with a seventy million dollar cash settlement. Half goes to the investors. Some of the remainder will go to buy the underlying titles to the shantytown and put them in a trust to be managed by a co-operative of residents. The rest is going into another trust that will be disbursed in grants to people operating rides around the country. There's a non-monetary part of the deal, too: all rides get a perpetual, worldwide license on all Disney trademarks for use in the rides."

The announcers smiled and nodded.

"We think this is a pretty good win. The rides go on. The shantytown goes on. Lester and Perry get to do great work in a heavily resourced lab environment."

Tania-Luz turned to Freddy. "It seems that your story is in dispute. Do you have further comment?"

Freddy squirmed. A streak of sweat cut through his pancake makeup as the camera came in for a closeup. "Well, if this is true, I'd want to know why Disney would make such a generous offer --"

"Generous?" Tjan said. He snorted. "We were asking for *eight billion* in punitive damages. They got off easy!"

Freddy acted like he hadn't heard. "Unless the terms of this so-called deal are published and subject to scrutiny --"

"We posted them about five minutes ago. You could have just asked us, you know."

Freddy's eyes bugged out. "We have no way of knowing whether what this man is saying is true --"

"Actually, you do. Like I say, it's all online. The deals are signed. Securities filings and everything."

Freddy got up out of his seat. "*Would you shut up and let me finish?*" he screamed.

"Sorry, sorry," Tjan said with a chuckle. He was enjoying this way too much. "Go on."

"And what about Death Waits? He's been a pawn all along in this game you've played with other people's lives. What happens to him as you all get rich?"

Tjan shrugged. "He got a large cash settlement too. He seemed pretty happy about it --"

Freddy was shaking. "You can't just sell off your lawsuit --"

"We were looking to get compensated for bad acts. We got compensated for them, and we did it without tying up the public courts. Everybody wins." He cocked his head. "Except you, of course."

"This was a fucking ambush," Freddy said, pointing his fingers at the two coiffed and groomed anchors, who shied away dramatically, making him look even crazier. He stormed off the stage, cursing, every word transmitted by his still-running wireless mic. He shouted at an invisible security guard to get out of his way. Then they heard him make a phone-call, presumably to his editor, shouting at him to kill the article, nearly weeping in frustration. The anchors and Tjan pasted on unconvincing poker-faces, but around the BBQ pit, it was all howls of laughter, which turned to shrieks when Freddy finally figured out that he was still on a live mic.

Perry and Sammy locked eyes and grinned. Perry ticked a little salute off his forehead at Sammy and hefted his tee. Then he turned on his heel and walked off into the night, the fragrant smell of the barbecue smoke and the sound of the party behind him.

He parked his car at home and trudged up the stairs. Hilda had packed her suitcase that morning. He had a lot more than a suitcase's worth of stuff around the apartment, but as he threw a few t-shirts -- including his new fake bootleg Mickey tee -- and some underwear in a bag, he suddenly realized that he didn't care about any of it.

Then he happened upon the baseball glove. The cloud of old leather smell it emitted when he picked it up made tears spring into his eyes. He hadn't cried through any of this process, though, and he wasn't about to start now. He wiped his eyes with his forearm and reverently set the glove into his bag and shut it. He carried both bags downstairs and put them in the trunk, then he drove to just a little ways north of the ride and called Hilda to let her know he was ready to go.

She didn't say a word when she got in the car, and neither did he, all the way to Miami airport. He took his frisking and secondary screening in stoic silence, and once they were seated on the Chicago flight, he put his head down on Hilda's shoulder and she stroked his hair until he fell asleep.

#

Epilogue

Lester was in his workshop when Perry came to see him. He had the yoga mat out and he was going through the slow exercises that his physiotherapist had assigned to him, stretching his crumbling bones and shrinking muscles, trying to keep it all together. He'd fired three physios, but Suzanne kept finding him new ones, and (because she loved him) prettier ones.

He was down on all fours, his ass stuck way up in the air, when Perry came through the door. He looked back through his ankles and squinted at the upside-down world. Perry's expression was carefully neutral, the same upside-down as it would be right-side-up. He grunted and went down to his knees, which crackled like popcorn.

"That doesn't sound good," Perry remarked mildly.

"Funny man," Lester said. "Get over here and help me up, will you?"

Perry went down in a crouch before him. There was something funny about his eye, the whole side of his head. He smelled a little sweaty and a little gamy, but the face was the one Lester knew so well. Perry held out his strong, leathery hands, and after a moment, Lester grasped them and let Perry drag him to his feet.

They stood facing one another for an uncomfortable moment, hands clasped together. Then Perry flung his arms wide and shouted, "Here I am!"

Lester laughed and embraced his old friend, not seen or heard from these last 15 years.

#

Lester's workshop had a sofa where he entertained visitors and took his afternoon nap. Normally, he'd use his cane to cross from his workbench to the sofa, but seeing Perry threw him for such a loop that he completely forgot until he was a pace or two away from it and then he found himself flailing for support as his hips started to give way. Perry caught him under the shoulders and propped him up. Lester felt a rush of shame color his cheeks.

"Steady there, cowboy," Perry said.

"Sorry, sorry," Lester muttered.

Perry lowered him to the sofa, then looked around. "You got anything to drink? Water? I didn't really expect the bus would take as long as it did."

"You're taking the bus around Burbank?" Lester said. "Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars."

Perry looked away and shook his head. "The bus is cheaper." Lester pursed his lips. "You got anything to drink?"

"In the fridge," Lester said, pointing to a set of nested clay pot evaporative coolers. Perry grinned at the jury-rigged cooler and rummaged around in its mouth for a while. "Anything, you know, buzzy? Guarana? Caffeine, even?"

Lester gave an apologetic shrug. "Not me, not anymore. Nothing goes into my body without oversight by a team of very expensive nutritionists."

"You don't look so bad," Perry said. "Maybe a little skinny --"

Lester cut him off. "Not bad like the people you see on TV, huh? Not bad like the dying ones." The fatkins had overwhelmed the nation's hospitals in successive waves of sickened disintegrating skeletons whose brittle bones and ruined joints had outstripped anyone's ability to cope with them. The only thing that kept the crisis from boiling over entirely was the fast mortality that followed on the first symptoms -- difficulty digesting, persistent stiffness. Once you couldn't keep down high-calorie slurry, you just starved to death.

"Not like them," Perry agreed. He had a bit of limp, Lester saw, and his old broken arm hung slightly stiff at his side.

"I'm doing OK," Lester said. "You wouldn't believe the medical bills, of course."

"Don't let Freddy know you've got the sickness," Perry said. "He'd love that story -- 'fatkins pioneer pays the price --'"

"Freddy! Man, I haven't thought of that shitheel in -- Christ, a decade, at least. Is he still alive?"

Perry shrugged. "Might be. I'd think that if he'd keeled over someone would have asked me to pitch in to charter a bus to go piss on his grave."

Lester laughed hard, so hard he hurt his chest and had to sag back into the sofa, doing deep yoga breathing until his ribs felt better.

Perry sat down opposite him on the sofa with a bottle of Lester's special thrice-distilled flat water in a torpedo-shaped bottle. "Suzanne?" he asked.

"Good," Lester said. "Spends about half her time here and half on the road. Writing, still."

"What's she on to now?"

"Cooking, if you can believe it. Molecular gastronomy -- food hackers who use centrifuges to clarify their consomme. She says she's never eaten better. Last week it was some kid who'd written a genetic algorithm to evolve custom printable molecules that can bridge two unharmonius flavors to make them taste good together -- like, what do you need to add to chocolate and sardines to make them freakin' delicious?"

"Is there such a molecule?"

"Suzanne says there is. She said that they misted it into her face with a vaporizer while she ate a sardine on a slab of dark chocolate and it tasted better than anything she'd ever had before."

"OK, that's just wrong," Perry said. The two of them were grinning at each other like fools.

Lester couldn't believe how good it felt to be in the same room as Perry again after all these years. His old friend was much older than the last time they'd seen each other. There was a lot of grey in his short hair, and his hairline was a lot higher up his forehead. His knuckles were swollen and wrinkled, and his face had deep lines, making him look carved. He had the leathery skin of a roadside homeless person, and there were little scars all over his arms and a few on his throat.

"How's Hilda?" Lester asked.

Perry looked away. "That's a name I haven't heard in a while," he said.

"Yowch. Sorry."

"No, that's OK. I get email blasts from her every now and again. She's chipper and scrappy as always. Fighting the good fight. Fatkins stuff again -- same as when I met her. Funny how that fight never gets old."

"Hardy har har," Lester said.

"OK, we're even," Perry said. "One-one on the faux-pas master's tournament."

They chatted about inconsequentialities for a while, stories about Lester's life as the closeted genius at Disney Labs, Perry's life on the road, getting itinerant and seasonal work at little micro-factories.

"Don't they recognize you?"

"Me? Naw, it's been a long time since I got recognized. I'm just the guy, you know, he's handy, keeps to himself. Probably going to be moving on soon. Good with money, always has a quiet suggestion for tweaking an idea to make it return a little higher on the investment."

"That's you, all right. All except the 'keeps to himself' part."

"A little older, a little wiser. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

"Thank you, Mister Twain. You and Huck been on the river a while then?"

"No Huck," he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasn't the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasn't the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, though -- gregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone.

"So, how long are you staying?"

"I'm just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, 'Shit, Lester's in Burbank, I should say hello.' But I got places to go."

"Come on, man, stay a while. We've got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too."

"Living the dream, huh?" He sounded unexpectedly bitter.

Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucks -- kid-reporters she'd trained and set up in business -- ran, and they never had to worry about a thing.

"Well, apart from dying. And working here." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasn't happy at the Mouse, and the dying thing -- well, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought.

Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. "Must be hard on Suzanne."

Now that was hitting the nail on the head. "You always were a perceptive son of a bitch."

"She never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame her --"

This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, they'd popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico.

But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking:

"-- the FDA, the doctors. That's what we pay them for. The way I see it, you're a victim, their victim."

Lester couldn't say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, "Change the subject, OK?"

Perry looked down. "Sorry. I'm out of practice with people."

"I hope you'll stay with us," he said, thinking *I hope you leave soon and never come back*.

"You miss it, huh?"

"Sometimes."

"You said working here --"

"Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it's like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."

"I hate working with assholes."

"They're not assholes, that's the thing, Perry. They're some really smart people. They're nice. We have them over for dinner. They're fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, *every single one of them feels the same way I do*. They *all* have cool shit they want to do, but they can't do it."

"Why?"

"It's like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit."

"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent -- 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you'll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.

"Maybe people are like that. If you're 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who's 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that's 81 percent non-bogus."

"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it's depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others' flaws."

"Well, maybe that's the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."

"So what are virtues?"

"Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."

"That'd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements."

"So what do you do around here all day?"

Lester blushed.

"What?"

"I'm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. There's something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant."

"I think I'd like to see that," Perry said, laughing a little.

"That can be arranged," Lester said.

They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.

They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.

They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.

#

Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian who'd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldn't drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didn't go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.

Perry couldn't bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalid's subsidy to feel excessive.

"Kap," Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that he'd made of the back-seat.

Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. "Home now?" He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.

"No," Lester said. "Let's eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?"

"Ms Suzanne says --"

"We don't need to tell her," Lester said.

Perry spoke in a low voice, "Lester, I don't need anything special. Don't make yourself sick --"

"Perry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isn't going to fall out of my asshole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there."

They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre d' gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium.

"We'd like Orson Welles's table, please," he said.

The maitre d' -- an elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beard -- nodded affably. "Give me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?"

They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. "Sorry," he said to the waitress. "Just having an indecisive kind of night, I guess."

Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the c-note, and decided that he hadn't been. He'd just gone native in LA, and a hundred for the maitre d' when you're in a hurry can't be much for a senior exec.

Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. "I like this place," he said, waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. "It's perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultra-modern place come here. They come because they've always come -- to sit in Orson Welles's booth."

"How's the food?"

"Depends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for steaks?"

"I'm down for whatever," Perry said. Lester was in his medium here, letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without taking any special notice of the old man.

The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity, though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a semi-subtle photo of her.

"Poor girl," Perry said with feeling.

"It's a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that it'll last forever -- that in thirty years, they'll come into Musso and Frank and ask for Miss Whatshername's table. Anyone who wants to know what stardom looks like can find out -- and no one becomes a star by accident."

"You think?" Perry said. "I mean, we were celebs, kind of, for a while there --"

"Are you saying that that happened by accident?"

"I never set out to get famous --"

"You took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically *founded* it. What did you think was going to happen --"

"You're saying that we were just attention whores --"

"No, Perry, no. We weren't *just* attention whores. We were attention whores *and* we built and ran cool shit. There's nothing wrong with being an attention whore. It's an attention economy. If you're going to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid in. But you can't sit there and tell me that it didn't feel good, didn't feel *great* to have all those people looking up to us, following us into battle, throwing themselves at us --"

Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye.

"I surrender, buddy, you're right." They ordered desserts, heavy "diplomat puddings" -- bread pudding made with cake and cherries, and Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a voyeur.

"How long did you say you were in town for?"

"I'm just passing through," Perry said. He had only planned on maybe seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a foregone conclusion that he'd be put up in the "guest cottage." He thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to work for.

"Come on, where you got to be? Stay a week. I'll put you on the payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the R&D team, whatever you want."

"Lester, you just got through telling me how much you hate your job --"

"That's the beauty of contracting -- you don't stick around long enough to hate it, and you never have to worry about the org chart. Come on, pal --"

"I'll think about it."

Lester fell asleep on the car ride home, and Kapriel didn't mind if Perry didn't want to chat, so he just rolled his windows down and watched the LA lights scream past as they hit the premium lanes on the crosstown freeways, heading to Lester's place in Topanga Canyon. When they arrived, Lester roused himself heavily, clutched his stomach, then raced for the house. Kapriel shook his head and rolled his eyes, then showed Perry to the front door and shook his hand.

#

In the morning, he prowled Lester and Suzanne's place like a burglar. The guesthouse had once served as Lester's workshop and it had the telltale leavings of a busy inventor -- drawers and tubs of parts, a moldy coffee-cup in a desk-drawer, pens and toys and unread postal spam in piles. What it didn't have was a kitchen, so Perry helped himself to the key that Lester had left him with the night before and wandered around the big house, looking for the kitchen.

It turned out to be on the second floor, a bit of weird architectural design that was characteristic of the place, which had started as a shack in the hills on several acres of land and then grown and grown as successive generations of owners had added extensions, seismic retrofitting, and new floors.

Perry found the pantries filled with high-tech MREs, each nutritionally balanced and fortified in ways calculated to make Lester as healthy as possible. Finally, he found a small cupboard clearly devoted to Suzanne's eating, with boxes of breakfast cereal and, way in the back, a little bag of Oreos. He munched thoughtfully on the cookies while drinking more of the flat, thrice-distilled water.

He heard Lester totter into a bathroom on the floor above, and called "Good morning," up a narrow, winding staircase.

Lester groaned back at him, a sound that Perry hadn't heard in years, that theatrical oh-my-shit-it's-another-day sound.

He clomped down the stairs with his cane, wearing a pair of boxer-shorts and rubber slippers. He was gaunt, the hair on his sunken chest gone wiry grey, and the skin around his torso sagged. From the neck down, he looked a hundred years old. Perry looked away.

"Morning, bro," Lester said, and took a vacuum-sealed pouch out of a medical white box over the sink, tore it open, added purified water, and put it in the microwave. The smell was like wet cardboard in a dumpster. Perry wrinkled his nose.

"Tastes better than it smells. Or looks," Lester said. "Very easy on the digestion. Which I need. Never let me pig out like that again, OK?"

He collapsed heavily into a stool and closed his sunken eyes. Without opening them, he said, "So, are you in?"

"Am I in?"

"You going to come on board as my consultant?"

"You were serious about that, huh?"

"Perry, they can't fire me. If I quit, I lose my health bennies, which means I'll be broke in a month. Which puts us at an impasse. I'm past feeling guilty about doing nothing much all day long, but that doesn't mean I'm not bored."

"You make it sound so attractive."

"You got something better to do?"

"I'm in."

#

Suzanne came home a week later and found them sitting up in the living room. They'd pushed all the furniture up against the walls and covered the floor with board-game boards, laid edge-to-edge or overlapping. They had tokens, cards and money from several of the games laid out around the rims of the games.

"What the blistering fuck?" she said good naturedly. Lester had told her that Perry was around, so she'd been prepared for something odd, but this was pretty amazing, even so. Lester held up a hand for silence and rolled two dice. They skittered across the floor, one of them slipping through the heating-grating.

"Three points," Perry said. "One for not going into the grating, two for going into the grating."

"I thought we said it was two points for not going into the grating, and one for dropping it?"

"Let's call it 1.5 points for each."

"Gentlemen," Suzanne said, "I believe I asked a question? To wit, 'What the blistering fuck --'"

"Calvinball," Lester said. "Like in the old Calvin and Hobbes strips. The rules are, the rules can never be the same twice."

"And you're supposed to wear a mask," Perry said. "But we kept stepping on the pieces."

"No peripheral vision," Lester said.

"Caucus race!" Perry yelled, and took a lap around the world. Lester struggled to his feet, then flopped back down.

"I disbelieve," he said, taking up two ten-sided dice and rolling them. "87," he said.

"Fine," Perry said. He picked up a Battleship board and said, "B7," and then he said, "What's the score, anyway?"

"Orange to seven," Lester said.

"Who's orange?"

"You are."

"Shit. OK, let's take a break."

Suzanne tried to hold in her laughter, but she couldn't. She ended up doubled over, tears streaming down her face. When she straightened up, Lester hobbled to her and gave her a surprisingly strong welcome-home hug. He smelled like Lester, like the man she'd shared her bed with all these years.

Perry held out his hand to her and she yanked him into a long, hard hug.

"It's good to have you back, Perry," she said, once she'd kissed both his cheeks.

"It's fantastic to see you, Suzanne," he said. He was thinner than she remembered, with snow on the roof, but he was still handsome as a pirate.

"We missed you. Tell me everything you've been up to."

"It's not interesting," he said. "Really."

"I find that difficult to believe."

So he told them stories from the road, and they were interesting in a kind of microcosm sort of way. Stories about interesting characters he'd met, improbable meals he'd eaten, bad working conditions, memorable rides hitched.

"So that's it?" Suzanne said. "That's what you've done?"

"It's what I do," he said.

"And you're happy?"

"I'm not sad," he said.

She shook her head involuntarily. Perry stiffened.

"What's wrong with not sad?"

"There's nothing wrong with it, Perry. I'm --" she faltered, searched for the words. "Remember when I first met you, met both of you, in that ghost mall? You weren't just happy, you were hysterical. Remember the Boogie-Woogie Elmos? The car they drove?"

Perry looked away. "Yeah," he said softly. There was a hitch in his voice.

"All I'm saying is, it doesn't have to be this way. You could --"

"Could what?" he said. He sounded angry, but she thought that he was just upset. "I could go work for Disney, sit in a workshop all day making crap no one cares about? Be the wage-slave for the end of my days, a caged monkey for some corporate sultan's zoo?" The phrase was Lester's, and Suzanne knew then that Perry and Lester had been talking about it.

Lester, leaning heavily against her on the sofa (they'd pushed it back into the room, moving aside pieces of the Calvinball game), made a warning sound and gave her knee a squeeze. Aha, definitely territory they'd covered before then.

"You two have some of the finest entrepreneurial instincts I've ever encountered," she said. Perry snorted.

"What's more, I've never seen you happier than you were back when I first met you, making stuff for the sheer joy of it and selling it to collectors. Do you know how many collectors would pony up for an original Gibbons/Banks today? You two could just do that forever --"

"Lester's medical --"

"Lester's medical nothing. You two get together on this, you could make so much money, we could buy Lester his own hospital." *Besides, Lester won't last long no matter what happens*. She didn't say it, but there it was. She'd come to grips with the reality years ago, when his symptoms first appeared -- when *all* the fatkins' symptoms began to appear. Now she could think of it without getting that hitch in her chest that she'd gotten at first. Now she could go away for a week to work on a story without weeping every night, then drying her eyes and calling Lester to make sure he was still alive.

"I'm not saying you need to do this to the exclusion of everything else, or forever --" *there is no forever for Lester* "-- but you two would have to be insane not to try it. Look at this board-game thing you've done --"

"Calvinball," Perry said.

"Calvinball. Right. You were made for this. You two make each other better. Perry, let's be honest here. You don't have anything better to do."

She held her breath. It had been years since she'd spoken to Perry, years since she'd had the right to say things like that to him. Once upon a time, she wouldn't have thought twice, but now --

"Let me sleep on it," Perry said.

Which meant no, of course. Perry didn't sleep on things. He decided to do things. Sometimes he decided wrong, but he'd never had trouble deciding.

That night, Lester rubbed her back, the way he always did when she came back from the road, using the hand-cream she kept on her end-table. His hands had once been so *strong*, mechanic's hands, stubby-fingered pistons he could drive tirelessly into the knots in her back. Now they smoothed and petted, a rub, not a massage. Every time she came home, it was gentler, somehow more loving. But she missed her massages. Sometimes she thought she should tell him not to bother anymore, but she was afraid of what it would mean to end this ritual -- and how many more rituals would end in its wake.

It was the briefest backrub yet and then he slid under the covers with her. She held him for a long time, spooning him from behind, her face in the nape of his neck, kissing his collar bone the way he liked, and he moaned softly.

"I love you, Suzanne," he said.

"What brought that on?"

"It's just good to have you home," he said.

"You seem to have been taking pretty good care of yourself while I was away, getting in some Perry time."

"I took him to Musso and Frank," he said. "I ate like a pig."

"And you paid the price, didn't you?"

"Yeah. For days."

"Serves you right. That Perry is *such* a bad influence on my boy."

"I'll miss him."

"You think he'll go, then?"

"You know he will."

"Oh, honey."

"Some wounds don't heal," he said. "I guess."

"I'm sure it's not that," Suzanne said. "He loves you. I bet this is the best week he's had in years."

"So why wouldn't he want to stay?" Lester's voice came out in the petulant near-sob she had only ever heard when he was in extreme physical pain. It was a voice she heard more and more often lately.

"Maybe he's just afraid of himself. He's been on the run for a long time. You have to ask yourself, what's he running from? It seems to me that he's spent his whole life trying to avoid having to look himself in the eye."

Lester sighed and she squeezed him tight. "How'd we get so screwed up?"

"Oh, baby," she said, "we're not screwed up. We're just people who want to do things, big things. Any time you want to make a difference, you face the possibility that you'll, you know, make a difference. It's a consequence of doing things with consequences."

"Gak," he said. "You always get so Zen-koan when you're on the road."

"Gives me time to reflect. Were you reading?"

"Was I reading? Suzanne, I read your posts whenever I feel lonely. It's kind of like having you home with me."

"You're sweet."

"Did you really eat sardines on sorbet toast?"

"Don't knock it. It's better than it sounds. Lots better."

"You can keep it."

"Listen to Mr Musso and Frank -- boy, you've got no business criticizing anyone else's food choices."

He heaved a happy sigh. "I love you, Suzanne Church."

"You're a good man, Lester Banks."

#

Perry met them at the breakfast table the next morning as Suzanne was fiddling with the espresso machine, steaming soy milk for her latte. He wore a pair of Lester's sloppy drawstring pants and a t-shirt for a motorcycle shop in Kansas City that was spotted with old motor-oil stains.

"Bom dia," he said, and chucked Lester on the shoulder. He was carrying himself with a certain stiffness, and Suzanne thought, *Here it comes; he's going to say goodbye. Perry Gibbons, you bastard.*

"Morning," Lester said, brittle and chipper.

Perry dug around on Suzanne's non-medicated food-shelf for a while and came up with a bagel for the toaster and a jar of peanut butter. No one said anything while he dug around for the big bread knife, found the cutting board, toasted the bagel, spread peanut butter, and took a bite. Suzanne and Lester just continued to eat, in uncomfortable silence. *Tell him,* Suzanne urged silently. *Get it over with, damn you.*

"I'm in," Perry said, around a mouthful of bagel, looking away.

Suzanne saw that he had purple bags under his eyes, like he hadn't slept a wink all night.

"I'm staying. If you'll have me. Let's make some stuff."

He put the bagel down and swallowed. He looked back at Lester and the two old comrades locked eyes for a long moment.

Lester smiled. "All right!" He danced a shuffling step, mindful of his sore hips. "All right, buddy, *fuckin' A*! Yeah!"

Suzanne tried to fade then, to back out of the room and let them do their thing, but Lester caught her arm and drew her into an embrace, tugging on her arm with a strength she'd forgotten he had.

He gave her a hard kiss. "I love you, Suzanne Church," he said. "You're my savior."

Perry made a happy sound behind her.

"I love you, too, Lester," she said, squeezing his skinny, brittle back.

Lester let go of her and she turned to face Perry. Tears pricked his eyes, and she found that she was crying too. She gave him a hug, and felt the ways that his body had changed since she'd held him back in Florida, back in some forgotten time. He was thicker, but still solid, and he smelled the same. She put her lips close to his ear and whispered, "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons."

#

Lester gave his notice that morning. Though it was 8PM in Tehran when Lester called, Sammy was at his desk.

"Why are you telling me this, Lester?"

"It says in my contract that I have to give my notice to you, specifically."

"Why the hell did I put that there?" Sammy's voice sounded far away -- not just in Iran. It sounded like he had travelled through time, too.

"Politics, I think," he said.

"Hard to remember. Probably wanted to be sure that someone like Wiener wouldn't convince you to quit, switch companies, and hire you again."

"Not much risk of that now," Lester said. "Let's face it, Sammy, I don't actually do anything for the company."

"Nope. That's right. We're not very good at making use of people like you."

"Nope."

"Well, email me your paperwork and I'll shove it around. How much notice are you supposed to give?"

"Three months'."

"Yowch. Whatever. Just pack up and go home. Gardening leave."

It had been two years since Lester'd had any contact with Sammy, but it was clear that running Iranian ops had mellowed him out. Harder to get into trouble with women there, anyway.

"How's Iran treating you?"

"The Middle East operation is something else, boy. You'd like it here. The post-war towns all look like your squatter city -- the craziest buildings you ever saw. They love the DiaBs though -- we get the most fantastic designs through the fan channels...." He trailed off. Then, with a note of suspicion: "What are you going to do now?"

Ah. No sense in faking it. "Perry and I are going to go into business together. Making kinetic sculptures. Like the old days."

"No *way*! Perry *Gibbons*? You two are back together? Christ, we're all doomed." He was laughing. "Sculptures -- like that toast robot? And he wants to go into *business*? I thought he was some kind of Commie."

Lester had a rush of remembrance, the emotional memory of how much he'd hated this man and everything he stood for. What had happened to him over the years that he counted this sneak, this thug, as his colleague? What had he sold when he sold out?

"Perry Gibbons," Lester said, and drew in a breath. "Perry Gibbons is the sharpest entrepreneur I've ever met. He can't *help* but make businesses. He's an artist who anticipates the market a year ahead of the curve. He could be a rich man a hundred times over if he chose. Commie? Page, you're not fit to keep his books."

The line went quiet, the eerie silence of a net-connection with no packets routing on it. "Goodbye, Lester," Sammy said at length.

Lester wanted to apologize. He wanted *not* to want to apologize. He swallowed the apology and disconnected the line.

#

When it was time for bed, Suzanne shut her lid and put the computer down beside the sofa. She stepped carefully around the pieces of the Calvinball game that still covered the living room floor and stepped into a pair of slippers. She slid open the back door and hit the switch for the yard's flood-light. The last thing she wanted to do was trip into the pool.

She picked her way carefully down the flagstones that led to the workshop, where the lights burned merrily in the night. There was no moon tonight, and the stars were laid out like a bag of synthetic diamonds arrayed on a piece of black velour in a street market stall.

She peered through the window before she went around to the door, the journalist in her wanting to fix an image of the moment in her mind before she moved in and disturbed it. That was the problem with being a reporter -- everything changed the instant you started reporting on it. By now, there wasn't a person alive who didn't know what it means to be in the presence of a reporter. She was a roving Panopticon.

The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight.

How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan's amusement, Kettlewell's enrichment? The postures were identical -- though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye.

She must have made a noise, because Lester looked up -- or maybe it was just the uncanny, semi-psychic bond between an old married couple. He grinned at her like he was ten years old and she grinned back and went around to the door.

"Hello, boys," she said. They straightened up, both of them unconsciously cradling their low backs, and she suppressed a grin. *My little boys, all grown up*.

"Darling!" Lester said. "Come here, have a look!"

He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her to the bench, leaning on her a little.

It was in pieces, but she could see where it was going: a pair of familiar boxy shapes, two of Lester's mechanical computers, their cola-can registers spilling away in a long daisy-chain of worm-gears and rotating shafts. One figure was big and round-shouldered like a vintage refrigerator. The other was cockeyed, half its gears set higher than the other half. Each had a single, stark mechanical arm extended before it, and at the end of each arm was a familiar cracked and fragrant baseball glove.

Lester put a ball into one of the gloves and Perry hammered away at the keyboard. Very, very slowly, the slope-shouldered robot drew its mechanical arm back -- "We used one of the open-source prosthestic plans," Lester whispered in the tense moment. Then it lobbed a soft underhand toss to the lopsided one.

The ball arced through the air and the other bot repositioned its arm in a series of clattering jerks. It seemed to Suzanne that the ball would miss the glove and bounce off of the robot's carapace, and she winced. Then, at the very last second, the robot repositioned its arm with one more fast jerk, and the ball fell into the pocket.

A moment later, the lopsided bot -- Perry, it was Perry, that was easy to see -- tossed the ball to the round-shouldered one, who was clearly her Lester, as she'd first known him. Lester-bot caught the ball with a similar series of jerks and returned the volley.

It was magic to watch the robots play their game of catch. Suzanne was mesmerized, mouth open. Lester squeezed her shoulder with uncontained excitement.

The Lester-bot lobbed one to Perry-bot, but Perry-bot flubbed the toss. The ball made a resounding gong sound as it bounced off of Perry-bot's carapace, and Perry-bot wobbled.

Suzanne winced, but Lester and Perry both dissolved in gales of laughter. She watched the Perry-bot try to get itself re-oriented, aligning its torso to face Lester-bot and she saw that it *was* funny, very funny, like a particularly great cartoon.

"They do that on purpose?"

"Not exactly -- but there's no way they're going to be perfect, so we built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it happened. It is now officially a feature, not a bug." Perry glowed with pride.

"Isn't it bad for them to get beaned with a baseball?" she asked as Lester carefully handed the ball to Perry-bot, who lobbed it to Lester-bot again.

"Well, yeah. But it's kind of an artistic statement," Perry said, looking away from them both. "About the way that friendships always wear you down, like upper and lower molars grinding away at each other."

Lester squeezed her again. "Over time, they'll knock each other apart."

Tears pricked at Suzanne's eyes. She blinked them away. "Guys, this is great." Her voice cracked, but she didn't care. Lester squeezed her tighter.

"Come to bed soon, hon," she said to Lester. "I'm going away again tomorrow afternoon -- New York, a restaurant opening."

"I'll be right up," Lester said, and kissed the top of her head. She'd forgotten that he was that tall. He didn't stand all the way up.

She went to bed, but she couldn't sleep. She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain and looked out at the backyard -- the scummy swimming pool she kept forgetting to do something about, the heavy grapefruit and lemon trees, the shed. Perry stood on the shed's stoop, looking up at the night sky. She pulled the curtains around herself an instant before he looked up at her.

Their eyes met and he nodded slowly.

"Thank you," she mouthed silently.

He blew her a kiss, stuck out a foot, and then bowed slightly over his outstretched leg.

She let the curtain fall back into place and went back to bed. Lester climbed into bed with her a few minutes later and spooned up against her back, his face buried in her neck.

She fell asleep almost instantly.

$$$$

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Andrew Leonard and Salon for publishing this when it was *Themepunks*.

Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, Pablo Defendini, Justin Golenbock, Liz Gorinksy, Tom Doherty and the many wonderful people at Tor for their good work putting this book into the world.

Likewise thanks to Sarah Hodgson, Alice Moss and Victoria Barnsley at HarperCollins for making this book happen in the UK.

Thanks to my agents, Russell Galen, Danny Baror and Justin Manask.

Thanks to my mother, Dr Roslyn Doctorow, who remains the sharpest proofer in the business.

Thanks to my business partners at Boing Boing, the staff of MAKE: Magazine, and to all the makers who let me hold their skateboards while they welded the killer robots.

And thanks, of course, to Alice and Poesy, who are the reason for all of it.

$$$$