Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  “Hello, Hilda,” he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt, and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands, burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move on his.

  They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but they hadn’t taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed wasn’t the right place to make pronouncements of love.

  “I love you,” he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. “I love you, Hilda.”

  She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he dared. Candice came back and stood by them.

  “They think that she’ll be better in the morning. She’s already much better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep’s the only thing for it. They’ve got her mildly sedated, too.”

  Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their night together, and he stroked her cheek.

  “I’ll stay here,” he said.

  “I don’t think that they’re going to let you do that, Perry. This is a prison, not a hospital.”

  “I’ll stay here,” he said again. “Just make it happen, OK? We’re going to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That’s got to give us some leverage. I’ll stay here.”

  She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of painkillers. They’d have painkillers here.

  Candice went away, and then, a while later, she came back. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll come and get you in the morning.”

  “Thanks,” he said. Then he thought that he should say something more, and he turned around, but the lawyer had gone.

  He fell asleep holding Hilda’s hand with his good hand, and woke up with an unbelievable pain in his broken arm and couldn’t find a nurse. He bit down on the pain and spent a long watch that night staring at Hilda, thinking of all she meant to him and how weird it was that she meant so much when they’d had so brief a moment together. They hadn’t let him bring his phone in, or he’d have taken a thousand pictures of her face in repose. He nodded off again.

  He woke when she did, stirring in her bed. Her movements were still weak and feeble, but they lacked the uncontrolled tremors of the night before. He leaned in for a kiss, not caring about his sour breath or hers.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Morning, gorgeous,” she said, and took him in a soft, sleepy hug.

  Candice sprung them and took them across town to her doctor, a young man who took great care in examining Hilda, explaining patiently which fluids he was drawing and which tests he planned on running on them. Perry had noticed that midwesterners came in two flavors: big Scandinavian Aryans with giant shoulders and easy smiles, and exchange students and immigrants in varying shades of brown, who looked hurt and bent alongside of the natives—looked like the people he knew from back home, people who didn’t have ready access to medical care or good nutrition in their formative years.

  The doctor was Vietnamese, but he was at least a couple generations in, judging by his accent, and he had the same midwestern smile and seemed big and bulky compared with the Vietnamese people Perry knew in Florida. He watched the man peer intently at a screen after taping some electrodes to Hilda’s head, and felt like he’d come to some land of Norse giants.

  The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice’s car and cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn’t until Perry got back with her to her apartment—every stick of furniture made from clever cardboard—and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch his phone on again.

  He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with sexy cowgirls printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers, lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent bleats.

  “Shit,” he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going on.

  A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with overreacting cops.

  Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down.

  “Right, what’s the game-plan?”

  “How should I know?” Perry said. He could hear the whine in his voice. “I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal defenses, but Disney’s denial-of-service attacking us in the courtroom. They’re also getting all this destruction dealt to us by the cops.”

  “You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let’s break this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them, then call up the troops and let them know what’s going on. I’ll get a conference call set up while we chat.”

  She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put down her laptop and rest, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces: incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together scrapbooks of the carnage wrought.

  It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and Kettlewell in.

  “Perry, do you think it’s a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan to respond to them?”

  Hilda shook her head and put a hand on Perry’s good arm to calm him down before he answered Kettlewell. “That’s how we do it over on our side. Their side is all about secrecy. Our side trades the advantage of surprise for the advantage of openness. You watch—by tonight we’ll have by-laws drafted, press-releases, exhaustive documentation. You watch.”

  On the screen, Lester’s face suddenly hove into view, fish-eye distorted by his proximity to the lens. Hilda gave an amused squeak and pulled back.

  “So that’s Yoko, huh?” Lester said, grinning. “Cute! Listen guys, don’t let these suits talk you out of what you’re doing. This is the right thing. I’m on all the message boards and stuff and they’re all champing to do something for real.”

  “Yoko?” Hilda said. She raised an adorable eyebrow.

  “Just a figure of speech,” Lester said. “I’m Lester. You must be Hilda. Perry’s told us practically nothing about you, which is probably a sign of something or other.”

  Hilda regarded Perry with mock coolness. “Oh really?”

  “Lester,” Perry said. “I love you like a brother. Shut the fuck up already.”

  Lester made a little whipping motion. Suddenly he was gone from the picture, and they saw Suzanne pulling him away by one ear. Hilda snorted. “I like her,” she said. Suzanne gave them a wave and Tjan and Kettlewell came back into frame.

  They made their goodbyes and hung up. Now Hilda and Perry were alone, together, in her bedroom, laptops shut, day done—though it was hardly gone noon—and the silence stretched.

  “Thanks for coming, Perry,” she said.

  “I—” He broke off. He didn’t know what to say. They had only known each other for a day, only had a one-night stand. She probably
thought that he was a giant creep. “I was worried.” he said. “Um. You should probably rest up some more, right?”

  He got up and headed for the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

  “Figured I’d let you rest,” he said with a half-shrug.

  “Get in this bed this instant, young man,” she said, slapping the bed beside her. “And get those stinky clothes off before you do—I won’t have you getting my sheets all covered in your travel-grime.”

  He felt the foolish grin spread across his face and he skinned out of his clothes as fast as he could with his cast on.

  They didn’t leave the house until suppertime, freshly showered (she’d been a delightful help in scrubbing those spots where the cast impeded access) and changed. Perry took a painkiller after the shower, which kicked in as they went out the door, and the autumn evening was crisp and sharp.

  They got as far as the corner before the man approached them. “Perry Gibbons, isn’t it?” He had an English accent, and a little pot-belly, and a big white bubble-jacket and a scarf wound round his throat.

  “That’s right,” Perry said. He looked at the guy. “Do I know you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But I’ve followed you in the press. Quite remarkable.”

  “Thanks,” Perry said. Being recognized—how weird was that. Cool that it happened in front of Hilda. “This is Hilda,” he said. She took the man’s hand, and he grinned, showing two long rat-like front teeth.

  “Fred,” he said. “What an absolute delight running into you out here of all places. What are you doing in town?”

  “Just visiting with friends,” Perry said.

  “Wasn’t there some kind of dust-up at your place in Florida? I saw what they did to the ride here, what a bloody mess.”

  “Yeah,” Perry said. He pointed at his casted arm. “Seemed like a good time to get out of Dodge.”

  Hilda said, “We’re getting some dinner, if you’d like to come along.”

  “I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “No, it’s no sweat, we’ve got a whole bunch of people associated with the ride meeting us. You’d be more than welcome.”

  “Goodness, that is hospitable of you. How can I refuse?”

  Luke and Ernie were there with their girlfriends, and there were more kids, midwestern and healthy even if they weren’t necessarily all Scandic, some Vietnamese kids, some Hmong, some desis descended from the H1B diaspora. They had a gigantic meal in a student place that was heavy on the potatoes and beers the size of your head, which Perry resisted for a couple hours until he figured that he’d metabolized most of the painkiller and then started in, getting just short of roaring drunk. He told them war stories, told them about Death Waits, told them about the co-op and the plan to fight back.

  “That just doesn’t sound right to me,” said a friend of Luke’s, a law-school grad student who had been bending Perry’s ear all night with stories from his law-clinic work defending university students from music-industry lawsuits. “I mean, sure, go after the cops because they roughed you guys up, but how much money do the cops have? You gotta target some fat cash, and for that you want to go after Disney. Abuse of trademark, abuse of process, something like that. The standard’s pretty high, but if you can get a judgement, the money is incredible. You could take them to the cleaners.”

  Perry looked blearily at him. He was young, like all of them, but he had a good rhetorical style that Perry recognized as something born of real confidence. He knew his stuff, or thought he did. He had a strawberry mark on his high forehead that looked like a map of a distant island, and Perry thought that the mark probably threw off the kid’s opponents. “So we sue Disney and five years from now we cash in—how does that help us now?”

  The kid nodded. “I hoped you’d ask me that. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Here’s what you need to do, dude, here’s the fucking thing.” The room had grown silent. Everyone leaned closer. Fred poured Perry another beer from the pitcher in the middle of the table. “Here’s how you do it. You raise investment capital for it. There’s a ton of money in this, a ton. Disney’s got deep pockets and you’ve got a great case.

  “But like you say, it’ll take ten, fifteen years to get the money out of them. And it’ll cost a mil in legal fees on the way. So what you do is, you create an investment syndicate. You can maybe get thirty million out of Disney, plus whatever the jury awards in punitives, and if you keep half of it, you can deliver a fifteen-x return on investment. So go find a millionaire and borrow sixteen million, and turn the defense over to him.”

  Perry was dumbstruck. “You’re joking. How can that possibly work?”

  “It’s how patent lawsuits work! Some dickhead engineer gets a bogus patent for his doomed startup, and as they’re sinking into the mud, some venture capitalist comes and buys the company up just so it can go around and threaten other companies with real businesses for violating the patent. They ask for sums just below what it would cost to get the US Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate the patent, and everyone ponies up. Venture capitalism is the major source of funding for commercial lawsuits these days.”

  Fred laughed and clapped. “Brilliant! Perry, that’s just brilliant. Are you going to do it?”

  Perry looked at the table, doodling in the puddles of beer with a fingertip. “I just want to get back to making stuff, you know. This is nuts. Devoting ten years of my life to suing someone?”

  “You don’t have to do the suing. That’s the point. You outsource that. You get the money; someone else does the business stuff.” Hilda put her arm around his shoulders. “Give the suits something to occupy themselves with—otherwise they get antsy and stir up trouble.”

  Perry and Hilda laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Fred and the others joined in, and Perry scrawled a drunken note to Tjan and Kettlewell with the info. The party broke up not long after, amid much chortling and snorting, and they staggered home. Fred gave Perry a warm handshake and treated Hilda to a lingering, sloppy hug until she pushed him off, laughing even harder.

  “All right then,” Perry said, “home again home again.”

  Hilda gave his groin a friendly honk and then made a dash for it, and he gave chase.

  PHOTO: A Drunken Perry Gibbons Gets a How’s Your Father From Ride-Bride Hilda Hammersen

  MADISON, WI: Say you managed to inspire some kind of “movement” of techno-utopians who built a network of amusement park rides that guide their visitors through an illustrated history of the last dotcom bubble.

  Say that your merry band of unwashed polyamorous info-hippies was overtaken by jackbooted thugs from one of the dinosauric media empires of yesteryear, whose legal machinations resulted in nationwide raids, beatings, gassings, and the total shutdown of your “movement.”

  What would you do? Sue? Call a press-conference? Bail your loyal followers out of the slam?

  Get laid, get shitfaced, and let a bunch of students spitball bullshit ideas for fighting back?

  If you picked the latter, you’re in good company. Last night, Perry Gibbons, soi-disant “founder” of the rideafarian religious cult, was spotted out for drinks and cuddles with a group of twentysomething students in the backwater town of Madison, WI, a place better known for its cheddar than its activism.

  While Gibbons regaled the impressionable post-adolescents with tales of his derring-do, he avidly noted their strategic suggestions for solving his legal, paramilitary, and technical problems.

  One suggestion that drew Gibbons’s attention and admiration was to approach venture capitalists and beg them for the capital to sue Disney and then use the settlements from the suits to pay back the VCs.

  This mind-croggling Ponzi scheme is the closest thing to a business model we’ve yet heard of from the chip-addled techno-hippies of the New Work and its post-boom incarnation.

  One can only imagine how our Ms Church will cover this in her fan-blog: breathless admiration
for Mr Gibbons’s cunning in soliciting yet more “way out of the box” thinking from the Junior Guevaras of the Great Midwest, no doubt.

  Perhaps Gibbons can be afforded a little sympathy, though. His latest encounter with Florida law left him with a broken arm and it may be that the pain medication is primarily responsible for Gibbons’s fancy thinking. If that’s the case, we can only hope that his young, blond Scandie nursie will carefully minister him back to health (while his comrades rot in gaol around the country).

  This organization needs to die before it gets someone killed.

  Comments? Write to Freddy at honestfred@techstink.co.uk

  Lester interrupted Suzanne’s phone-call to break in and announce that he’d run Rat-Toothed Freddy to ground: the reporter had caught the first flight from Madison to Chicago and then gone west to San Jose. The TSA had flagged him as a person-of-interest and were watching his movements, and a little digging on its website could cause it to disclose Freddy’s every airborne movement.

  Suzanne relayed this to Perry.

  “Don’t you go there,” she said. “He’s gunning for the San Francisco crew, and he’s hoping for a confrontation or a denunciation so that he can print it. He gets idees fixes that he worries at like a terrier, going for more bile.”

  “Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?”

  “I think that he thinks that technology hasn’t lived up to its promise and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him, that means that anyone who actually likes technology is the enemy, the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its true potential.”

  “Fuck, that is so twisted.”

  “And given the kind of vile crap he writes, the only readers he has are nut-cases who get off on seeing people who are actually creating stuff flayed alive for their failures. They egg him on—ever see one of his letters columns? If he changed to actual reportage, telling the balanced stories of what was going on in the world, they’d jump ship for some other hate-monger. He’s a lightning-rod for assholes—he’s the king of the trolls.”