Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  “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 execu
tive 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.”