To make a change.
And in the back of her mind was Sturtevant, shaking hands with Mulcahy while saying, “We get very few opportunities in life to do lasting good.”
It had been more than a week, but the crumpled business card was still in the pocket of her purse. She flattened the thick cardstock by rubbing it flat against the edge of the stairs, then ran her thumb along the embossed letters and the little bumps beneath it. She felt each number as she placed the call.
“Visual Cybernetics, Incorporated. Dr. Gillion’s office. How may we help you?”
“Other way around,” she said. “I’m Agent Peng, with the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies. You guys might want to clear your schedule.”
Acknowledgements and Apologies
MAKER SPACE was supposed to be a completely different novel than the one you’ve just read. Digital Divide, the first book in the Rachel Peng series, was released on April 2nd, 2013. It was my first long work of fiction and I was ready to drop. I figured I’d take a few months off, maybe write some recreational stuff to shake up my thinking, and then get to work on Maker Space. Two weeks later, I was on the phone with my sister, the two of us panicking because we didn’t know if our mother had kept to her tradition of watching the Boston Marathon from the finish line.
This new version of Maker Space came from the institutional shakeups caused by the Boston Marathon bombings. I strongly recommend Brian Castner’s article for Wired, “The Exclusive Inside Story of the Boston Bomb Squad’s Defining Day,” in which he describes how none of the traditional search-and-response methods used by the Boston Police Department applied to the Tsarnaev brothers and their backpacks full of pressure cookers. Castner paints a picture of how one of the world’s best response teams found themselves in a scenario in which their training and their established methods were not only inadequate, but could have allowed a bad situation to become much, much worse.
The ingenuity and imagination of the maker community is astonishing. They’ve been portrayed in this book as an artists’ community of younger adults, but in reality, makers come from all walks of life. They are brilliant and creative and driven, and I’ve never spoken to one who wants to do anything but make the world a better place. A major theme within the maker community is voluntary self-regulation to ensure their actions and activities are beneficial. However, human beings have a history of twisting what we make and say to purposes other than for what they were intended. This is not necessarily a bad thing—as Rachel said, it’s a brave new world, and we’re all trying to find our way—but it is something of which we need to be aware.
For myself, I need to thank my husband, Brown, for being there with me as we find our way together.
As always, thanks also goes to Fuzz, Gary, Tiff, Joris, Greg, and Elizabeth for fighting through the rough drafts. To Joie, Elissa, Erin, and Jonathan, who lent their names to this book. And to Danny, my copy editor, who put up with an absolutely insane number of editing changes brought on through my tight schedule and a certain television show. We may never agree on hyphenated adjectives, my friend, but you have the patience of a saint.
Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising provided the fantastic cover art.
Finally, Maker Space is set in a larger fictional universe. Patrick Mulcahy’s story is free to all readers and is in graphic novel form at agirlandherfed.com. You can find updates on current projects and novels at kbspangler.com and agirlandherfed.com. Thanks for reading!
Rachel Peng and Raul Santino will be back.
Maker Space Page 37
