Part 5 (1/2)
The afternoon pa.s.sed quickly and enchantingly. Perry was working on a knee-high, articulated Frankenstein monster built out of hand-painted seash.e.l.ls from a beach-side kitsch market. They said G.o.d BLESS AMERICA and SOUVENIR OF FLORIDA and CONCH REPUBLIC and each had to be fitted out for a motor custom built to conform to its contours.
”When it's done, it will make toast.”
”Make toast?”
”Yeah, separate a single slice off a loaf, load it into a top-loading slice-toaster, depress the lever, time the toast-cycle, retrieve the toast and b.u.t.ter it. I got the idea from old-time backup-tape loaders. This plus a toaster will function as a loosely coupled single system.”
”OK, that's really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast-robot?”
Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off. He was really built, and his s.h.a.ggy hair made him look younger than his crows-feet suggested. He turned a seash.e.l.l with a half-built motor in it over and spun it like a top on the hand-painted WEATHER IS HERE/WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL legend.
”Well, that's the question, isn't it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it's a good hobby business, but that's not really it.
”It's like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn't go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that'll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there's not much traditional constraint. I've got the engineer's most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I'll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.
”Now, it may be that there is a suite of tasks lurking *in potentia*
that demand all this resource and more -- maybe I'm like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don't see many of those problems -- none that interest me.
”What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these *trivial* problems, like car-driving Elmo cl.u.s.ters and seash.e.l.l toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a s.p.a.ce-program, and that's by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so p.r.o.ne to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to s.h.i.+t if you looked at them cross-eyed? It's because the iPod was only meant to last a year!
”It's like tailfins -- they were cool in the Tailfin Cretaceous, but wouldn't it have been better if they could have disappeared from view when they became aesthetically obsolete, when the s.p.a.ce age withered up and blew away? Oh, not really, obviously, because it's nice to see a well-maintained land-yacht on the highway every now and again, if only for variety's sake, but if you're going to design something that is meant to be *au fait* then presumably you should have some planned obsolescence in there, some end-of-lifing strategy for the aesthetic crash that follows any couture movement. Here, check this out.”
He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. ”Christ, it's *huge*,” she said.
”Yeah, isn't it just. Remember how small and s.h.i.+ny this thing was when it s.h.i.+pped? 'A thousand songs in your pocket!'”
That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. ”I *think* I've got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven't run out of s.p.a.ce yet, either.”
He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. ”You won't -- I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I've got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet... Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today.” He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. ”And that's just the point!
Tomorrow, we'll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost --”
”I lose those things all the time, like a set a month.”
”There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just *look at them*.” The iPod's chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. ”They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They *chose* to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you'd have already worn yours out and wouldn't feel bad about junking them.
”So I'm building a tape-loading seash.e.l.l robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It's a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that's why the collectors buy it, anyway.”
”That brings us back to the question of your relations.h.i.+p with Kodacell. They want to do what, exactly, with you?”
”Well, we've been playing with some ma.s.s-production techniques, the three-d printer and so on. When Kettlebelly called me, he said that he wanted to see about using the scanner and so on to make a lot of these things, at a low price-point. It's pretty perverse when you think about it: using modern technology to build replicas of obsolete technology rescued from the dump, when these replicas are bound to end up back here at the dump!” He laughed. He had nice laugh-lines around his eyes. ”Anyway, it's something that Lester and I had talked about for a long time, but never really got around to. Too much like retail. It's bad enough dealing with a couple dozen collectors who'll pay ten grand for a sculpture: who wants to deal with ten thousand customers who'll go a dollar each for the same thing?”
”But you figure that this Tjan character will handle all the customer stuff?”
”That's the idea: he'll run the business side, we'll get more time to hack; everyone gets paid. Kodacell's got some micro-sized marketing agencies, specialized PR firms, creative s.h.i.+ppers, all kinds of little three-person outfits that they've promised to hook us up with. Tjan interfaces with them, we do our thing, enrich the shareholders, get stock ourselves. It's supposed to be all upside. h.e.l.l, if it doesn't work we can just walk away and find another dump and go back into the collectors' market.”
He picked up his half-finished sh.e.l.l and swung a lamp with a magnifying lens built into it over his works.p.a.ce. ”Hey, just a sec, OK? I've just figured out what I was doing wrong before.” He took up a little tweezers and a plastic rod and probed for a moment, then daubed some solder down inside the sh.e.l.l's guts. He tweezed a wire to a contact and the sh.e.l.l made a motorized sound, a peg sticking out of it began to move rhythmically.
”Got it,” he said. He set it down. ”I don't expect I'm going to be doing many more of these projects after next week. This kind of design, we could never ma.s.s-produce it.” He looked a little wistful, and Suzanne suppressed a smile. What a tortured artiste this Florida junkyard engineer was!