Part 6 (1/2)

The nostalgia filled her up like a balloon expanding in her chest. She hadn't ever seen a computer until she was ten years old, and that had been the size of a chest-freezer, with less capability than one of the active printed-computer cards that came in glossy fas.h.i.+on magazines with come-ons for perfume and weight-loss.

The world had been stood on its head so many times in the intervening thirty-plus years that it was literally dizzying -- or was that the beer having a delayed effect? Suddenly all the certainties she rested on -- her 401k, her house, her ability to navigate the professional world in a competent manner -- seemed to be built on s.h.i.+fting sands.

They'd come in Lester's car, a homemade auto built around two electric Smart cars joined together to form a kind of mini-sedan with room enough for Lester to slide into the driver's perch with room to spare. Once they arrived, they unpacked clever folding chairs and sat them beside the car, rolled down the windows, and turned up the speakers. It was a warm night, but not sticky the way it had been that day, and the kiss of the wind that rustled the leaves of the tall palms ringing the theater was like balm.

The movie was something forgettable about b.u.mbling detectives on the moon, one of those trendy new things acted entirely by animated dead actors who combined the virtues of box-office draw and cheap labor. There might have been a couple of fictional actors in there too, it was hard to say, she'd never really followed the movies except as a place to escape to. There was real magic and escape in a drive-in, though, with the palpable evidence of all those other breathing humans in the darkened night watching the magic story flicker past on the screen, something that went right into her hindbrain. Before she knew it, her eyelids were drooping and then she found herself jerking awake. This happened a couple times before Lester slipped a pillow under her head and she sank into it and fell into sleep.

She woke at the closing credits and realized that she'd managed to prop the pillow on Lester's barrel-chest. She snapped her head up and then smiled embarra.s.sedly at him. ”Hey, sleepyhead,” he said. ”You snore like a bandsaw, you know it?”

She blushed. ”I don't!”

”You do,” he said.

”I do?”

Perry, on her other side nodded. ”You do.”

”G.o.d,” she said.

”Don't worry, you haven't got anything on Lester,” Perry said. ”I've gone into his room some mornings and found all the pictures lying on the floor, vibrated off their hooks.”

It seemed to her that Lester was blus.h.i.+ng now.

”I'm sorry if I spoiled the movie,” she said.

”Don't sweat it,” Lester said, clearly grateful for the change of subject. ”It was a lousy movie anyway. You drowned out some truly foul dialogue.”

”Well, there's that.”

”C'mon, let's go back to the office and get you your car. It's an hour to Miami from here.”

She was wide awake by the time she parked the rent-a-car in the coffin-hotel's parking lot and crawled into her room, slapping the air-con b.u.t.tons up to full to clear out the stifling air that had baked into the interior during the day.

She lay on her back in the dark coffin for a long time, eyes open and slowly adjusting to the idiot lights on the control panel, until it seemed that she was lying in a s.p.a.ce capsule hurtling through the universe at relativistic speeds, leaving behind history, the world, everything she knew. She sat up, wide awake, on West Coast time suddenly, and there was no way she would fall asleep now, but she lay back down and then she did, finally.

The alarm woke her seemingly five minutes later. She did a couple laps around the parking lot, padding around, stretching her legs, trying to clear her head -- her internal clock thought that it was 4AM, but at 7AM on the east coast, the sun was up and the heat had begun to sizzle all the available moisture into the air. She left the hotel and drove around Miami for a while. She needed to find some toiletries and then a cafe where she could sit down and file some copy. She'd tweeted a bunch of working notes and posted a few things to her blog the day before, but her editor expected something more coherent for those who preferred their news a little more digested.

By the time she arrived at Perry's junkyard, the day had tipped for afternoon, the sun no longer straight overhead, the heat a little softer than it had been the day before. She settled in for another day of watching the guys work, asking the occasional question. The column she'd ended up filing had been a kind of wait-and-see piece, describing the cool culture these two had going between them, and asking if it could survive scaling up to ma.s.s production. Now she experimented with their works-in-progress, sculptures and machines that almost worked, or didn't work at all, but that showed the scope of their creativity. Kettlewell thought that there were a thousand, ten thousand people as creative as these two out there, waiting to be discovered. Could it be true?

”Sure,” Perry said, ”why not? We're just here because someone dropped the barrier to entry, made it possible for a couple of tinkerers to get a lot of materials and to a.s.semble them without knowing a whole lot about advanced materials science. Wasn't it like this when the Internet was starting out?”

”Woah,” Suzanne said. ”I just realized that you wouldn't really remember those days, back in the early nineties.”

”Sure I remember them. I was a kid, but I remember them fine!”

She felt very old. ”The thing was that no one really suspected that there were so many liberal arts majors lurking in the nation's universities, dying to drop out and learn perl and HTML.”

Perry c.o.c.ked his head. ”Yeah, I guess that's a.n.a.logous. The legacy of the dotcom years for me is all this free infrastructure, very cheap network connections and hosting companies and so on. That, I guess, combined with people willing to use it. I never really thought of it, but there must have been a lot of people hanging around in the old days who thought email and the net were pretty sketchy, right?”

She waved her hands at him. ”Perry, lad, you don't know the half of it. There are *still* executives in the rustbelt who spend bailout money on secretaries to print out their email and then dictate replies into tape recorders to be typed and sent.”