Part 26 (1/2)

Sammy plodded through the rest of the market with his paper bag. It was all so depressing. The numbers at Disney World were down, way down, and it was his job to figure out how to bring them up again, without spending too much money. He'd done it before a couple of times, with the live-action role-playing stuff, and with the rebuild of Fantasyland as an ironic goth hangout (being a wholly separate ent.i.ty from the old Walt Disney Company had its advantages). But to do it a third time -- Christ, he had no idea how he'd get there. These weird-a.s.s Wal-Mart squatters had seemed promising, but could you possibly transplant something like this to a high-throughput, professional location-based entertainment product?

The urchins were still in the parking lot with their Roman emperor busts. He held his hands out to ward them off and found himself holding onto a bust of his own head. One of the little rats had gotten a three-d scan of his head while he was walking by and had made the bust on spec. He looked older in Roman emperor guise than he did in his mind's eye, old and tired, like an emperor in decline.

”Twenty dollah man, twenty, twenty,” the kid said. He was about 12, and still chubby, with long hair that frizzed away from his head in a dandelion halo.

”Ten,” Sammy said, clutching his tired head. It was smooth as epoxy resin, and surprisingly light. There was a lot of different goop you could run through those three-d printers, but whatever they'd used for this, it was featherweight.

The kid looked shrewd. ”Twenty dollah and I get rid of these other kids, OK?”

Sammy laughed. He pa.s.sed the kid a twenty, taking care to tuck his wallet deep into the inside pocket of his jacket. The kid whistled shrilly and the rest of the kids melted away. The entrepreneur made the twenty disappear, tapped the side of his nose, and took off running back into the market stalls.

It was hot and muggy and Sammy was tired, and the drive back to Orlando was another five hours if the traffic was against him -- and these days, everything was against him.

Perry's funny eyebrow twitched as he counted out the day's take. This gig was all cream, all profit. His overheads amounted to a couple hundred a month to Jason and his crew to help with the robot and machinery maintenance in the Wal-Mart, half that to some of the shantytown girls to dust and sweep after closing, and a retainer to a bangbanger pack that ran security at the ride and in the market. Plus he got the market-stall rents, and so when the day was over, only the first hundred bucks out of the till went into overheads and the rest split even-steven with Lester.

Lester waited impatiently, watching him count twice before splitting the stack. Perry rolled up his take and dropped it into a hidden pocket sewn into his cargo shorts.

”Someday you're going to get lucky and some chick is going to reach down and freak out, buddy,” Lester said.

”Better she finds my bank-roll than my prostate,” Perry said. Lester spent a lot of time thinking about getting lucky, making up for a lifetime of bad luck with girls.

”OK, let's get changed,” Lester said. As usual, he was wearing tight-fitting jeans that owed a little debt to the bangbanger cycling shorts, something you would have had to go to a gay bar to see when Perry was in college. His s.h.i.+rt clung to his pecs and was tailored down to his narrow waist. It was a fatkins style, the kind of thing you couldn't wear unless you had a uniquely adversarial relations.h.i.+p with your body and metabolism.

”No, Lester, no.” Perry said. ”I said I'd go on this double date with you, but I didn't say anything about letting you dress me up for it.”

The two girls were a pair that Lester had met at a fatkins club in South Beach the week before, and he'd camera-phoned their pic to Perry with a scrawled drunken note about which one was his. They were attractive enough, but the monotonic fatkins devotion to sybartism was so tiresome. Perry didn't see much point in hooking up with a girl he couldn't have a good technical discussion with.

”Come *on*, it's good stuff, you'll love it.”

”If I have to change clothes, I'm not interested.” Perry folded his arms. In truth, he wasn't interested, period. He liked his little kingdom there, and he could get everything he needed from burritos to RAM at the market. He had a chest freezer full of bankruptcy sale organic MREs, for variety.

”Just the s.h.i.+rt then -- I had it printed just for you.”

Perry raised his funny eyebrow. ”Let's see it.”

Lester turned to his latest car, a trike with huge, electric blue back tires, and popped the trunk, rummaged, and proudly emerged holding a bright blue Hawai'ian print s.h.i.+rt.

”Lester, are those . . . t.u.r.ds?”

”It's transgressivist moderne,” Lester said, hopping from foot to foot. ”Saw it in the New York Times, brought the pic to Gabriela in the market, she cloned it, printed it, and sent it out for st.i.tching -- an extra ten buck for same-day service.”

”I am *not* wearing a s.h.i.+rt covered in steaming piles of s.h.i.+t, Lester. No, no, no. A googol times no.”

Lester laughed. ”Christ, I had you going, didn't I? Don't worry, I wouldn't actually have let you go out in public wearing this. But how about *this*?” he said with a flourish, and brought out another s.h.i.+rt. Something stretchy and iridescent, like an oil-slick. It was sleeveless. ”It'll really work with your biceps and pecs. Also: looks pretty good compared to the t.u.r.d s.h.i.+rt, doesn't it? Go on, try it on.”

”Lester Banks, you are the gayest straight man I know,” Perry said. He shucked his sweaty tee and slipped into the s.h.i.+rt. Lester gave him a big thumbs-up. He examined his reflection in the blacked-out gla.s.s doors of the Wal-Mart.

”Yeah, OK,” he said. ”Let's get this over with.”

”Your enthusiasm, your best feature,” Lester said.