Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  “Works a stall by the Wal-Mart ride, selling contact lenses?”

  The kid’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know me, man. You don’t want to know me. Better for your health if you don’t know me.”

  His hands were passing over his phone, his wallet, his keys—Lester’s keys. Lester would be glad to have an excuse to build a new car.

  “Only I own the Wal-Mart ride, and I’ve known Jason a long time. I gave him his first job, fixing the printers. You look like him.”

  The kid’s three buddies were beginning their slow fade into the background. The kid was visibly on the horns of a dilemma. The gun wavered. Perry’s knees turned to water.

  “You’re that guy?” the kid said. He peered closer. “Shit, you are.”

  “Keep it all,” Perry said. His mouth wasn’t so smart. Knowing who mugged you wasn’t good for your health.

  “Shit,” the kid said. The gun wavered. Wavered.

  “Come on,” one of his buddies said. “Come on, man!”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” the kid said, his voice flat.

  Perry knew he was a dead man.

  “I’m really sorry,” the kid said, once his friends were out of range.

  “Me too,” said Perry.

  “You won’t tell my brother?”

  Perry froze. Time dilated. He realized that his fists were clenched so tight that his knuckles hurt. He realized that he had a zit on the back of his neck that was rubbing against his collar. He realized that the kid had a paperback book stuck in the waistband of his bangbanger shorts, which was unusual. It was a fantasy novel. A Conan novel. Wow.

  Time snapped back.

  “I won’t tell your brother,” he said. Then he surprised himself, “But you’ve got to give me back the credit-cards and leave the car at the market in the morning.”

  The kid nodded. Then he seemed to realize he was holding a gun on Perry. He lowered it. “Yeah, that’s fair,” he said. “Can’t use the fucking cards these days anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Perry said. “Well, there’s some cash there anyway.” He realized he had five hundred bucks in a roll in a hidden pocket in his shorts.

  “You get home OK?”

  “I’ll thumb a ride,” Perry said.

  “I can call you a taxi,” the kid said. “It’s not safe to hang around here.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” Perry said. “Thanks.”

  The kid took out a little phone and prodded it for a minute. “On the way,” he said. “The guns aren’t loaded.”

  “Oh, well,” Perry said. “Good to know.”

  An awkward silence spread between them. “Look, I’m really sorry,” the kid said. “We don’t really do this. It’s our first night. My brother would really kill me.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Perry said. His heart was beating again, not thundering or keeping ominously still. “But you know, this isn’t smart. You’re going to stick someone up who has bullets and he’s gonna shoot you.”

  “We’ll get ammo,” the kid said.

  “And shoot him? That’s only a little better, you know.”

  “What do you want me to say?” the kid said, looking young and petulant. “I apologized.”

  “Come by tomorrow with the car and let’s talk, all right?”

  Lester didn’t even notice that his car was missing until the kid drove up with it, and when he asked about it, Perry just raised his funny eyebrow at him. That funny eyebrow, it had the power to cloud men’s minds.

  “What’s your name?” Perry asked the kid, giving him the spare stool by the ticket-window. It was after lunch time, when the punishing heat slowed everyone to a sticky crawl, and the crowd was thin—one or two customers every half hour.

  “Glenn,” the kid said. In full daylight, he looked older. Perry had noticed that the shantytowners never stopped dressing like teenagers, wearing the fashions of their youths forever, so that a walk through the market was like a tour through the teen fashions of the last thirty years.

  “Glenn, you did me a real solid last night.”

  Glenn squirmed on his stool. “I’m sorry about that—”

  “Me too,” Perry said. “But not as sorry as I might have been. You said it was your first night. Is that true?”

  “Car-jacking, sure,” the kid said.

  “But you get into other shit, don’t you? Mugging? Selling a little dope? Something like that?”

  “Everyone does that,” Glenn said. He looked sullen.

  “Maybe,” Perry said. “And then a lot of them end up doing a stretch in a work-camp. Sometimes they get bit by water-moccasins and don’t come out. Sometimes, one of the other prisoners hits them over the head with a shovel. Sometimes you just lose three to five years of your life to digging ditches.”

  Glenn said nothing.

  “I’m not trying to tell you how to run your life,” Perry said. “But you seem like a decent kid, so I figure there’s more in store for you than getting killed or locked up. I know that’s pretty normal around here, but you don’t have to go that way. Your brother didn’t.”

  “What the fuck do you know about it, anyway?” The kid was up now, body language saying he wanted to get far away, fast.

  “I could ask around the market,” Perry said, as though the kid hadn’t spoken. “Someone here has got to be looking for someone to help out. You could open your own stall.”

  The kid said, “It’s all just selling junk to idiots. What kind of job is that for a man?”

  “Selling people stuff they can’t be bothered to make for themselves is a time-honored way of making a living. There used to be professional portrait photographers who’d take a pic of your family for money. They were even considered artists. Besides, you don’t have to sell stuff you download. You can invent stuff and print that.”

  “Get over it. Those days are over. No one cares about inventions anymore.”

  It nailed Perry between the eyes, like a slaughterhouse bolt. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. He didn’t want to talk to this kid any more than this kid wanted to talk to him. “Well, if I can’t talk you out of it, it’s your own business. .” He started to rearrange his ticket-desk.

  The kid saw his opportunity for freedom and bolted. He was probably headed for his brother’s stall and then the long walk to wherever he planned on spending his day. Everything was a long walk from here, or you could wait for the busses that ran on the hour during business-hours.

  Perry checked out the car, cleaned out the empties and the roaches and twists from the back seat, then parked it. A couple more people came by to ride his ride, and he took their money.

  Lester had just finished his largest-ever flattened-soda-can mechanical computer, it snaked back and forth across the whole of the old Wal-Mart solarium, sheets of pressboard with precision-cut gears mounted on aviation bearings—Francis had helped him with those. All day, he’d been listening to the racket of it grinding through its mighty 0.001KHz calculations, dumping carloads of M&Ms into its output hopper. You programmed it with regulation baseballs, footballs, soccer-balls, and wiffleballs: dump them in the input hopper and they would be sorted into the correct chutes to trigger the operations. With a whopping one kilobit of memory, the thing could best any of the early vacuum tube computers without a single electrical component, and Lester was ready to finally declare victory over the cursed Univac.

  Perry let himself be coaxed into the work-room, deputizing Francis to man the ticket-desk, and watched admiringly as Lester put the machine through its paces.

  “You’ve done it,” Perry said.

  “Well, I gotta blog it,” Lester said. “Run some benchmarks, really test it out against the old monsters. I’m thinking of using it to brute-force the old Nazi Enigma code. That’ll show those dirty Nazi bastards! We’ll win the war yet!”

  Perry found himself giggling. “You’re the best, man,” he said to Lester. “It’s good that there’s at least one sane person around here.”

  “Don’t flatter yourse
lf, Perry.”

  “I was talking about you, Lester.”

  “Uh-oh,” Lester said. He scooped a double handful of brown M&Ms up from the output hopper and munched them. “It’s not a good sign when you start accusing me of being the grownup in our partnership. Have some M&Ms and tell me about it.”

  Perry did, unburdening himself to his old pal, his roommate of ten years, the guy he’d gone to war with and started businesses with and collaborated with.

  “You’re restless, Perry,” Lester said. He put nine golf-balls, a ping-pong ball, and another nine golf balls in the machine’s input hopper. Two and a third seconds later, eighty one M&Ms dropped into the output hopper. “You’re just bored. You’re a maker, and you’re running things instead of making things.”

  “No one cares about made things anymore, Les.”

  “That’s sort of true,” Lester said. “I’ll allow you that. But it’s only sort of true. What you’re missing is how much people care about organizations still. That was the really important thing about the New Work: the way we could all come together to execute, without a lot of top-down management. The bangbanger arms dealers, the bio-terrorists and fatkins suppliers—they all run on social institutions that we perfected back then. You’ve got something like that here with your market, a fluid social institution that you couldn’t have had ten or fifteen years ago.”

  “If you say so,” Perry said. The M&Ms were giving him heartburn. Cheap chocolate didn’t really agree with his stomach.

  “I do. And so the answer is staring you right in the face: go invent some social institutions. You’ve got one creeping up here in the ride. There are little blogospheres of fans who coordinate what they’re going to bring down and where they’re going to put it. Build on that.”

  “No one’s going to haul ass across the country to ride this ride, Les. Get real.”

  “Course not.” Lester beamed at him. “I’ve got one word for you, man: franchise!”

  “Franchise?”

  “Build dupes of this thing. Print out anything that’s a one of a kind, run them as franchises.”

  “Won’t work,” Perry said. “Like you said, this thing works because of the hardcore of volunteer curators who add their own stuff to it—it’s always different. Those franchises would all be static, or would diverge… It’d just be boring compared to this.”

  “Why should they diverge? Why should they be static? You could network them, dude! What happens in one, happens in all. The curators wouldn’t just be updating one exhibit, but all of them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. A gigantic physical wiki. Oh, it’d be so very very very cool, Perry. A cool social institution.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I’m gonna. But I need someone to run the project. Someone who’s good at getting people all pointed in the same direction. You, pal. You’re my hero on this stuff.”

  “You’re such a flatterer.”

  “You love it, baby,” Lester said, and fluttered his long eyelashes. “Like the lady said to the stamp collector, philately will get you everywhere.”

  “Oy,” Perry said. “You’re fired.”

  “You can’t fire me, I’m a volunteer!”

  Lester dropped six golf-balls and a heavy medicine ball down the hopper. The machine ground and chattered, then started dropping hundred-loads of M&Ms—100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700—then some change.

  “What operation was that?” Perry said. He’d never seen Lester pull out the medicine ball.

  “Figure it out,” Lester said.

  Perry thought for a moment. Six squared? Six cubed? Log six? “Six factorial? My God you’re weird, Les.”

  “Genius is never appreciated.” He scooped up a double-handful of brown M&Ms. “In your face, Von Neumann! Let’s see your precious ENIAC top this!”

  A month later, Perry was clearing security at Miami International, looking awkward in long trousers, closed-sole shoes, and a denim jacket. It was autumn in Boston, and he couldn’t show up in flip-flops and a pair of cutoffs. The security guards gave his leathery, lopsided face a hard look. He grinned like a pirate and made his funny eyebrow twitch, a stunt that earned him half an hour behind the screen and a date with Doctor Jellyfinger.

  “What, exactly, do you think I’ve got hidden up there?” he asked as he gripped the railing and tried not to let the illegitimati carborundum.

  “It’s procedure, sir.”

  “Well, the doc said my prostate was the size of a guava about a month ago—in your professional opinion, has it shrunk or grown? I mean, while you’re up there.”

  The TSA man didn’t like that at all. A minute later, Perry was buckling up and leaving the little room with an exaggerated bowlegged gait. He tipped an imaginary hat at the guard’s retreating back and said, “Call me!” in a stagey voice.

  It was the last bit of fun he had for the next four hours, crammed in the tin can full of recycled discount air-traveller flatulence and the clatter of fingers on keyboards and the gabble of a hundred phone conversations as the salarymen on the flight stole a few minutes of cramped productivity from the dead travel time.

  Touching down in Boston and getting his luggage, he felt like he’d landed on an alien planet. The feeling of disorientation and foreignness was new to Perry. He was used to being supremely comfortable, in control—confident. But he was nervous now, maybe even scared, a little.

  He dialed Tjan. “I’ve got my bags,” he said.

  “I’ll be right around,” Tjan said. “Really looking forward to seeing you.”

  There were more cops than passengers in the arrivals area at Logan, and they watched Tjan warily as he pulled up and swung open a door of his little sports-car.

  “What the fuck is this, a Porsche?” Perry said as he folded himself awkwardly into the front seat, stepping in through the sun-roof, pulling his bag down into his lap after him.

  “It’s a Lada. I had it imported—they’re all over Russia. Evolutionary algorithm used to produce a minimum-materials/maximum-strength chassis. It’s nice to see you, Perry.”

  “It’s nice to see you, Tjan,” he said. The car was so low to the ground that it felt like he was riding luge. Tjan hammered mercilessly on the gearbox, rocketing them to Cambridge at such speed that Perry barely had time to admire the foliage, except at stop-lights.

  They were around the campus now, taking a screeching right off Mass Ave onto a tree-lined street of homely two-storey brick houses. Tjan pulled up in front of one and popped the sun-roof. The cold air that rushed in was as crisp as an apple, unlike any breath of air to be had in Florida, where there was always a mushiness, a feeling of air that had been filtered through the moist lungs of Florida’s teeming fauna.

  Perry climbed out of the little Russian sports-car and twisted his back and raised his arms over his head until his spine gave and popped and crackled.

  Tjan followed, and then he shut down the car with a remote that made it go through an impressive and stylish series of clicks, clunks and chirps before settling down over its wheels, dropping the chassis to a muffler-scraping centimeter off the ground.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you your room.”

  Tjan’s porch sagged, with a couple kids’ bikes triple-locked to it and an all-covering chalk mosaic over every inch of it. The wood creaked and gave beneath their feet.

  The door sprang open and revealed a pretty little girl, nine or ten years old, in blue-jeans and a hoodie sweater that went nearly to her ankles, the long sleeves bunched up like beach-balls on her forearms. The hood hung down to her butt—it was East Coast bangbanger, as reinterpreted through the malls.

  “Daddy!” she said, and put her arms around Tjan’s waist, squeezing hard.

  He pried her loose and then hoisted her by the armpits up to eye-height. “What have you done to your brother?”

  “Nothing he didn’t deserve,” she said, with a smile that showed dimples and made her little nose wrinkle.

  Tjan looked over at Perry.
“This is my daughter, Lyenitchka, who is about to be locked in the coal cellar until she learns to stop torturing her younger brother. Lyenitchka, this is Perry Gibbons, upon whom you have already made an irreparably bad first impression.” He shook her gently Perrywards.

  “Hello, Perry,” she said, giggling, holding out one hand. She had a faint accent, which made her sound like a tiny, skinny Bond villainess.

  He shook gravely. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “You got your kids,” Perry said, once she was gone.

  “For the school year. Me and the ex, we had a heart-to-heart about the Russian education system and ended up here: I get the kids from September to June, but not Christmases or Easter holidays. She gets them the rest of the time, and takes them to a family dacha in Ukraine, where she assures me there are hardly any mafiyeh kids to influence my darling daughter.”

  “You must be loving this,” Perry said.

  Tjan’s face went serious. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “I’m really happy for you, buddy.”

  They had burgers in the back-yard, cooking on an electric grill that was caked with the smoking grease of a summer’s worth of outdoor meals. The plastic table-cloth was weighed down with painted rocks and the corners blew up in the freshening autumn winds. Lyenitchka’s little brother appeared when the burgers began to spit and smoke on the grill, a seven-year-old in metallic mesh trousers and shirt wrought with the logo of a cartoon Cossack holding a laser-sword aloft.

  “Sasha, meet Perry.” Sasha looked away, then went off to swing on a tire-swing hanging from the big tree.

  “You’ve got good kids,” Perry said, handing Tjan a beer from the cooler under the picnic table.

  “Yup,” Tjan said. He flipped the burgers and then looked at both of them. Lyenitchka was pushing her brother on the swing, a little too hard. Tjan smiled and looked back down at his burgers.

  Tjan cut the burgers in half and dressed them to his kids’ exacting standards. They picked at them, pushed them onto each other’s plates and got some into their mouths.

  “I’ve read your briefing on the ride,” Tjan said, once his kids had finished and eaten half a package of Chutney Oreos for dessert. “It’s pretty weird stuff.”