Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  “Hey!” he called. “My chair’s dead!” He had fetched up in a central pathway where the chairs tried to run cloverleafs around four displays. A couple chairs swerved around him. He thumped the panel dramatically, then stepped out and shook his head. He contrived to step on three robots on the way to another chair.

  “Is yours working?” he asked the kid riding in it, all of ten years old and of indefinite gender.

  “Yeah,” the kid said. It scooted over. “There’s room for both of us, get in.”

  Christ, don’t they have stranger-danger in the north? He climbed in beside the kid and contrived to slide one sly hand under the panel. Teasing out the wires the second time was easier, even one-handed. He sliced through five large bundles this time before the chair ground to a halt, its gyros whining and rocking it from side-to-side.

  The kid looked at him and frowned. “These things are shit,” it said with real vehemence, climbing down and kicking one of its tires, and then kicking a couple of the floor-level robots for good measure. They’d landed another great breakdown spot: directly in front of a ranked display of raygun-shaped appliances and objects. He remembered seeing that one in its nascent stage, back in Florida—just a couple of toy guns, which were presently joined by three more, then there were ten, then fifty, then a high wall of them, striking and charming. The chair’s breakdown position neatly blocked the way.

  “Guess we’d better walk out,” he said. He stepped on a couple more robots, making oops noises. The kid enthusiastically kicked robots out of its way. Chairs swerved around them as other riders tried to navigate. They were approaching the exit when Sammy spotted a charge-plate for the robots. They were standard issue for robotic vacuum cleaners and other semi-autonomous appliances, and he’d had one in his old apartment. They were supposed to be safe as anything, but a friend’s toddler had crawled over to his and shoved a stack of dimes into its recessed jack and one of them had shorted it out in a smoking, fizzing fireworks display.

  “You go on ahead, I’m going to tie my shoes.”

  Sammy bent down beside the charge plate, his back to the kid and the imagined cameras that were capturing his every move, and slipped the stack of coins he’d taken from his pocket into the little slot where the robots inserted their charging stamen.

  The ensuing shower of sparks was more dramatic than he’d remembered—maybe it was the darkened room. The kid shrieked and ran for the EXIT sign, and he took off too, at a good clip. They’d get the ride up and running soon enough, but maybe not tonight, not if they couldn’t get the two chairs he’d toasted out of the room.

  There was the beginnings of chaos at the exit. There was that Tjan character, giving him an intense look. He tried to head for the down escalator, but Tjan cut him off.

  “What’s going on in there?”

  “Damnedest thing,” he said, trying to keep his face composed. “My chair died. Then another one—a little kid was riding in it. Then there was a lot of electrical sparks, and I walked out. Crazy.”

  Tjan cocked his head. “I hope you’re not hurt. We could have a doctor look at you; there are a couple around tonight.”

  It had never occurred to Sammy that professional types might turn out for a ride like this, but of course it was obvious. There were probably off-duty cops, local politicians, lawyers, and the like.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. Maybe you should send someone in for the people still in there, though?”

  “That’s being taken care of. I’m just sorry you came all the way from Florida for this kind of disappointment. That’s just brutal.” Tjan’s measuring stare was even more intense.

  “Uh, it’s OK. I had meetings here this week. This was just a cool bonus.”

  “Who do you work for, Mickey?”

  Shit.

  “Insurance company,” he said.

  “That’d be Norwich Union, then, right? They’ve got a headquarters here.”

  Sammy knew how this went. Norwich Union didn’t have headquarters here. Or they did. He’d have to outguess Tjan with his answer.

  “Are you going to stay open tonight?”

  Tjan nodded, though it wasn’t clear whether he was nodding because he was answering in the affirmative or because his suspicions had been confirmed.

  “Well then, I should be going.”

  Tjan put out a hand. “Oh, please stay. I’m sure we’ll be running soon; you should get a whole ride through.”

  “No, really, I have to go.” He shook off the hand and pelted down the escalator and out into the freezing night. His blood sang in his ears. They probably wouldn’t get the ride running that night at all. They probably would send that whole carnival crowd home, disappointed. He’d won some kind of little victory over something.

  He’d felt more confident of his victory when he was concerned with the guy with the funny eyebrow—with Perry. He’d seemed little more than a bum, a vag. But this Tjan reminded him of the climbers he’d met through his career at Walt Disney World: keenly observant and fast formulators of strategies. Someone who could add two and two before you’d know that there was such a thing as four.

  Sammy walked back to his hotel as quickly as he could, given the icy sidewalks underfoot, and by the time he got to the lobby of the old office tower his face hurt—forehead, cheeks and nose. He’d booked his return flight for a day later, thinking he’d do more reccies of the new site before writing his report and heading home, but there was no way he was facing down that Tjan guy again.

  What had prompted him to sabotage the ride? It was something primal, something he hadn’t been in any real control of. He’d been in some kind of fugue-state. But he’d packed the little knife in his suitcase and he’d slipped it into his pocket before leaving the room. So how instinctive could it possibly have been?

  He had a vision of the carnival atmosphere in the market stalls outside and knew that even after the ride had broken down, the crowd had lingered, laughing and browsing and enjoying a night’s respite from the world and the cold city. The Whos down in Who-ville had gone on singing even after he’d Grinched their ride.

  That was it. The ride didn’t just make use of user-created content—it was user-created content. He could never convince his bosses in Orlando to let him build anything remotely like this, and given enough time, it would surely overtake them. That Tjan—someone like him wouldn’t be involved if there wasn’t some serious money opportunity on the line.

  He’d seen the future that night and he had no place in it.

  It only took a week on the Boston ride before they had their third and fourth nodes. The third was outside of San Francisco, in a gigantic ghost-mall that was already being used as a flea-market. They had two former anchor-stores, one of which was being squatted by artists who needed studio space. The other one made a perfect location for a new ride, and the geeks who planned on building it had cut their teeth building elaborate Burning Man confectioneries together, so Perry gave them his blessing.

  The fourth was to open in Raleigh, in the Research Triangle, where the strip malls ran one into the next. The soft-spoken, bitingly ironic southerners who proposed it were the daughters of old IBM blue-tie stalwarts who’d been running a women’s tech collective since they realized they couldn’t afford college and dropped out together. They wanted to see how much admission they could charge if they let it be known that they would plow their profits into scholarship funds for local women.

  Perry couldn’t believe that these people wanted to open their own rides, nor that they thought they needed his permission to do so. He was reminded of the glory days of New Work, when every day there were fifty New Work sites with a hundred new gizmos, popping up on the mailing lists, looking for distributors, recruiting, competing, swarming, arguing, forming and reforming. Watching Tjan cut the deals whereby these people were granted permission to open their own editions of the ride felt like that, and weirder still.

  “Why do they need our permission? The API’s wide open.
They can just implement. Are they sheep or something?”

  Tjan gave him an old-fashioned look. “They’re being polite, Perry—they’re giving you face for being the progenitor of the ride.”

  “I don’t like it,” Perry said. “I didn’t get anyone’s permission to include their junk in the ride. When we get a printer to clone something that someone brings here, we don’t get their permission. Why the hell is seeking permission considered so polite? Shit, why not send me a letter asking me if I mind receiving an email? Where does it end?”

  “They’re trying to be nice to you Perry, that’s all.”

  “Well I don’t like it,” Perry said. “How about this: from now on when someone asks for permission we tell them no, we don’t give out or withhold permission for joining the network, but we hope that they’ll join it anyway. Maybe put up a FAQ on the site.”

  “You’ll just confuse people.”

  “I won’t be confusing them, man! I’ll be educating them!”

  “How about if you add a Creative Commons license to it? Some of them are very liberal.”

  “I don’t want to license this. You have to own something to license it. A license is a way of saying, ‘Without this license, you’re forbidden to do this.’ You don’t need a license to click a link and load a webpage—no one has to give you permission to do this and no one could take it away from you. Licensing just gives people even worse ideas about ownership and permission and property!”

  “It’s your show,” Tjan said.

  “No it isn’t! That’s the point!”

  “OK, OK, it’s not your show. But we’ll do it your way. You are a lovable, cranky weirdo, you know it?”

  They did it Perry’s way. He was scheduled to go back to Florida a few days later, but he changed his ticket to go out to San Francisco and meet with the crew who were implementing the ride there. One of them taught interaction design at SFSU and brought him in to talk to the students. He wasn’t sure what he was going to talk to them about, but when he got there, he found himself telling the story of how he and Lester and Tjan and Suzanne and Kettlebelly had built and lost the New Work movement, without even trying. It was a fun story to tell from start to finish, and they talked through the lunch break and then a group of students took him to a bar in the Mission with a big outdoor patio where he went on telling war stories until the sun had set and he’d drunk so much beer he couldn’t tell stories any longer.

  They were all ten or fifteen years younger than him, and the girls were pretty and androgynous and the boys were also pretty and androgynous, not that he really swung that way. Still, it was fine being surrounded by the catcalling, joking, bullshitting crowd of young, pretty, flirty people. They hugged him a lot, and two of the prettier girls (who, he later realized, were a lot more interested in each other than him) took him back to a capsule hotel built across three parking-spots and poured him into bed and tucked him in.

  He had a burrito the size of a football for breakfast, stuffed with shredded pig-parts and two kinds of sloppy beans. He washed it down with a quart of a cinnamon/rice drink called horchata that was served ice-cold and did wonders for his hangover.

  A couple hours’ noodling on his laptop and a couple bags of Tecate later and he was feeling almost human. Early mariachis strolled the street with electric guitars that controlled little tribes of dancing, singing knee-high animatronics, belting out old Jose Alfredo Jimenez tunes.

  It was shaping up to be a good day. His laptop rang and he screwed in his headset and started talking to Tjan.

  “Man, this place is excellent,” he said. “I had the best night I’ve had in years last night.”

  “Well then you’ll love this: there’s a crew in Madison that want to do the same thing and could use a little guidance. They spoke to me this morning and said they’d be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six o’clock flight at SFO?”

  They gave him cheese in Madison and introduced him to the biohackers who were the spiritual progeny of the quirky moment when Madison was one of six places where stem cells could be legally researched. The biohackers gave him the willies. One had gills. One glowed in the dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize.

  He got his hosts to bring him to the ratskeller where they sat down to comedy-sized beers and huge, suspicious steaming wursts.

  “Where’s your site?”

  “We were thinking of building one—there’s a lot of farmland around here.” Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasn’t old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldn’t. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever.

  “That’s pretty weird. Everywhere else, they’re just moving into spaces that have been left vacant.”

  “We haven’t got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups.”

  “Heavily funded startups? In this day and age?”

  “Superbabies,” the kid said with a shrug. “It’s all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazy—imagine being a twenty-year-old superbaby, with two-decade-old technology in your genes. In your germline! Breeding other obsolete superbabies. Crazy. But the Chinese are investing heavily.”

  “So no dead malls? Christ, that’s like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?”

  The kid laughed. “The campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But there’s lots of farmland, like I said. Won’t be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. It’ll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska.”

  “Wow.” He wanted to say, They have the ACLU in Nebraska? but he knew that wasn’t fair. The midwesterners he’d met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. “So why do you want to do this?”

  The kid grinned. “Because there’s got to be a way to do something cool without moving to New York. I like it around here. Don’t want to live in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I don’t want to be a farmer or an academic or run a student bar. All that stuff is a dead-end, I can see it from here. I mean, who drinks beer anymore? There’s much sweeter highs out there in the real world.”

  Perry looked at his beer. It was in a themed stein with Germano-Gothic gingerbread worked into the finish. It felt like it had been printed from some kind of ceramic/epoxy hybrid. You could get them at traveling carny midways, too.

  “I like beer,” he said.

  “But you’re—” The kid broke off.

  “Old,” Perry said. “’Sok. You’re what, 16?”

  “21,” the kid said. “I’m a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more important things than puberty.”

  Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did look 21. “Hey Luke,” the girl said, kissing him on the cheek.

  Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldn’t forget it again—Nebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew he’d keep the name for good now.

  “This is Perry Gibbons,” Luke said. “Perry, this is Hilda and Ernie. Guys, Perry’s the guy who built the ride I was telling you about.”

  Ernie shook his hand. “Man, that’s the coolest shit I’ve ever seen, wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow.”

  Hilda flicked his ear. “Stop drooling, fanboy,” she said.

  Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly.

  “Sorry. It’s just—well, I’m a big fan is all.”

  “That’s really nice of you,” Perry said. He’d met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadn’t known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work day
s he’d meet reporters who called themselves fans, but that was just blowing smoke. Now he was meeting people who seemed to really mean it. Not many, thank God.

  “He’s just like a puppy,” Hilda said, pinching Ernie’s cheek. “All enthusiasm.”

  Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. “These two are going to help me build the ride,” he said. “Hilda’s an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic.”

  “Women’s health clinic or something?” Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that he’d seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didn’t think he’d ever met one like her.

  “No,” Hilda said. “Metabolic health. Lots of people get the fatkins treatment at puberty, either because their fatkins parents talk them into it or because they hate their baby fat.”

  Perry shook his head. “Come again?”

  “You think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? It’s hell on your digestive system. Not to mention you spend a fortune on food. A lot of people get to college and just switch to high-calorie powdered supplements because they can’t afford enough real food to stay healthy, so you’ve got all these kids sucking down vanilla slurry all day just to keep from starving. We provide counseling and mitigation therapies to kids who want it.”

  “And when they get out of college—do they get the treatment again?”

  “You can’t. The mitigation’s permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising.”

  “Do they get fat?”

  She looked away, then down, then back up at him. “Yes, most of them do. How could they not? Everything around them is geared at people who need to eat five times as much as they do. Even the salads all have protein powder mixed in with them. But it is possible to eat right. You’ve never had the treatment, have you?”