He almost pointed out all her warnings about only having a one-night stand and not missing the people he was away from and so forth, but stayed his tongue. The fact that she wanted him to come for a visit was overshadowing everything, even the looming crisis with the cops.
“It’s a deal.”
“Deal.”
“Well, bye.”
“Bye.”
He almost said, “You hang up first,” but that would have been too much. Instead he just kept the phone at his ear until he heard her click.
Suzanne was pointing and shooting like mad. Perry sat down on the cracked pavement beside her and unfolded his computer and started sending out emails, setting up a conference-channel. He gave Suzanne a short version of his talk with Hilda, being careful not to give a hint of his feelings for her.
“She sounds like a sensible girl,” Suzanne said. “You should go and pay her another visit.”
He blushed and she socked him in the shoulder.
“Take your call,” she said. The cops were giving them the hairy eyeball, and Perry screwed in his headset.
The conference channel was filling up. Perry checked off names as reps from all the rides came online. There was a lot of tight, tense chatter, jokes about the fuzz.
“OK,” Perry said. “Let’s get it started. There’s cops blockading every ride, right? Use the poll please.” He posted a poll to the conference page and it quickly got to 100 percent green. “So I just found the cops outside of mine, too, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I’ve got some dough for a lawyer, but I can’t afford lawyers for everyone. To make that work, we’d have to fly attorneys to every city with a ride in it, and that’s not practical as I’m sure you can tell.”
A half-dozen flags went up in the conference page. “I need someone to play moderator, ’cause I can’t talk and mod at the same time. How about you, Hilda?”
“OK,” she said. “I’m Hilda Hammersen, from the Madison group. Post one-line summaries of your points and I’ll set a speaker order.”
The conference page filled up. There was the official back channel at the bottom where the text was spilling by too fast for Perry to parse, and he knew that there were lots of unofficial back-channels in use, too. He covered the mic and sighed. He had nothing to say to these people. He didn’t have any answers.
“Right. So who knows what we should do?” The back-channel went crazy. Hilda started green-lighting speakers with their flags up.
“Why are you asking us, Perry? You’ve got to run this.” The voice was petulant and Perry saw that it was one of the Boston crew, which made him wonder what Tjan was going to do when he discovered that Perry was doing this.
The page pinkened and then sank into red. The other people on the call clearly thought this was BS, which was a relief to Perry. Hilda cued up the next speaker.
“We could set up information pickets at the gates to each ride hitting people up for donations for our legal defense—get the press to cover it and maybe we could bring in enough to fight all the injunctions.”
The pink lightened a little, went back to neutral white, turned a little green. Perry slowed down the back-channel a little and skimmed it:
:: No way could we bring in enough, that’s like 30 grand each I get a couple hundred people here in the morning and that would mean a hundred and fifty bucks each
:: No no it’s totally do-able we can raise that easy just set up some paypals and publicize the shit out of it
The next speaker was talking. “What if we got the maintenance bots to break open the doors and carry the ride outside where everyone can see it?”
Bright red. Dumb idea.
Perry broke in. “I’m worried that when people show up it’ll provoke some kind of confrontation with the law. It could get ugly here. How can we keep that cooled out?”
Green.
“That’s totally got to be our top priority,” Hilda said.
Next speaker. “OK, so the best way to keep people calm is to tell them that there’s an alternative to going nuts, which maybe could be raising money for a legal defense.”
Green-ish. “What about finding pro-bono lawyers? What about the ACLU or EFF?”
Greener.
The back-channel filled up with URLs and phone numbers and email addresses.
“OK, time’s running out here,” Perry said. “You guys need to organize a call-around to those orgs and see if they’ll help us out. Pass the hat at your rides, try to find lawyers. Everyone keep reporting in all day—especially if you get a win anywhere. I’m going to go take care of things here.”
Hilda IMed him—“Good luck, Perry. You’ll kick ass.”
Perry started to IM back, but a shadow fell across his screen. It was Jason, who ran the contact-lens stall. He was staring at the two cop-cars quizzically, looking groggy but growing alarmed.
Perry closed his lid and got to his feet. “Morning, Jason.” Behind Jason were five or six other vendors. The sellers who lived in the shantytown and could therefore walk to work were always first in. Soon the commuters would start arriving in their beater cars.
“Hey, Perry,” Jason said. He was chewing on an unlit cigarette, a disgusting habit that was only marginally less gross than smoking them. He’d tried toothpicks, but nothing would satisfy his oral cravings like a filter-tip. At least he didn’t light them. “What’s up?”
Perry told him what he knew, which wasn’t much. Jason listened carefully, as did the other vendors who arrived. “They’re fucking with you, man. The cops, Disney, all of them. Just fucking with you. You go ahead and hire a lawyer to go to the court for you and see how far it gets you. They’re not playing by any rules, they’re not interested in the law you broke or whatever. They just want to fuck with you.”
Suzanne appeared over Perry’s shoulder.
“I’m Suzanne Church, Jason. I’m a reporter.”
“Sure, I know you. You were there when they burned down the old place.”
“That was me. I think you’re right. They’re fucking with you guys. I want to report on that because it might be that exposing it makes it harder to continue. Can I record what you guys say and do?”
Jason grinned and slid the soggy cig from one corner of his mouth to the other and back again. “Sure, that’s cool with me.” He turned to the other sellers: “You guys don’t mind, do you?” They joked and laughed and said no. Perry let out a breath slowly. These guys didn’t want a confrontation with the cops—they knew better than him that they couldn’t win that one.
Suzanne started interviewing them. The cops got out of their cars and stared at them. The woman cop had her mirrorshades on now, and so the both of them looked hard and eyeless. Perry looked away quickly.
The vendors with cars were pulling them around to the roadside leading up to the ride, unpacking merchandise and setting it out on their hoods. Vendors from the shantytown headed home and came back with folding tables and blankets. These guys were business-people. They weren’t going to let the law stand in the way of putting food on the table for their families.
The cops got back into their cars. Kettlewell worked his way cautiously across the freeway, climbing laboriously over the median. He had changed into a smart blazer and slacks, with a crisp white shirt that hid his incipient belly. He looked like the Kettlewell of old, the kind of man used to giving orders and getting respect.
“Hey, man,” Perry said. Kettlewell’s easy smile was reassuring.
“Perry,” he said, throwing an arm around his shoulders and leading him away. “Come here and talk with me.”
They stood in the lee of one of the sickly palms that stood by the roadside. The day was coming up hot and Perry’s t-shirt stuck to his chest, though Kettlewell seemed dry and in control.
“What’s going on, Perry?”
“Well, we did a phoner this morning with all the ride operators. They’re going to work on raising money for the defense and getting pro-bono lawyers from the EFF or the ACLU or something.”
Kettlewell did a double-take. “Wait, what? They’re going to ask the ACLU? They can’t be trusted, Perry. They’re impact litigators—they’ll take cases to make a point, even when it’s not in their clients’ best interests.”
“What could be more in our interests than getting lawyers to fight these bogus injunctions?”
Kettlewell blew out a long breath. “OK, table it. Table it. Here’s what I’ve been pulling together: we’ve got a shitkicking corporate firm that used to handle the Kodacell business that’s sending out a partner to go to the Broward County court this morning to get the injunction lifted. They’re doing this as a freebie, but I told them that they could handle the business if we put together all the rides into one entity.”
Now it was Perry’s turn to boggle. “What kind of entity?”
“We have to incorporate them all, get them all under one umbrella so that we can defend them all in one go. Otherwise there’s no way we’re going to be able to save them. Without a corporate entity, it’s like trying to herd cats. Besides, you need some kind of structure, a formal constitution or something for this thing. You’ve got a network protocol, and that’s it. There’s money at stake here—potentially some big money—and you can’t run something like that on a handshake. It’s too vulnerable. You’ll get embezzled or sued into oblivion before you even have a chance to grow. So I’ve started the paperwork to get everything under one banner.”
Perry counted to ten, backwards. “Landon, I’m really thankful that you’re helping us out here. You’re probably going to save our asses. But you can’t put everything under one banner—you can’t just declare to these people that their projects are ours—”
“Of course they’re yours. They’re using your IP, your protocols, your designs…. If they don’t come on board, you can just threaten to sue them—”
“Landon! Please listen to me. We are not going to effect a hostile takeover of my friends. They are equal owners of everything we do here. And no offense, but if you ever mention suing other projects over our ’IP’”—he made sarcastic finger quotes—“then we’re through having any discussions about this. OK?”
Kettlewell snorted air through his nostrils. “My apologies, I didn’t realize that this was such a sensitive area for you.” Perry boggled at this—lawsuits against ride operators! “But I can get that. Here’s the thing, Perry. Without some kind of fast-moving structure you’re going to be dead. Even if we repel the boarders this morning, they’ll be back tomorrow and the day after. You need something stronger than a bunch of friends who have loose agreements. You need a legal entity that can speak for everyone. Maybe that’s a co-op or a charity or something else, but it’s got to exist. You may not think you have any say over these other rides, but does everyone else agree? What if you get sued for someone’s bad deeds in Minneapolis? What if some ride operator sues you to put you out of business?”
Perry’s head swam. He hated conversations like this. He didn’t have any good answer for Kettlewell’s objections, but it was ridiculous. No one from a ride was going to sue him. Or maybe they would, if he got all grabby and went MINE MINE MINE and incorporated everything with him at the top. Hilda said he was the one they all looked to, but that was because he would never try to hijack their projects.
“No.”
“No what?”
“No to all of it. We have to defend this thing, but we’re not going to do it by trying to tie everyone down to contracts and agreements where I get to control everything. Maybe a co-op is the right way to go, but we can’t just declare a co-op and force everyone to be members. We have to get everyone to agree, everyone who’s involved, and then they can elect a council or something and work out some kind of uniform agreement. I mean, that’s how all the good free software projects work. There’s authority, but it’s not all unilateral and imperious. I’m not interested in that. I’d rather shut this down than declare myself pope-emperor of ride-land.”
Kettlewell scrubbed his eyes with his fists. Up close, the lines in his face were deep-sunk, his eyeballs bloodshot and hung over. “You’re killing me, you know that? What good is principle going to do when they knock this fucking thing down and slap you with a gigantic lawsuit?”
Perry shrugged. “I really appreciate what you’ve done, but I’d rather lose it than fuck it up.”
They stared at each other for a long time. Cars whizzed past. Perry felt like a big jerk. Kettlewell had done amazing work for him this morning, just out of the goodness of his own heart, and Perry had repaid him by being a stiff-necked dickwad. He felt an overwhelming desire to take it back, just put Kettlewell in charge and let him run the whole show. Just shrug his shoulders and abdicate.
He looked down at the ground and up into the straggly palms, then heaved a sigh.
“Landon, I’m sorry, OK, but that’s just how it is. I totally dig that you’re saying that we’re risking everything by not doing it your way, but from my seat, doing it your way will kill it anyway. So we need a better answer.”
Kettlewell scrubbed his eyes some more. “You and my wife sound like you’d get along.”
Perry waited for him to go on, but it became clear he had nothing more to say.
Perry went back to the cop cars just as the first gang of goths showed up to take a ride.
PART III
Sammy had filled a cooler and stuck it in the back-seat of his car the night before, programmed his coffee-maker, and when his alarm roused him at 3AM, he hit the road. First he guzzled his thermos of lethal coffee, then reached around in back for bottles of icy distilled water. He kept the windows rolled down and breathed in the swampy, cool morning air, the most promising air of the Florida day, before it all turned to steam and sizzle.
He didn’t bother looking for truck-stops when he needed to piss, just pulled over on the turnpike’s side and let fly. Why not? At that hour, it was just him and the truckers and the tourists with morning flights.
He reached Miami ahead of schedule and had a diner-breakfast big enough to kill a lesser man, a real fatkins affair. He got back on the road groaning from the chow and made it to the old Wal-Mart just as the merchants were setting up their market on the roadside.
When he’d done the Boston ride, he’d been discouraged that they’d kept on with their Who-ville Xmas even though he’d grinched away all their fun, but this time he was expecting something like this. Watching these guys sell souvenirs at the funeral for the ride made him feel pretty good this time around: their disloyalty had to be a real morale-killer for those ride-operators.
The cops were getting twitchy, which made him grin. Twitchy cops were a key ingredient for bad trouble. He reached behind him and pulled an iced coffee from the cooler and cracked it, listening to the hiss as the embedded CO2 cartridge forced bubbles through it.
Now here came a suit. He looked like a genuine mighty morphin’ power broker, which made Sammy worry, because a guy like that hadn’t figured into his plans, but look at that; he was having a huge fight with the eyebrow guy and now the eyebrow guy was running away from him.
Getting the lawyers to agree to spring the budget to file in every location where there was a ride had been tricky. Sammy had had to fudge a little on his research, claim that they were bringing in real money, tie it to the drop in numbers in Florida, and generally do a song and dance, but it was all worth it. These guys clearly didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
Now eyebrow man was headed for the cop-cars and the entrance, and there, oh yes, there it was. Five cars’ worth of goths, lugging bags full of some kind of home-made or scavenged horror-memorabilia, pulling up short at the entrance.
They piled out of their cars and started milling around, asking questions. Some approached the cops, who seemed in no mood to chat. The body-language could be read at 150 feet:
Goth: But officer, I wanna get on this riiiiiide.
Cop: You sicken me.
Goth: All around me is gloom, gloom. Why can’t I go on my riiiiiide?
>
Cop: I would like to arrest you and lock you up for being a weird, sexually ambiguous melodramatic who’s dumb enough to hang around out of doors, all in black, in Florida.
Goth: Can I take your picture? I’m gonna put it on my blog and then everyone will know what a meanie you are.
Cop: Yap yap yap, little bitch. You go on photographing me and mouthing off, see how long it is before you’re in cuffs in the back of this car.
Scumbag street-vendors: Ha ha ha, look at these goth kids mouthing off to the law, that cop must have minuscule testicles!
Cop: Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Eyebrow guy: Um, can everyone just be nice? I’d prefer that this all not go up in flames.
Scumbags, goths: Hurr hurr hurr, shuttup, look at those dumb cops, ahahaha.
Cops: Grrrr.
Eyebrow: Oh, shit.
Four more cars pulled up. Now the shoulder was getting really crowded and freeway traffic was slowing to a crawl.
More goths piled out. Family cars approached the snarl, slowed, then sped up again, not wanting to risk the craziness. Maybe some of them would get on the fucking turnpike and drive up to Orlando, where the real fun was.
The four-lane road was down to about a lane and a half, and milling crowds from the shantytown and the arriving cars were clogging what remained of the thoroughfare. Now goths were parking their cars way back at the intersection and walking over, carrying the objects they’d planned to sacrifice to the ride and smoking clove cigarettes.
Sammy saw Death Waits before Death Waits turned his head, and so Sammy had time to duck down before he was spotted. He giggled to himself and chugged his coffee, crouched down below the window.
The situation was heating up now. Lots of people were asking questions of the cops. People trying to drive through got shouted at by the people in the road. Sometimes a goth would slam a fist down on a hood and there’d be a little bit of back and forth. It was a powder-keg, and Sammy decided to touch it off.
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