Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  Sammy sat back in his chair and looked coolly at Wiener. Threats now. Disciplinary action. He kept on his best poker face, looking past Wiener’s shoulder (a favorite trick for staring down adversaries—just don’t meet their eyes). In his peripheral vision, he saw Wiener wilt, look away and then turn and leave the room.

  He waited until the door had shut, then slumped in his seat and put his face in his hands. God, and shit, and damn. How did it all go so crapola? How did he end up with a theme-area that was half-shut, record absenteeism, and even a goddamned union organizer just the day before, whom he’d had to have security remove. Florida laws being what they were, it was a rare organizer brave enough to try to come on an employer’s actual premises to do his dirty work, no one wanted a two-year rap without parole for criminal trespass and interference with trade. The kid had been young, about the same age as Death Waits and the castmembers, and had clearly been desperate to collect his bounty from SEIU. He’d gone hard, struggling and kicking, shouting slogans at the wide-eyed castmembers and few guests who watched him go away.

  Having him taken away had given Sammy a sick feeling. They hadn’t had one of those vultures on the premises in three years, and never on Sammy’s turf.

  What next, what next? How much worse could it get?

  “Hi, Sammy.” Hackelberg wasn’t the head of the legal department, but he was as high up in the shadowy organization as Sammy ever hoped to meet. He was old and leathery, the way that natives to the Sunbelt could be. He loved to affect ice-cream suits and had even been known to carry a cane. When he was in casual conversation, he talked “normal”—like a Yankee newscaster. But the more serious he got, the deeper and thicker his drawl got. Sammy never once believed that this was accidental. Hackelberg was as premeditated as they came.

  “I was just about to come over and see you,” Sammy lied. Whatever problem had brought Hackelberg down to his office, it would be better to seem as though he was already on top of it.

  “I expect you were.” Were came out Wuh—when the drawl got that far into the swamps that quickly, disaster was on the horizon. Hackelberg let the phrase hang there.

  Sammy sweated. He was good at this game, but Hackelberg was better. Entertainment lawyers were like fucking vampires, evil embodied. He looked down at his desk.

  “Sammy. They’re coming back after us—” They-ah comin’ back aft-ah us. “Those ride people. They did what we thought they’d do, incorporating into a single entity that we can sue once and kill for good, but then they did something else. Do you know what they did, Sammy?”

  Sammy nodded. “They’re countersuing. We knew they’d do that, right?”

  “We didn’t expect they’d raise a war-chest like the one they’ve pulled together. They have a business-plan built around suing us for the next fifteen years, Sammy. They’re practically ready to float an IPO. Have you seen this?” He handed Sammy a hardcopy of a chic little investment newsletter that was so expensive to subscribe to that he’d suspected until now that it might just be a rumor.

  HOW DO YOU GET RID(E) OF A BILLION?

  The Kodacell experiment recognized one fundamental truth: it’s easy to turn ten thousand into two hundred thousand, but much harder to turn ten million into two hundred million. Scaling an investment up to gigascale is so hard, it’s nearly impossible.

  But a new paradigm in investment that’s unfolding around us that might actually solve the problem: venture-financed litigation. Twenty or thirty million sunk into litigation can bankrupt a twenty billion-dollar firm, transferring to the investors whatever assets remain after legal fees.

  It sounds crazy, and only time will tell whether it proves to be sustainable. But the founder of the strategy, Landon Kettlewell, has struck gold for his investors more than once—witness the legendary rise and fall of Kodacell, the entity that emerged from the merger of Kodak and Duracell. Investors in the first two rounds and the IPO on Kodacell brought home 30X returns in three years (of course, investors who stayed in too long came away with nothing).

  Meanwhile, Kettlewell’s bid to take down Disney Parks looks good—the legal analysis of the vexatious litigation and unfair competition charges have legal scholars arguing and adding up the zeros. Most damning is the number of former Disney Parks employees (or “castmembers” in the treacly dialect of the Magic Kingdom) who’ve posted information about the company’s long-term plan to sabotage Kettlewell’s clients.

  Likewise fascinating is the question of whether the jury will be able to distinguish between Disney Parks, whose corporate citizenship is actually pretty good, from Disney Products, whose record has been tainted by a string of disastrous child-labor, safety, and design flaws (astute readers will be thinking of the “flammable pajamas” flap of last year, and CEO Robert Montague’s memorable words, “Parents who can’t keep their kids away from matches have no business complaining about our irresponsibility”). Punitive jury awards are a wild-card in this kind of litigation, but given the trends in recent years, things look bad for Disney Parks.

  Bottom line: should your portfolio include a litigation-investment component? Yes, unequivocally. While risky and slow to mature, litigation-investments promise a staggering return on investment not seen in decades. A million or two carefully placed with the right litigation fund could pay off enough to make it all worthwhile. This is creative destruction at its finest: the old dinosaurs like Disney Parks are like rich seams of locked-away capital begging to be liquidated and put to work at nimbler firms.

  How can you tell if you’ve got the right fund? Come back next week, when we’ll have a Q&A with a litigation specialist at Credit Suisse/First Boston.

  “There’s litigation specialists at Credit Suisse?”

  He was big, Hackelberg, though he often gave the impression of being smaller through his habitual slouch. But when he pulled himself up, it was like a string in the center of the top of his head was holding him erect, like he was hovering off the ground, like he was about to leap across the desk and go for your throat. His lower jaw rocked from side to side.

  “They do now, Sammy. Every investment bank has one, including the one that the chairman of our board is a majority shareholder in.”

  Sammy swallowed. “But they’ve got just as deep pockets as we do—can’t we just fight these battles out and take the money off of them when we win?”

  “If we win.”

  Sammy saw his opportunity to shift the blame. “If we’ve been acting on good legal advice, why wouldn’t we win?”

  Hackelberg inhaled slowly, his chest filling and filling until his ice-cream suit looked like it might pop. His jaw clicked from side to side. But he didn’t say anything. Sammy tried to meet that cool gaze, but he couldn’t out-stare the man. The silence stretched. Sammy got the message: this was not a problem that originated in the legal department. This was a problem that originated with him.

  He looked away. “How do we solve this?”

  “We need to raise the cost of litigation, Samuel. The only reason this is viable is that it’s cost-effective to sue us. When we raise the cost of litigation, we reduce its profitability.”

  “How do we raise the cost of litigation?”

  “You have a fertile imagination, Sammy. I have no doubt that you will be able to conceive of innumerable means of accomplishing this goal.”

  “I see.”

  “I hope you do. I really hope you do. Because we have an alternative to raising the cost of litigation.”

  “Yes?”

  “We could sacrifice an employee or two.”

  Sammy picked up his water-glass and discovered that it was empty. He turned away from his desk to refill it from his filter and when he turned back, the lawyer had gone. His mouth was dry as cotton and his hands were shaking.

  Raise the cost of litigation, huh?

  He grabbed his laptop. There were ways to establish anonymous email accounts, but he didn’t know them. Figuring that out would take up the rest of the afternoon, he realized, as he cal
led up a couple of FAQs.

  In the course of a career as varied and ambitious as Sammy’s, it was often the case that you ran across an email address for someone you never planned on contacting, but you never knew, and a wise planner makes space for lots of outlier contingencies.

  Sammy hadn’t written down these email addresses. He’d committed them to memory.

  Death Waits was living the dream. He took people’s money and directed them to the ride’s entrance, making them feel welcome, talking ride trivia. Some of his pals spotted him at the desk and enviously demanded to know how he came to be sitting on the other side of the wicket, and he told them the incredible story of the fatkins who’d simply handed over the reins.

  This, this was how you ran a ride. None of that artificial gloopy sweetness that defined the Disney experience: instead, you got a personal, informal, human-scale experience. Chat people up, find out their hopes and dreams, make admiring noises at the artifacts they’d brought to add to the ride, kibbitz about where they might place them….

  Around him, the bark of the vendors. One of them, an old lady in a blinding white sun-dress, came by to ask him if he wanted anything from the coffee-cart.

  There had been a time, those first days when they’d rebuilt Fantasyland, when he’d really felt like he was part of the magic. No, The Magic, with capital letters. Something about the shared experience of going to a place with people and having an experience with them, that was special. It must be why people went to church. Not that Disney had been a religion for him, exactly. But when he watched the park he’d grown up attending take on the trappings that adorned his favorite clubs, his favorite movies and games—man, it had been a piece of magic.

  And to be a part of it. To be an altar boy, if not a priest, in that magical cathedral they’d all built together in Orlando!

  But it hadn’t been real. He could see that now.

  At Disney, Death Waits had been a customer, and then an employee (“castmember”—he corrected himself reflexively). What he wanted, though, was to be a citizen. A citizen of The Magic—which wasn’t a Magic Kingdom, since kingdoms didn’t have citizens, they had subjects.

  He started to worry about whether he was going to get a lunch break by about two, and by three he was starving. Luckily that’s when Lester came back. He thanked Death profusely, which was nice, but he didn’t ask Death to come back the next day.

  “Um, when can I come back and do this some more?”

  “You want to do this?”

  “I told you that this morning—I love it. I’m good at it, too.”

  Lester appeared to think it over. “I don’t know, man. I kind of put you in the hot-seat today, but I don’t really have the authority to do it. I could get into trouble—”

  Death waved him off. “Don’t sweat it, then,” he said with as much chirp as he could muster, which was precious fucking little. He felt like his heart was breaking. It was worse than when he’d finally asked out a co-worker who’d worked the Pinocchio Village Haus and she had her looked so horrified that he’d made a joke out of it, worried about a sexual harassment complaint.

  Lester clearly caught some of that, for he thought some more and then waved his hands. “Screw her anyway. Meet me here at ten tomorrow. You’re in.”

  Death wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. “You’re kidding.”

  “No man, you want it, you got it. You’re good at it, like you said.”

  “Holy—thanks. Thank you so much. I mean it. Thank you!” He made himself stop blithering. “Nice to meet you,” he said finally. “Have a great evening!” Yowch. He was speaking castmemberese. Nice one, Darren.

  He’d saved enough out of his wages from his first year at Disney to buy a little Shell electric two-seater, and then he’d gone way into debt buying kits to mod it to look like a Big Daddy Roth coffin-dragster. The car sat alone at the edge of the lot. Around him, a slow procession of stall-operators, with their arms full, headed for the freeway and across to the shantytown.

  Meanwhile, he nursed his embarrassment and tried to take comfort in the attention that his gleaming, modded car evinced. He loved the decorative spoilers, the huge rear tires, the shining muffler-pipes running alongside the bulging running-boards. He stepped in and gripped the bat-shaped gearshift, adjusted the headstone-shaped headrest, and got rolling. It was a long drive back home to Melbourne, and he was reeling from the day’s events. He wished he’d gotten someone to snap a pic of him at the counter. Shit.

  He pulled off at a filling station after a couple hours. He needed a piss and something with guarana if he was going to make it the rest of the way home. It was all shut down, but the automat was still open. He stood before the giant, wall-sized glassed-in refrigerator and dithered over the energy-drinks. There were chocolate ones, salty ones, colas and cream sodas, but a friend had texted him a picture of a semi-legal yogurt smoothie with taurine and modafinil that sounded really good.

  He spotted it and reached to tap on the glass and order it just as the fat guy came up beside him. Fat guys were rare in the era of fatkins, it was practically a fashion-statement to be chunky, but this guy wasn’t fashionable. He had onion-breath that Death could smell even before he opened his mouth, and he was wearing a greasy windbreaker and baggy jeans. He had a comb-over and needed a shave.

  “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “I’m not anything,” Death Waits said. He was used to shit-kickers and tourists gawping at his shock of black hair with its viridian green highlights, his white face-paint and eyeliner, his contact lenses that made his whole eyes into zombie-white cue-balls. You just had to ignore them.

  “You don’t look like nothing to me. You look like something. Something you’d dress up a six year old as for Halloween. I mean, what the fuck?” He was talking quietly and without rancor, but he had a vibe like a basher. He must have arrived at the deserted rest-stop while Death Waits was having a piss.

  Death Waits looked around for a security cam. These rest-stops always had a license-plate cam at the entrance and a couple of anti-stickup cams around the cashier. He spotted the camera. Someone had hung a baseball hat over its lens.

  He felt his balls draw up toward his abdomen and his breathing quicken. This guy was going to fucking mug him. Shit shit shit. Maybe take his car.

  “OK,” Death said, “nice talking to you.” He tried to step around the guy, but he side-stepped to block Death’s path, then put a hand on Death’s shoulder—it was strong. Death had been mugged once before, but the guy hadn’t touched him; he’d just told him, fast and mean, to hand over his wallet and phone and then had split.

  “I’m not done,” the guy said.

  “Look, take my wallet, I don’t want any trouble.” Apart from two glorious sucker-punches at Sammy, Death had never thrown a punch, not since he’d flunked out of karate lessons at the local strip-mall when he was twelve. He liked to dance and he could run a couple miles without getting winded, but he’d seen enough real fights to know that it was better to get away than to try to strike out if you didn’t know what you were doing.

  “You don’t want any trouble, huh?”

  Death held out his wallet. He could cancel the cards. Losing the cash would hurt now that he didn’t have a day-job, but it was better than losing his teeth.

  The guy smiled. His onion breath was terrible.

  “I want trouble.” Without any pre-amble or wind-up, the guy took hold of the earring that Death wore in his tragus, the little knob of cartilage on the inside of his ear, and briskly tore it out of Death’s head.

  It was so sudden, the pain didn’t come at once. What came first was a numb feeling, the blood draining out of his cheeks and the color draining out of the world, and his brain double- and triple-checking what had just happened. Did someone just tear a piece out of my ear? Tear? Ear?

  Then the pain roared in, all of his senses leaping to keen awareness before maxing out completely. He heard a crashing sound like the surf, smelled something burn
ing, a light appeared before his eyes, an acrid taste flooded his mouth and his ear felt like there was a hot coal nestled in it, charring the flesh.

  With pain came the plan: get the fuck out of there. He took a step back and turned to run, but there was something tangled in his feet—the guy had bridged the distance between them quickly, very quickly, and had hooked a foot around his ankle. He was going to fall over. He landed in a runner’s crouch and tried to start running, but a boot caught him in the butt, like an old-timey comedy moment, and he went sprawling, his chin smacking into the pavement, his teeth clacking together with a sound that echoed in his head.

  “Get the fuck up,” the guy said. He was panting a little, sounding excited. That sound was the scariest thing so far. This guy wanted to kill him. He could hear that. He was some kind of truck-stop murderer.

  Death’s fingers were encrusted in heavy silver rings—stylized skulls, a staring eyeball, a coffin-shaped poisoner’s ring that he sometimes kept artificial sweetener in, an ankh, an alien head with insectile eyes—and he balled his hands into fists, thinking of everything he’d ever read about throwing a punch without breaking your knuckles. Get close. Keep your fist tight, thumb outside. Don’t wind up or he’ll see it coming.

  He slowly turned over. The guy’s eyes were in shadow. His belly heaved with each excited pant. From this angle, Death could see the guy had a gigantic boner. The thought of what that might bode sent him into overdrive. He couldn’t afford to let this guy beat him up.

  He backed up to the rail that lined the walkway and pulled himself upright. He cowered in on himself as much as he could, hoping that the guy would close with him, so he could get in one good punch. He muttered indistinctly, softly, hoping to make the man lean in. His ring-encrusted hands gripped the railings.

  The guy took a step toward him. His lips were wet, his eyes shone. He had a hand in his pocket and Death realized that getting his attacker close in wouldn’t be smart if he had a knife.