Makers

by Cory Doctorow

“You work for Disney?”

  “They both work for Disney, Lester,” Suzanne said. “This is Sammy and Herve.” Herve doesn’t do much talking, she mentally added, but he seems to be in charge.

  “That’s right,” Sammy said, seeming to come to himself at last. “And it’s an honor to formally meet you at last. I run the DiaB program. I see you’re a fan. I’ve read quite a bit about you, of course, thanks to Ms Church here.”

  Lester’s hands closed and opened, closed and opened. “You were, what, you were sneaking around here?”

  “Have I mentioned that I’m a great fan of your work? Not just the ride, either. This DiaBolical, well, it’s—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Suzanne had expected something like this. Lester wasn’t like Perry, he wouldn’t go off the deep-end with this guy, but he wasn’t going to be his best buddy, either. Still, someone needed to intervene before this melted down altogether.

  “Lester,” she said, putting her hand on his warm shoulder. “Do you want to show these guys what you’re working on?”

  He blew air through his nose a couple times, then settled down. He even smiled.

  “This one,” he said, pointing to a DiaBolical, “I’ve got it running an experimental firmware that lets it print out hollow components. They’re a lot lighter and they don’t last as long. But they’re also way less consumptive on goop. You get about ten times as much printing out of them.”

  Suzanne noted that this bit of news turned both of the Disney execs a little green. They made a lot of money selling goop, she knew.

  “This one,” Lester continued, patting a DiaB that was open to the elements, its imps lounging in its guts, “we mix some serious epoxy in with it, some carbon fibers. The printouts are practically indestructible. There are some kids around here who’ve been using it to print parts for bicycles—”

  “Those were printed on this?” Sammy said.

  “We ran into Francis and his gang,” Suzanne explained.

  Lester nodded. “Yeah, it’s not perfect, though. The epoxy clogs up the works and the imps really don’t like it. I only get two or three days out of a printer after I convert it. I’m working on changing the mix to fix that, though.”

  “After all,” Guignol noted sourly, “it’s not as if you have to pay for new DiaBs when you break one.”

  Lester smiled nastily at him. “Exactly,” he said. “We’ve got a great research subsidy around here.”

  Guignol looked away, lips pursed.

  “This one,” Lester said, choosing not to notice, “this one is the realization of an age-old project.” He pointed to the table next to it, where its imps were carefully fitting together some very fine parts.

  Sammy leaned in close, inspecting their work. After a second, he hissed like a teakettle, then slapped his knee.

  Now Lester’s smile was more genuine. He loved it when people appreciated his work. “You figured it out?”

  “You’re printing DiaBs!”

  “Not the whole thing,” Lester said. “A lot of the logic needs an FPGA burner. And we can’t do some of the conductive elements, either. But yeah, about 90 percent of the DiaB can be printed in a DiaB.”

  Suzanne hadn’t heard about this one, though she remembered earlier attempts, back in the golden New Work days, the dream of self-replicating machines. Now she looked close, leaning in next to Sammy, so close she could feel his warm breath. There was something, well, spooky about the imps building a machine using another one of the machines.

  “It’s, what, it’s like it’s alive, and reproducing itself,” Sammy said.

  “Don’t tell me this never occurred to you,” Lester said.

  “Honestly? No. It never did. Mr Banks, you have a uniquely twisted, fucked up imagination, and I say that with the warmest admiration.”

  Guignol leaned in, too, staring at it.

  “It’s so obvious now that I see it,” he said.

  “Yeah, all the really great ideas are like that,” Lester said.

  Sammy straightened up and shook Lester’s hand. “Thank you for the tour, Lester. You have managed to simultaneously impress and depress me. You are one sharp motherfucker.”

  Lester preened and Suzanne suppressed a giggle.

  Sammy held his hand up like he was being sworn in. “I’m dead serious, man. This is amazing. I mean, we manage some pretty out-of-the-box thinking at Disney, right? We may not be as nimble as some little whacked out co-op, but for who we are—I think we do a good job.

  “But you, man, you blow us out of the water. This stuff is just crazy, like it came down from Mars. Like it’s from the future.” He shook his head. “It’s humbling, you know.”

  Guignol looked more thoughtful than he had to this point. He and Lester stared at Sammy, wearing similar expressions of bemusement.

  “Let’s go into the apartment,” Suzanne said. “We can sit down and have a chat.”

  They trooped up the stairs together. Guignol expressed admiration for the weird junk-sculptures that adorned each landing, made by a local craftswoman and installed by the landlord. They sat around the living room and Lester poured iced coffee out of a pitcher in the fridge, dropping in ice-cubes molded to look like legos.

  They rattled their drinks and looked uncomfortably at one another. Suzanne longed to whip out her computer and take notes, or at least a pad, or a camera, but she restrained himself. Guignol looked significantly at Sammy.

  “Lester, I’m just going to say it. Would you sell your business to us? The ride, DiaBolical, all of it? We could make you a very, very rich man. You and Perry. You would have the freedom to go on doing what you’re doing, but we’d put it in our production chain, mass-market the hell out of it, get it into places you’ve never seen. At its peak, New Work—which you were only a small part of, remember—touched 20 percent of Americans. 90 percent of Americans have been to a Disney park. We’re a bigger tourist draw than all of Great Britain. We can give your ideas legs.”

  Lester began to chuckle, then laugh, then he was doubled over, thumping his thighs. Suzanne shook her head. In just a few short moments, she’d gotten used to the idea, and it was growing on her.

  Guignol looked grim. “It’s not a firm offer—it’s a chance to open a dialogue, a negotiation. Talk the possibility over. A good negotiation is one where we both start by saying what we want and work it over until we get to the point where we’re left with what we both need.”

  Lester wiped tears from his eyes. “I don’t think that you grasp the absurdity of this situation, fellas. For starters, Perry will never go for it. I mean never.” Suzanne wondered about that. And wondered whether it mattered. The two had hardly said a word to each other in months.

  “What’s more, the rest of the rides will never, never, never go in for it. That’s also for sure.

  “Finally, what the fuck are you talking about? Me go to work for you? Us go to work for you? What will you do, stick Mickey in the ride? He’s already in the ride, every now and again, as you well know. You going to move me up to Orlando?”

  Sammy waggled his head from side to side. “I have a deep appreciation for how weird this is, Lester. To tell you the truth, I haven’t thought much about your ride or this little town. As far as I’m concerned, we could just buy it and then turn around and sell it back to the residents for one dollar—we wouldn’t want to own or operate any of this stuff, the liability is too huge. Likewise the other rides. We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.

  “Listen, you’re a smart guy. You make stuff that we can’t dream of, that we lack the institutional imagination to dream of. We need that. What the hell is the point of fighting you, suing you, when we can put you on the payroll? And you know what? Even if we throw an idiotic sum of money at you, even if you never make anything for us, we’re still ahead of the game if you stop making stuff against us.

  “I’m putting my cards on the table here. I know your partner is going to
be even harder to convince, too. None of this is going to be easy. I don’t care about easy. I care about what’s right. I’m sick of being in charge of sabotaging people who make awesome stuff. Aren’t you sick of being sabotaged? Wouldn’t you like to come work some place where we’ll shovel money and resources at your projects and keep the wolves at bay?”

  Suzanne was impressed. This wasn’t the same guy whom Rat-Toothed Freddy had savaged. It wasn’t the same guy that Death Waits had described. He had come a long way. Even Guignol—whom, she suspected, needed to be sold on the idea almost as much as Lester—was nodding along by the end of it.

  Lester wasn’t though: “You’re wasting your time, mister. That’s all there is to it. I am not going to go and work for—” a giggle escaped his lips “—Disney. It’s just—”

  Sammy held his hands up in partial surrender. “OK, OK. I won’t push you today. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy. I’m a patient guy.” Guignol snorted. “I don’t want to lean on you here.”

  They took their leave, though Suzanne found out later that they’d taken a spin around the ride before leaving. Everyone went on the ride.

  Lester shook his head at the door behind them.

  “Can you believe that?”

  Suzanne smiled and squeezed his hand. “You’re funny about this, you know that? Normally, when you encounter a new idea, you like to play with it, think it through, see what you can make of it. With this, you’re not even willing to noodle with it.”

  “You can’t seriously think that this is a good idea—”

  “I don’t know. It’s not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. Become a millionaire, get to do whatever you want? It’ll sure make an interesting story.”

  He goggled at her.

  “Kidding,” she said, thinking, It would indeed make an interesting story, though. “But where are you going from here? Are you going to stay here forever?”

  “Perry would never go for it—” Lester said, then stopped.

  “You and Perry, Lester, how long do you think that’s going to last.”

  “Don’t you go all Yoko on me, Suzanne. We’ve got one of those around here already—”

  “I don’t like this Yoko joke, Lester. I never did. Hilda doesn’t want to drive Perry away from you. She wants to make the rides work. And it sounds like that’s what Perry wants, too. What’s wrong with them doing that? Especially if you can get them a ton of money to support it?”

  Lester stared at her, open-mouthed. “Honey—”

  “Think about it, Lester. Your most important virtue is your expansive imagination. Use it.”

  She watched this sink in. It did sink in. Lester listened to her, which surprised her every now and again. Most relationships seemed to be negotiations or possibly competitions. With Lester it was a conversation.

  She gave him a hug that seemed to go on forever.

  Sammy was glad he was driving. The mood Guignol was in, he’d have wrecked the car. “That was not the plan, Sammy,” he said. “The plan was to get the data, talk it over—”

  “The first casualty of any battle is the battle-plan,” Sammy said, threading them through the press of tourist busses and commuter cars.

  “I thought the first casualty was the truth.”

  They’d spent too long at the ride, then gotten stuck in the afternoon rush hour out of Miami. “That too. Look, I’m proposing to spend a tenth of the profits from the DiaB on this venture. In any other circumstance, I would do it with a purchase order. The only reason it’s a big deal is—”

  “That it carries enough legal liability to destroy the company. Sammy, didn’t you listen to Hackelberg?”

  “The reason I still work at Disney is that it’s the kind of company where the lawyers don’t always set the agenda.”

  Guignol drummed his hands on the dashboard. Sammy pulled over and gassed up. At the next pump was a minivan with Kansas plates. Dad was a dumpy Korean guy, Mom was a dumpy white midwesterner with a country-and-western denim jacket, and the back seat was filled with vibrating children, two girls and a boy. The kids were screaming and fighting, the girls trying to draw on the boy’s face with candy-flavored lipstick and kiddie mascara, the boy squirming mightily and lashing out at them with his gameboy.

  Dad and Mom were having their own heated discussion as Dad gassed up, Sammy eavesdropped enough to hear that they were fighting over Dad’s choice of taking the toll roads instead of the cheaper, slower alternative route. The kids were shouting so loud, though—

  “You keep that up and we’re not going to Disney World!”

  It was the magic sentence, the litmus test for Disney’s currency. As it rose and fell, so did the efficacy of the threat. If Sammy could, he’d take a video of the result every time this was uttered.

  The kids looked at Dad and shrugged. “Who cares?” the eldest sister said, and grabbed the boy again.

  Sammy turned to Guignol and waggled his eyebrows. Once he was back in the car, he said, “You know, it’s risky doing anything. But riskiest of all is doing nothing.”

  Guignol shook his head and pulled out his computer.

  He spent a lot of time looking at the numbers while Sammy fought traffic. Finally he closed his computer, put his head back and shut his eyes. Sammy drove on.

  “You think this’ll work?” Guignol said.

  “Which part?

  “You think if you buy these guys out—”

  “Oh, that part. Sure, yeah, slam dunk. They’re cheap. Like I say, we could make back the whole nut just by settling the lawsuit. The hard part is going to be convincing them to sell.”

  “And Hackelberg.”

  “That’s your job, not mine.”

  Guignol slid the seat back so it was flat as a bed. “Wake me when we hit Orlando.”

  It took IT three days to get Sammy his computer back. His secretary managed as best as she could, but he wasn’t able to do much without it.

  When he got it back at last, he eagerly downloaded his backlog of mail. It beggared the imagination. Even after auto-filtering it, there were hundreds of new messages, things he had to pay real attention to. When he was dealing with this stuff in little spurts every few minutes all day long, it didn’t seem like much, but it sure piled up.

  He enlisted his secretary to help him with sorting and responding. After an hour she forwarded one back to him with a bold red flag.

  It was from Freddy. He got an instant headache, the feeling halfway between a migraine and the feeling after you bang your head against the corner of a table.

  :: Sammy, I’m disappointed in you. I thought we were friends. Why do I have to learn about your bizarre plan to buy out Gibbons and Banks from strangers. I do hope you’ll give me a comment on the story?

  He’d left the financials with Guignol, who had been discreetly showing them around to the rest of the executive committee in closed door, off-site meetings. One of them must have blabbed, though—or maybe it was a leak at Lester’s end.

  He tasted his lunch and bile as his stomach twisted. It wasn’t fair. He had a real chance of making this happen—and it would be a source of genuine good for all concerned.

  He got halfway through calling Guignol’s number, then put the phone down. He didn’t know who to call. He’d put himself in an unwinnable position. As he contemplated the article that Freddy would probably write, he realized that he would almost certainly lose his job over this, too. Maybe end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Man, that seemed to be his natural state at Disney. Maybe he was in the wrong job.

  He groaned and thumped himself on the forehead. All he wanted to do was have good ideas and make them happen.

  Basically, he wanted to be Lester.

  Then he knew who he had to call.

  “Ms Church?”

  “We’re back to that, huh? That’s probably not a good sign.”

  “Suzanne then.”

  “Sammy, you sound like you’re about to pop a testicle. Spit it out.”

  “Do you
think I could get a job with Lester?”

  “You’re not joking, are you?”

  “Freddy found out about the buyout offer.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I’m gonna be in search of employment. All I ever wanted to do was come up with cool ideas and execute them—”

  “Shush now. Freddy found out about this, huh? Not surprising. He’s got a knack for it. It’s just about his only virtue.”

  “Urgh.”

  “However, it’s also his greatest failing. I’ve given this a lot of thought, since my last run in with Rat-Toothed Freddy.”

  “You call him that to his face?”

  “Not yet. But I look forward to it. Tell you what, give me an hour to talk to some people here, and I’ll get back to you.”

  An hour? “An hour?”

  “He’ll keep you squirming for at least that long. He loves to make people squirm. It’s good journalism—shakes loose some new developments.”

  “An hour?”

  “Have you got a choice?”

  “An hour, then.”

  Suzanne didn’t knock on Lester’s door. Lester would fall into place, once Perry was in.

  She found him working the ride, Hilda back in the maintenance bay, tweaking some of the robots. His arm was out of the cast, but it was noticeably thinner than his good left arm, weak and pale and flabby.

  “Hello, Suzanne.” He was formal, like he always was these days, and it saddened her, but she pressed on.

  “Perry, we need to shut down for a while, it’s urgent.”

  “Suzanne, this is a busy time, we just can’t shut down—”

  She thumped her hand on his lemonade-stand counter. “Cut it out, Perry. I have never been an alarmist, you know that. I understand intimately what it means to shut this place down. Look, I know that things haven’t been so good between us, between any of us, for a long time. But I am your dear friend, and you are mine, no matter what’s going on at this second, and I’m telling you that you need to shut this down and we need to talk. Do it, Perry.”

  He gave her a long, considering look.

  “Please?”

  He looked at the little queue of four or five people, pretending not to eavesdrop, waiting their turn.