Makers by Cory Doctorow (best romance ebooks .TXT) đ
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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 hoursâ 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.
âMan, this place is excellent,â he said. âI had the best night Iâve had in years last night.â
âWell then youâll love this: thereâs 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 theyâd be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six oâclock flight at SFO?â
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.
âWhereâs your site?â
âWe were thinking of building oneâthereâs a lot of farmland around here.â Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasnât old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldnât. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever.
âThatâs pretty weird. Everywhere else, theyâre just moving into spaces that have been left vacant.â
âWe havenât got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups.â
âHeavily funded startups? In this day and age?â
âSuperbabies,â the kid said with a shrug. âItâs all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazyâimagine 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.â
âSo no dead malls? Christ, thatâs like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?â
The kid laughed. âThe campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But thereâs lots of farmland, like I said. Wonât be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. Itâll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska.â
âWow.â He wanted to say, They have the ACLU in Nebraska? but he knew that wasnât fair. The midwesterners heâd met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. âSo why do you want to do this?â
The kid grinned. âBecause thereâs got to be a way to do something cool without moving to New York. I like it around here. Donât want to live in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I donât 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? Thereâs much sweeter highs out there in the real world.â
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.
âI like beer,â he said.
âBut youâreââ The kid broke off.
âOld,â Perry said. ââSok. Youâre what, 16?â
â21,â the kid said. âIâm a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more important things than puberty.â
Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did look 21. âHey Luke,â the girl said, kissing him on the cheek.
Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldnât forget it againâNebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew heâd keep the name for good now.
âThis is Perry Gibbons,â Luke said. âPerry, this is Hilda and Ernie. Guys, Perryâs the guy who built the ride I was telling you about.â
Ernie shook his hand. âMan, thatâs the coolest shit Iâve ever seen, wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow.â
Hilda flicked his ear. âStop drooling, fanboy,â she said.
Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly.
âSorry. Itâs justâwell, Iâm a big fan is all.â
âThatâs really nice of you,â Perry said. Heâd met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadnât known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days heâd 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.
âHeâs just like a puppy,â Hilda said, pinching Ernieâs cheek. âAll enthusiasm.â
Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. âThese two are going to help me build the ride,â he said. âHildaâs an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic.â
âWomenâs health clinic or something?â Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that heâd seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didnât think heâd ever met one like her.
âNo,â Hilda said. âMetabolic 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.â
Perry shook his head. âCome again?â
âYou think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? Itâs 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 canât afford enough real food to stay healthy, so youâve 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.â
âAnd when they get out of collegeâdo they get the treatment again?â
âYou canât. The mitigationâs permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising.â
âDo they get fat?â
She looked away, then down, then back up at him. âYes, 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. Youâve never had the treatment, have you?â
Perry shook his head. âTrick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog and not put on an ounce.â
Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. âReallyâand I suppose that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism, too?â
She left her hand where it was.
âOK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But Iâm just sayingâif they get fat again after they reverse the treatmentââ
âThere are worse things than being fat.â
Her hand still hadnât moved. He looked at Ernie, whom heâd assumed was her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that was showing competitive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing entities and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldnât imagine how youâd make sense of it.
The girlâs hand was still on his arm, and it was warm. His mouth was dry but more beer would be a bad idea. âHow about some water?â he said, in a bit of a croak.
Luke jumped up to get some, and a silence fell over the table. âSo this clinic, howâd you fundraise for it?â
âPapercraft,â she said. âI have a lot of friends who are into paper-folding and we modded a bunch of patterns. We did really big pieces, tooâbed-frames, sofas, kitchen-tables, chairsââ
âLike actual furniture?â
âLike actual furniture,â she said with a solemn nod. âWe used huge sheets of paper and treated them with stiffening, waterproofing and fireproofing agents. We did a frat houseâs outdoor bar and sauna, with a wind-dynamoâI even made a steam engine.â
âYou made a steam engine out of paper?â He was agog.
âYou mean to say that youâre surprised by building stuff out of unusual materials?â
Perry laughed. âPoint taken.â
âWe just got a couple hundred students to do some folding in their spare time and then sold it on. Everyone on campus needs bookshelves, so we started with thoseâusing accordion-folded arched supports under each shelf. We could paint or print designs on them, too, but a lot of people liked them all-white. Then we did chairs, desks, kitchenette sets, placematsâyou name it. I called the designs âMultiple Origami.ââ
Perry sprayed beer out his nose. âThatâs awesome!â he said, wiping up the mess with a kleenex that she extracted from a folded paper purse. Looking closely, he realized that the white baseball cap she was wearing was also folded out of paper.
She laughed and rummaged some more in her handbag, coming up with a piece of stiff card. Working quickly and nimbly, she gave it a few deft folds along pre-scored lines, and a moment later she was holding a baseball hat that was the twin of the one she was wearing. She leaned over the table and popped it on his head.
Luke came back with the water and set it down between them, pouring out glasses for everyone.
âSmooth lid,â he said, touching the bill of Perryâs cap.
âThanks,â Perry said, draining his water and pouring another glass. âWell, you people certainly have some pretty cool stuff going on here.â
âThis is a great town,â Luke said expansively, as though he had travelled extensively and settled on Madison, Wisconsin as a truly international hotspot. âWeâre going to build a kick-ass ride.â
âYou going to make it all out of paper?â
âSome of it, anyway,â Luke said. âHilda wouldnât have it any other way, right?â
âThis oneâs your show, Luke,â she said. âIâm just a fundraiser.â
âAnyone hungry?â Hilda said. âI want to go eat something that doesnât have unidentified organ-meat mixed in.â
âGo on without me,â Ernie said. âI got money on this game.â
âHomework,â Luke said.
Perry had just eaten, and had planned on spending this night in his room catching up on email. âYeah, Iâm starving,â he said. He felt like a high-school kid, but 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 hoursâ 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.
âMan, this place is excellent,â he said. âI had the best night Iâve had in years last night.â
âWell then youâll love this: thereâs 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 theyâd be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six oâclock flight at SFO?â
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.
âWhereâs your site?â
âWe were thinking of building oneâthereâs a lot of farmland around here.â Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasnât old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldnât. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever.
âThatâs pretty weird. Everywhere else, theyâre just moving into spaces that have been left vacant.â
âWe havenât got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups.â
âHeavily funded startups? In this day and age?â
âSuperbabies,â the kid said with a shrug. âItâs all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazyâimagine 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.â
âSo no dead malls? Christ, thatâs like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?â
The kid laughed. âThe campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But thereâs lots of farmland, like I said. Wonât be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. Itâll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska.â
âWow.â He wanted to say, They have the ACLU in Nebraska? but he knew that wasnât fair. The midwesterners heâd met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. âSo why do you want to do this?â
The kid grinned. âBecause thereâs got to be a way to do something cool without moving to New York. I like it around here. Donât want to live in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I donât 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? Thereâs much sweeter highs out there in the real world.â
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.
âI like beer,â he said.
âBut youâreââ The kid broke off.
âOld,â Perry said. ââSok. Youâre what, 16?â
â21,â the kid said. âIâm a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more important things than puberty.â
Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did look 21. âHey Luke,â the girl said, kissing him on the cheek.
Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldnât forget it againâNebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew heâd keep the name for good now.
âThis is Perry Gibbons,â Luke said. âPerry, this is Hilda and Ernie. Guys, Perryâs the guy who built the ride I was telling you about.â
Ernie shook his hand. âMan, thatâs the coolest shit Iâve ever seen, wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow.â
Hilda flicked his ear. âStop drooling, fanboy,â she said.
Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly.
âSorry. Itâs justâwell, Iâm a big fan is all.â
âThatâs really nice of you,â Perry said. Heâd met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadnât known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days heâd 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.
âHeâs just like a puppy,â Hilda said, pinching Ernieâs cheek. âAll enthusiasm.â
Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. âThese two are going to help me build the ride,â he said. âHildaâs an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic.â
âWomenâs health clinic or something?â Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that heâd seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didnât think heâd ever met one like her.
âNo,â Hilda said. âMetabolic 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.â
Perry shook his head. âCome again?â
âYou think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? Itâs 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 canât afford enough real food to stay healthy, so youâve 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.â
âAnd when they get out of collegeâdo they get the treatment again?â
âYou canât. The mitigationâs permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising.â
âDo they get fat?â
She looked away, then down, then back up at him. âYes, 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. Youâve never had the treatment, have you?â
Perry shook his head. âTrick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog and not put on an ounce.â
Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. âReallyâand I suppose that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism, too?â
She left her hand where it was.
âOK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But Iâm just sayingâif they get fat again after they reverse the treatmentââ
âThere are worse things than being fat.â
Her hand still hadnât moved. He looked at Ernie, whom heâd assumed was her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that was showing competitive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing entities and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldnât imagine how youâd make sense of it.
The girlâs hand was still on his arm, and it was warm. His mouth was dry but more beer would be a bad idea. âHow about some water?â he said, in a bit of a croak.
Luke jumped up to get some, and a silence fell over the table. âSo this clinic, howâd you fundraise for it?â
âPapercraft,â she said. âI have a lot of friends who are into paper-folding and we modded a bunch of patterns. We did really big pieces, tooâbed-frames, sofas, kitchen-tables, chairsââ
âLike actual furniture?â
âLike actual furniture,â she said with a solemn nod. âWe used huge sheets of paper and treated them with stiffening, waterproofing and fireproofing agents. We did a frat houseâs outdoor bar and sauna, with a wind-dynamoâI even made a steam engine.â
âYou made a steam engine out of paper?â He was agog.
âYou mean to say that youâre surprised by building stuff out of unusual materials?â
Perry laughed. âPoint taken.â
âWe just got a couple hundred students to do some folding in their spare time and then sold it on. Everyone on campus needs bookshelves, so we started with thoseâusing accordion-folded arched supports under each shelf. We could paint or print designs on them, too, but a lot of people liked them all-white. Then we did chairs, desks, kitchenette sets, placematsâyou name it. I called the designs âMultiple Origami.ââ
Perry sprayed beer out his nose. âThatâs awesome!â he said, wiping up the mess with a kleenex that she extracted from a folded paper purse. Looking closely, he realized that the white baseball cap she was wearing was also folded out of paper.
She laughed and rummaged some more in her handbag, coming up with a piece of stiff card. Working quickly and nimbly, she gave it a few deft folds along pre-scored lines, and a moment later she was holding a baseball hat that was the twin of the one she was wearing. She leaned over the table and popped it on his head.
Luke came back with the water and set it down between them, pouring out glasses for everyone.
âSmooth lid,â he said, touching the bill of Perryâs cap.
âThanks,â Perry said, draining his water and pouring another glass. âWell, you people certainly have some pretty cool stuff going on here.â
âThis is a great town,â Luke said expansively, as though he had travelled extensively and settled on Madison, Wisconsin as a truly international hotspot. âWeâre going to build a kick-ass ride.â
âYou going to make it all out of paper?â
âSome of it, anyway,â Luke said. âHilda wouldnât have it any other way, right?â
âThis oneâs your show, Luke,â she said. âIâm just a fundraiser.â
âAnyone hungry?â Hilda said. âI want to go eat something that doesnât have unidentified organ-meat mixed in.â
âGo on without me,â Ernie said. âI got money on this game.â
âHomework,â Luke said.
Perry had just eaten, and had planned on spending this night in his room catching up on email. âYeah, Iâm starving,â he said. He felt like a high-school kid, but in
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