Makers by Cory Doctorow (best romance ebooks .TXT) đ
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then?â
âNo Huck,â he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasnât the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasnât the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, thoughâgregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone.
âSo, how long are you staying?â
âIâm just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, âShit, Lesterâs in Burbank, I should say hello.â But I got places to go.â
âCome on, man, stay a while. Weâve got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too.â
âLiving the dream, huh?â He sounded unexpectedly bitter.
Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucksâkid-reporters sheâd trained and set up in businessâran, and they never had to worry about a thing.
âWell, apart from dying. And working here.â As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasnât happy at the Mouse, and the dying thingâwell, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought.
Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. âMust be hard on Suzanne.â
Now that was hitting the nail on the head. âYou always were a perceptive son of a bitch.â
âShe never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame herââ
This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, theyâd popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico.
But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking:
ââthe FDA, the doctors. Thatâs what we pay them for. The way I see it, youâre a victim, their victim.â
Lester couldnât say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, âChange the subject, OK?â
Perry looked down. âSorry. Iâm out of practice with people.â
âI hope youâll stay with us,â he said, thinking I hope you leave soon and never come back.
âYou miss it, huh?â
âSometimes.â
âYou said working hereââ
âWorking here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But itâs like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?â He snorted. âItâs like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.â
âI hate working with assholes.â
âTheyâre not assholes, thatâs the thing, Perry. Theyâre some really smart people. Theyâre nice. We have them over for dinner. Theyâre fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they canât do it.â
âWhy?â
âItâs like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit.â
âReminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percentâ81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and youâll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
âMaybe people are like that. If youâre 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else whoâs 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team thatâs 81 percent non-bogus.â
âI like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, itâs depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each othersâ flaws.â
âWell, maybe thatâs the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative.â
âSo what are virtues?â
âAdditive, maybe. A shallower curve.â
âThatâd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements.â
âSo what do you do around here all day?â
Lester blushed.
âWhat?â
âIâm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. Thereâs something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant.â
âI think Iâd like to see that,â Perry said, laughing a little.
âThat can be arranged,â Lester said.
They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.
They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.
They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.
Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian whoâd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldnât drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didnât go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.
Perry couldnât bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalidâs subsidy to feel excessive.
âKap,â Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that heâd made of the back-seat.
Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. âHome now?â He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.
âNo,â Lester said. âLetâs eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?â
âMs Suzanne saysââ
âWe donât need to tell her,â Lester said.
Perry spoke in a low voice, âLester, I donât need anything special. Donât make yourself sickââ
âPerry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isnât going to fall out of my asshole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there.â
They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre dâ gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium.
âWeâd like Orson Wellesâs table, please,â he said.
The maitre dââan elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beardânodded affably. âGive me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?â
They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. âSorry,â he said to the waitress. âJust having an indecisive kind of night, I guess.â
Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the c-note, and decided that he hadnât been. Heâd just gone native in LA, and a hundred for the maitre dâ when youâre in a hurry canât be much for a senior exec.
Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. âI like this place,â he said, waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. âItâs perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultra-modern place come here. They come because theyâve always comeâto sit in Orson Wellesâs booth.â
âHowâs the food?â
âDepends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for steaks?â
âIâm down for whatever,â Perry said. Lester was in his medium here, letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without taking any special notice of the old man.
The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity, though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a semi-subtle photo of her.
âPoor girl,â Perry said with feeling.
âItâs a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that itâll last foreverâthat in thirty years, theyâll come into Musso and Frank and ask for Miss Whatshernameâs table. Anyone who wants to know what stardom looks like can find outâand no one becomes a star by accident.â
âYou think?â Perry said. âI mean, we were celebs, kind of, for a while thereââ
âAre you saying that that happened by accident?â
âI never set out to get famousââ
âYou took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically founded it. What did you think was going to happenââ
âYouâre saying that we were just attention whoresââ
âNo, Perry, no. We werenât just attention whores. We were attention whores and we built and ran cool shit. Thereâs nothing wrong with being an attention whore. Itâs an attention economy. If youâre going to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid in. But you canât sit there and tell me that it didnât feel good, didnât feel great to have all those people looking up to us, following us into battle, throwing themselves at usââ
Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye.
âI surrender, buddy, youâre right.â They ordered desserts, heavy âdiplomat puddingsââbread pudding made with cake and cherries, and Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a voyeur.
âHow long did you say you were in town for?â
âIâm just passing through,â Perry said. He had only planned on maybe seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a foregone conclusion that heâd be put up in the âguest cottage.â He thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to work for.
âCome on, where you got to be? Stay a week. Iâll put you on the payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the
âNo Huck,â he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasnât the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasnât the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, thoughâgregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone.
âSo, how long are you staying?â
âIâm just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, âShit, Lesterâs in Burbank, I should say hello.â But I got places to go.â
âCome on, man, stay a while. Weâve got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too.â
âLiving the dream, huh?â He sounded unexpectedly bitter.
Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucksâkid-reporters sheâd trained and set up in businessâran, and they never had to worry about a thing.
âWell, apart from dying. And working here.â As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasnât happy at the Mouse, and the dying thingâwell, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought.
Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. âMust be hard on Suzanne.â
Now that was hitting the nail on the head. âYou always were a perceptive son of a bitch.â
âShe never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame herââ
This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, theyâd popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico.
But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking:
ââthe FDA, the doctors. Thatâs what we pay them for. The way I see it, youâre a victim, their victim.â
Lester couldnât say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, âChange the subject, OK?â
Perry looked down. âSorry. Iâm out of practice with people.â
âI hope youâll stay with us,â he said, thinking I hope you leave soon and never come back.
âYou miss it, huh?â
âSometimes.â
âYou said working hereââ
âWorking here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But itâs like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?â He snorted. âItâs like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.â
âI hate working with assholes.â
âTheyâre not assholes, thatâs the thing, Perry. Theyâre some really smart people. Theyâre nice. We have them over for dinner. Theyâre fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they canât do it.â
âWhy?â
âItâs like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit.â
âReminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percentâ81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and youâll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
âMaybe people are like that. If youâre 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else whoâs 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team thatâs 81 percent non-bogus.â
âI like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, itâs depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each othersâ flaws.â
âWell, maybe thatâs the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative.â
âSo what are virtues?â
âAdditive, maybe. A shallower curve.â
âThatâd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements.â
âSo what do you do around here all day?â
Lester blushed.
âWhat?â
âIâm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. Thereâs something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant.â
âI think Iâd like to see that,â Perry said, laughing a little.
âThat can be arranged,â Lester said.
They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.
They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.
They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.
Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian whoâd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldnât drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didnât go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.
Perry couldnât bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalidâs subsidy to feel excessive.
âKap,â Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that heâd made of the back-seat.
Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. âHome now?â He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.
âNo,â Lester said. âLetâs eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?â
âMs Suzanne saysââ
âWe donât need to tell her,â Lester said.
Perry spoke in a low voice, âLester, I donât need anything special. Donât make yourself sickââ
âPerry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isnât going to fall out of my asshole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there.â
They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre dâ gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium.
âWeâd like Orson Wellesâs table, please,â he said.
The maitre dââan elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beardânodded affably. âGive me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?â
They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. âSorry,â he said to the waitress. âJust having an indecisive kind of night, I guess.â
Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the c-note, and decided that he hadnât been. Heâd just gone native in LA, and a hundred for the maitre dâ when youâre in a hurry canât be much for a senior exec.
Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. âI like this place,â he said, waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. âItâs perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultra-modern place come here. They come because theyâve always comeâto sit in Orson Wellesâs booth.â
âHowâs the food?â
âDepends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for steaks?â
âIâm down for whatever,â Perry said. Lester was in his medium here, letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without taking any special notice of the old man.
The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity, though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a semi-subtle photo of her.
âPoor girl,â Perry said with feeling.
âItâs a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that itâll last foreverâthat in thirty years, theyâll come into Musso and Frank and ask for Miss Whatshernameâs table. Anyone who wants to know what stardom looks like can find outâand no one becomes a star by accident.â
âYou think?â Perry said. âI mean, we were celebs, kind of, for a while thereââ
âAre you saying that that happened by accident?â
âI never set out to get famousââ
âYou took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically founded it. What did you think was going to happenââ
âYouâre saying that we were just attention whoresââ
âNo, Perry, no. We werenât just attention whores. We were attention whores and we built and ran cool shit. Thereâs nothing wrong with being an attention whore. Itâs an attention economy. If youâre going to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid in. But you canât sit there and tell me that it didnât feel good, didnât feel great to have all those people looking up to us, following us into battle, throwing themselves at usââ
Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye.
âI surrender, buddy, youâre right.â They ordered desserts, heavy âdiplomat puddingsââbread pudding made with cake and cherries, and Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a voyeur.
âHow long did you say you were in town for?â
âIâm just passing through,â Perry said. He had only planned on maybe seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a foregone conclusion that heâd be put up in the âguest cottage.â He thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to work for.
âCome on, where you got to be? Stay a week. Iâll put you on the payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the
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