“You got any breakfast plans?” It was hardly gone 9AM — Sammy liked to get these meetings started early. “I normally get something sent in, but your little prototypes there…”
She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. “Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I’m nothing but breakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?”
“Heh. Oh yeah.”
“I’m on the next flight to DFW,” she said. “I’ve got a cab waiting to take me to the airport.”
“I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details,” Sammy said.
“Only if you want to do it in the taxi.”
“I was thinking we could do it on the plane,” he said.
“You’re going to buy a ticket?”
“On my plane,” he said. They’d given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs.
“Oh yes, I think that can be arranged,” she said. “It’s Sammy, right?”
“Right,” he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive.
Lester hadn’t left Suzanne’s apartment in days. She’d rented a place in the shantytown — bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry’s apartment had become so tense.
Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day.
She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry’s ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof — none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn’t getting any rent.
She looked over Lester’s shoulder for the fiftieth time. “How’s it going?”
“Don’t write about this, OK?”
He’d never said that to her.
“I’ll embargo it until you ship.”
He grunted. “Fine, I guess. OK, well, I’ve got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don’t make it easy, which is weird. It’s like they don’t plan on updating it once it’s in the field — maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals.”
“Why’s the firmware matter to you?”
“Well, that’s where it stores information about where to get the day’s designs. If we’re going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don’t know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it’s accessing their site when it’s really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine — no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that.”
Suzanne nodded. She wondered if “a few hardcore geeks” summed up the total audience for this project in any event. She didn’t mention it, though. Lester’s brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the crease above his nose.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll get it,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader.”
Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring, sexy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering angrily about boot-loaders.
Suzanne missed Russia. She’d had a good life there, covering the biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry, but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to.
She’d liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the squalor. She’d bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners where they took apart the day’s experiences on Planet Petrograd.
“I’m going out, Lester,” she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation.
“Hey,” he said. “Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I’m just — I’m trying to work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I don’t know what to do — ” He broke off and thumped the side of the printer.
“How’s Perry getting on with rebuilding?”
“He’s getting on,” Lester said. “As far as I know. I read that the Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that means.”
“He freaks me out,” Suzanne said. “I mean, I feel terrible for him, and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people — the way they follow him around. It’s just weird. Like the charismatic cults back home.” She realized she’d just called Russia “home” and it made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these people, anyway?
Lester hadn’t noticed. “I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they like what he has to say about stories. I just can’t get a lot of spit in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something we did and completed and should move on from.”
Suzanne didn’t have anything to say, and Lester wasn’t particularly expecting anything, he was giving off a palpable let-me-work vibe, so she let herself out of the apartment — her apartment! — and headed out into the shantytown. On the way to the ride, she passed the little tea-house where Kettlewell and Tjan had done their scheming and she suddenly felt very, very old. The only grownup on-site.
She was about to cross the freeway to the ride when her phone rang. She looked at the face and then nearly dropped it. Freddy was calling her.
“Hello, Suzanne,” he said. The gloat in his voice was unmistakable. He had something really slimy up his sleeve.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m calling for comment on a story,” he said. “It’s my understanding that your lad, Perry, pitched a tantie and fired the business-managers of the ride, and has told the lawyers representing him against Disney that he intends to drop the suit.”
“Is there a question in there?”
“Oh, there are many questions in there, my darling. For starters, I wondered how it could possibly be true if you haven’t written about it on your little ’blog’ — ” even over the phone, she could hear the sarcastic quotes. “ — You seem to be quite comprehensive in documenting the undertakings of your friends down there in Florida.”
“Are you asking me to comment on why I haven’t commented?”
“For starters.”
“Have you approached Perry for a comment?”
“I’m afraid he was rather abrupt. And I couldn’t reach his Valkyrie of the Midwest, either. So I’m left calling on you, Suzanne. Any comment?”
Suzanne stared across the road at the ride. She’d been gassed there, chased by armed men, watched a war there.
“The ride doesn’t have much formal decision-making process,” she said finally. “That means that words like ’fired’ don’t really apply here. The boys might have a disagreement about the best way to proceed, but if that’s the case, you’ll have to talk to them about it.”
“Are you saying that you don’t know if your boyfriend’s best friend is fighting with his business partners? Don’t you all live together?”
“I’m saying that if you want to find out what Lester and Perry are doing, you’ll have to ask Lester and Perry.”
“And the living together thing?”
“We don’t live together,” she said. It was technically true.
“Really?” Freddy said.