Makers Part 20

At the fourth site, she was ambushed by a flying hug. Tjan laughed as she nearly went down under the weight of a strong, young woman who flung her arms around Suzanne's neck. "Holy *c.r.a.p* it's good to see you!"

Suzanne untangled herself and got a look at her hugger. She had short mousy hair, twinkling blue eyes, and was dressed in overalls and a pretty flowered blouse, scuffed work boots and stained and torn work-gloves. "Uh..." she said, then it clicked. "Fiona?"

"Yeah! Didn't Tjan tell you I was here?" The last time she'd seen this woman, she was weeping over pizza and getting ready to give up on life. Now she was practically vibrating.

"Uh, no," she said, shooting a look at Tjan, who was smiling like the Buddha and pretending to inspect a pair of shoes with gyroscopically stabilized retractable wheels in the heels.

"I've been here for months! I went back to Oregon, like you told me to, and then I saw a recruiting ad for Westinghouse and I sent them my CV and then I got a videoconference interview and then, bam, I was on an airplane to Rhode Island!"

Suzanne blinked. *I* told you to go back to Oregon? Well, maybe she had. That was a lifetime ago.

The workshop was another dead mall, this one a horseshoe of storefronts separated by flimsy gyprock. The Westinghousers had cut through the walls with drywall knives to join all the stores together. The air was permeated with the familiar Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave tang of three-d printers. The parking lot was given over to some larger apparatus and a fantastical children's jungle-gym in the shape of a baroque, spired pirate fortress, with elegantly curved turrets, corkscrew sky-bridges, and flying b.u.t.tresses crusted over with ornate, grotesque gargoyles. Children swarmed over it like ants, screeching with pleasure.

"Well, you're looking really good, Fiona," Suzanne said. *Still not great with people*, she thought. Fiona, though, was indeed looking good, and beaming. She wasn't wearing the crust of cosmetics and hair-care products she'd affected in the corporate Silicon Valley world. She glowed pink.

"Suzanne," Fiona said, getting serious now, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. "I can't thank you enough for this. This has saved my life. It gave me something to live for. For the first time in my life, I am doing something I'm proud of. I go to bed every night thankful and happy that I ended up here. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you."

Suzanne tried not to squirm. Fiona gave her another long hug. "It's all your doing," Suzanne said at last. "I just told you about it. You've made this happen for you, OK?"

"OK," Fiona said, "but I still wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. I love you, Suzanne."

Ick. Suzanne gave her another perfunctory hug and got the h.e.l.l out of Dodge.

"What's with the jungle-gym?" It really had been something, fun and Martian-looking.

"That's the big one," Tjan said with a big grin. "Most people don't even notice it, they think it's daycare or something. Well, that's how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so that the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically: now it's a self-modifying jungle-gym. The kids love it. It is the crack cocaine of jungle-gyms, though we won't be using that in the marketing copy, of course."

"Of course," Suzanne said drily. She'd automatically reached for her notepad and started writing when Tjan started talking. Now, reviewing her notes, she knew that she was going to have to go back and get some photos of this. She asked Tjan about it.

"The robots go all night, you know. Not much sleep if you do that."

No going back to the hotel to see Freddy, what a pity. "I'll grab a couple blankets from the hotel to keep warm," she said.

"Oh, you needn't," he said. "That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It's pretty gorgeous, if you ask me."

They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Suzanne ensconced herself at someone's vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on email before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket amid a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters'

roar.

Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn't have much by way of hands at their ends. "We just use rare-earth magnets," Fiona said. "Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars."

Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together with *snick* sounds that were audible over the whine of their motors.

Suzanne switched on her camera's night-vision mode and got shooting. "Where did you get all these robots?"

Tjan grinned. "It's an open design -- the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There's a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren't proprietary enough and they were worried that they'd have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though."

The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, s.h.i.+fting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch.

"Can I go out and have a look?" she said. "I mean, is it safe?"

"Sure," Fiona said. "Of course! Our robots won't harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction."

"Still, try to stay out of their way," Tjan said. "Some of that stuff they're moving around is heavy."

So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off.

Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Standing there amid the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she'd arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity's creations had evolved past their inventors.

She was going to have to do a *lot* of writing before bed.

Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she pa.s.sed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy.

She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina's Research Triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams.

Another three weeks of this stuff and she'd get to go home -- Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling.

It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn't been her idea, she'd been dragged back by impa.s.sioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who'd rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them.

The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disa.s.sembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts' interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams with their latest bail-out and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they'd won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew.

Lester emailed her and said that he'd seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he'd be in town too?

They ate at Devil's Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades' worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Devil's Night was the pre-Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings, and all of Brush Park had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs.

Reclaiming these buildings was an artisa.n.a.l practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement, and gla.s.s to preserve the look of a burned out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way gla.s.s that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below.

Suzanne showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decades since she'd left. She was fl.u.s.tered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread.

When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn't there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days' stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton s.h.i.+rt underneath. He was beaming at her.

"Suzanne," he said.

Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. "Lester?" she said, wonderingly.

He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands.

When he let go of her, he laughed again. "Oh, Suzanne, I could *not*

have asked for any better reaction than this. *Thank you*." They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he.

"Lester?" she said again.

"Yes, it's me," he said. "I'll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders."

Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Suzanne picked one at random. So did Lester.

"So," he said, patting his washboard tummy. "You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?"