Makers Part 3

"Poor Elmo was an orphan, and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint-in-package BWEs, getting rained on, waiting to start their long, half-million-year decomposition.

"But check this out." He flicked a mult.i.tool off his belt and extracted a short, sharp scalpel-blade. He slit the grinning, disco-suited Elmo open from chin to groin and shucked its furry exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its a.s.s and revealed a little printed circuit board.

"That's an entire Atom processor on a chip, there," he said. "Each limb and the head have their own subcontrollers. There's a high-powered digital-to-a.n.a.log rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs, and an a.n.a.log-to-digital converter array for converting spoken and danced commands to motions. Basically, you dance and sing for Elmo and he'll dance and sing back for you."

Suzanne nodded. She'd missed that toy, which was a pity. She had a five year old G.o.ddaughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a Boogie Woogie Elmo.

They had come to a giant barn, set at the edge of a story-and-a-half's worth of anchor store. "This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment," Lester rumbled, aiming a car-door remote at the door, which queeped and opened.

Inside, it was cool and bright, the chugging air-conditioners efficiently blasting purified air over the many work-surfaces. The barn was a good 25 feet tall, with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts scrounged from the junkyard.

Perry set Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest-cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.

"This thing is running InstallParty -- it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn't care, though: one-click and away it goes." The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art.

"All done. Now, have a look -- this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand -- that's because it's from India. If it was from Cambodia, you'd see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device's karmic history, there's a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.

"So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I've turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I've modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I've done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cl.u.s.ter. Come on," he said, and took off deeper into the barn's depths.

They came to a dusty, stripped-down Smart car, one of those tiny two-seat electric cars you could literally buy out of a vending machine in Europe. It was barely recognizable, having been reduced to its roll-cage, drive-train and control-panel. A gang of naked robot Elmos were piled into it.

"Wake up boys, time for a demo!" Perry shouted, and they sat up and made canned, tinny Elmo "oh boy" noises, climbing into position on the pedals, around the wheel, and on the gear-tree.

"I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers. I thought it'd get a decent diggdotting. I could get it to speedrun all of the first level using an old paddle I'd found and rehabilitated, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is a drive-in theater, and I was out front watching the silent movies, and one of them showed all these cute little furry animated whatevers collectively driving a car. It's a really old sight-gag, I mean, like racial memory old. I'd seen the Little Rascals do the same bit, with Alfalfa on the wheel and Buckwheat and Spanky on the brake and clutch and the doggy working the gears.h.i.+ft.

"And I thought, s.h.i.+t, I could do that with Elmos. They don't have any networking capability, but they can talk and they can pa.r.s.e spoken commands, so all I need is to designate one for left and one for right and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes, barking orders and they should be able to do this. And it works! They even adjust their balance and centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at their posts. Check it out." He turned to the car. "Driving Elmos, ten-HUT!" They snapped upright and ticked salutes off their naked plastic noggins. "In circles, DRIVE," he called. The Elmos scrambled into position and fired up the car and in short order they were doing donuts in the car's little indoor pasture.

"Elmos, HALT" Perry shouted and the car stopped silently, rocking gently. "Stand DOWN." The Elmos sat down with a series of tiny thumps.

Suzanne found herself applauding. "That was amazing," she said. "Really impressive. So that's what you're going to do for Kodacell, make these things out of recycled toys?"

Lester chuckled. "Nope, not quite. That's just for starters. The Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Everywhere you look, there's devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything.

"But have a look at part two, c'mere." He lumbered off in another direction, and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him.

"This is Lester's workshop," Perry said, as they pa.s.sed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland. Where Perry's domain had been clean and neatly organized, Lester's area was a happy shambles. His shelves weren't orderly, but rather, crammed with looming piles of amazing junk: thrift-store wedding dresses, plaster statues of bowling monkeys, box kites, knee-high tin knights-in-armor, seash.e.l.ls painted with American flags, presidential action-figures, paste jewelry and antique cough-drop tins.

"You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a statue? Like he can *see* the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on the heaps and in roadside trash and I can just *see* how it can go together, like this."

He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor.

The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus.

"It's a mechanical calculator," he said proudly. "About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here." He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel" while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. "It's OK. They're not from the trash," he said. "I buy them in bulk." He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms in her direction. "See, it's a bit-bucket!" he said.

Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. "You guys are hilarious," she said. "This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff." The gears on the mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out.

"Who's the Van Halen fan?"

Lester beamed. "Might as well jump -- JUMP!" He mimed heavy-metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. "You're the first one to get the joke!" he said. "Even Perry didn't get it!"

"Get what?" Perry said, also grinning.

"Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their dressing room they'd trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I used to *dream* about being so famous that I could act like that much of a p.r.i.c.k. Ever since, I've afforded a great personal significance to brown M&Ms."

She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. "Look, I hate to break this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly -- c.r.a.p, Kettle*well* -- said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you've done is all very interesting, it's killer art, but I don't see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?"

"That's step three," Perry said. "C'mere." He led her back to his works.p.a.ce, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. "three-d scanner," he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester's machine and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a b.u.t.ton and a nearby screen filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He moused one over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-down menu, selected an option and then they were merged, rotating.

"Once we've got the three-d scan, it's basically Plasticine." He distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse. "So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-object out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap, like this." More fast mousing -- Barbie's head turned into a gridded mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic hair. Then a Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup label wrapped around her like a stocking being pulled over her head. There was something stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a cartoon stretched out on a blob of Silly Putty.

"So we can build anything out of interesting junk, with any shape, and then we can digitize the shape. Then we can do anything we like with the shape. Then we can output the shape." He typed quickly and another machine, sealed and mammoth like an outsized photocopier, started to grunt and churn. The air filled with a smell like Saran Wrap in a microwave.

"The goop we use in this thing is epoxy-based. You wouldn't want to build a car out of it, but it makes a mean doll-house. The last stage of the output switches to inks, so you get whatever bitmap you've skinned your object with baked right in. It does about one cubic inch per minute, so this job should be almost done now."

He drummed his fingers on top of the machine for a moment and then it stopped chunking and something inside it went *clunk*. He lifted a lid and reached inside and plucked out the barbie head, stretched and distorted, skinned with a Campbell's Soup label. He handed it to Suzanne. She expected it to be warm, like a squashed penny from a machine on Fisherman's Wharf, but it was cool and had the seamless texture of a plastic margarine tub and the heft of a paperweight.

"So, that's the business," Lester said. "Or so we're told. We've been making cool stuff and selling it to collectors on the web for you know, gigantic bucks. We move one or two pieces a month at about ten grand per. But Kettlebelly says he's going to industrialize us, alienate us from the product of our labor, and turn us into an a.s.sembly line."

"He didn't say any such thing," Perry said. Suzanne was aware that her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the shoulder. "Lester's only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbodies and some bigger printers and we'll be able to turn out more modest devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the designs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there's no setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do another hundred. We can make 'em to order. "

"And we need an MBA," Lester said. "Kodacell's sending us a business manager to help us turn junk into pesos."

"Yeah," Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. "Yeah, a business manager."

"So, I've known some business geeks who aren't total a.s.sholes," Lester said. "Who care about what they're doing and the people they're doing it with. Respectful and mindful. It's like lawyers -- they're not all sc.u.mbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your a.s.s."

Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fas.h.i.+oned spiral-bound s.h.i.+rt-pocket notebook. "When's he arriving?"

"Next week," Lester said. "We've cleared him a s.p.a.ce to work and everything. He's someone that Kettlewell's people recruited up in Ithaca and he's going to move here to work with us, sight unseen. Crazy, huh?"

"Crazy," Suzanne agreed.

"Right," Perry said. "That's next week, and this aft we've got some work to do, but now I'm ready for lunch. You guys ready for lunch?"

Something about food and really fat guys, it seemed like an awkward question to Suzanne, like asking someone who'd been horribly disfigured by burns if he wanted to toast a marshmallow. But Lester didn't react to the question -- of course not, he had to eat, everyone had to eat.

"Yeah, let's do the IHOP." Lester trundled back to his half of the works.p.a.ce, then came back with a cane in one hand. "There's like three places to eat within walking distance of here if you don't count the mobile Mexican burrito wagon, which I don't, since it's a rolling advertis.e.m.e.nt for dysentery. The IHOP is the least objectionable of those."

"We could drive somewhere," Suzanne said. It was coming up on noon and the heat once they got outside into the mall's ruins was like the steam off a dishwasher. She plucked at her blouse a couple of times.

"It's the only chance to exercise we get," Perry said. "It's pretty much impossible to live or work within walking distance of anything down here. You end up living in your car."

And so they hiked along the side of the road. The sidewalk was a curious mix of old and new, the concrete unworn but still overgrown by tall sawgra.s.s thriving in the Florida heat. It brushed up against her ankles, hard and sharp, unlike the gra.s.s back home.

They were walking parallel to a ditch filled with sluggish, brackish water and populated by singing frogs, ducks, ibises, and mosquitoes in great number. Across the way were empty lots, ghost-plazas, dead filling stations. Behind one of the filling stations, a cl.u.s.ter of tents and shacks.

"Squatters?" she asked, pointing to the shantytown.