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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 assembly 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 assholes,” 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 scumbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your ass.”
    Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned spiral-bound shirt-pocket notebook. “When’s he arriving?”
    “Next week,” Lester said. “We’ve cleared him a space 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 workspace, 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 advertisement 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