Makers Part 14

"I was planning to," Kettlewell said. "Thanks."

Suzanne and Kettlewell got off the plane and Tjan didn't look back when they'd landed at JFK. "Should we go into town and get some bialy to bring back to Miami?" Kettlewell said, squinting at the bright day on the tarmac.

"Bring deli to Miami?"

"Right, right," he said. "Forget I asked. Besides, we'd have to charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in traffic."

Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the smell -- something indefinably New York -- made her yearn for Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.

"Let's go," she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a touch of headache. "I'm bushed."

"Me too," Kettlewell said. "I left San Jose last night to get into Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and catch some winks, if that's OK?"

"Good plan," Suzanne said.

Embarra.s.singly, when they were fully reclined, their seats nearly touched, forming something like a double bed. Suzanne lay awake in the hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside her, the first man she'd done anything like share a bed with in at least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep.

:: Perry thought that they'd sell a million Home Awares in six :: months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high. :: :: "Please," he said, "I *invented* these things but there aren't a :: million roommate households in all of America. We'll sell half :: a million tops, total.

Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.

:: Today the boys s.h.i.+pped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.

They'd uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million s.h.i.+pped. They hadn't actually s.h.i.+pped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they'd laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.

:: What's exciting about this isn't just the money that these guys :: have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to :: its shareholders, it's the ecosystem that these things have :: enabled. There're at least ten competing commercial systems for :: organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects. :: Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them. :: Seniors' homes.

The seniors' homes had been Francis's idea. They'd brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he'd join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.

:: They're not the sole supplier. That's what an ecosystem is all :: about, creating value for a lot of players. All this compet.i.tion :: is great news for you and me, because it's already driven the :: price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that :: Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, :: before the margin disappears altogether -- and that's also good :: news for you and me.

"Are you coming?" Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she'd dumped him and Perry had confided that she'd left him because he didn't live up to the press he'd gotten in Suzanne's column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.

"Up in a minute," she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.

On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.

"Jet engine," Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them ("They f.u.c.king *pay me* to do this," he'd told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.

"Good old Kettlebelly," she said. "Must have broken his heart."

Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. "This thing wasn't going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he'd have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge s.h.i.+tloads for parts."

"Too bad," Lester said. "It's pretty. Gorgeous, even." He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.

"Aeros.p.a.ce loves the virtual wind-tunnel," Francis said, and glared at the cowling. "You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers."

"Is that why you were laid off?" Suzanne said.

"I wasn't laid off, girl," he said. He jiggled his lame foot. "I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I'm not bitter -- why should the poor be allowed to live, huh?"

His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.

"Stop that, now," he said, "you're getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you'd think that they grew up in some kind of zoo."

When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.

"So, kids," Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. "What do you think of the stuff we're building?"

They looked at their toes. "'S OK," one of them grunted.

"Answer the man," Francis snapped. "Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you've got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?"

They s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. "It's fine," one of them said.

"Would you use it at home?"

One of them snorted. "No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it."

"Oh," Perry said.

"f.u.c.ker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly took his f.u.c.king head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. f.u.c.king juice-head."

"You should have f.u.c.ked him up," one of the other kids said. "My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back."

Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn't take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law.

Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. "Have you ever tried burglar alarms?"

The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was undaunted. "You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off."

"I want one that fires spears," the one with the juice-head father said.

"Blowtorches," said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus.

"I want a force-field," the third one said, speaking for the first time. "I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don't have to sleep one eye up, 'cause I'll be safe."

The other two nodded, slowly.

"d.a.m.n straight," Francis said.

That was the last time Francis's acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued.

"What's that smoke?" Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset's glare.

"House-fire," Francis said. "Has to be. Or a big f.u.c.king car-wreck, maybe."

Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. "Francis, that's your place," he said after a second's fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. "Just hit the b.u.t.ton and they'll self-stabilize."