Makers Part 38

"They're all in there already," he said. "I've been running the whole fleet for two weeks and I've got ten more on order."

Perry whistled. "You shoulda said," he said, then turned back to the tour guide. "It might be a little bit of a wait."

"Ten, fifteen minutes," Lester said.

"No *problem*," she said. "They'll wait till kingdom come, provided there's good shopping to be had." Indeed the tour group was at the center of a pack of vendor-kids, hawking busts and tattoos, contacts and action-figures, kitchenware and cigarette lighters.

Once she was gone, Lester gave his shoulder another squeeze. "I hired two more kids to bring the ride cars back around to the entrance."

When Perry had left, that had been a once-daily ch.o.r.e, something you did before shutting down for the night.

"Holy c.r.a.p," Perry said, watching the tour group edge toward the entrance, slip inside in ones and twos.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Lester said. "And wait till you see the ride!"

Perry didn't get a chance to ride until much later that day, once the sun had set and the last market-stall had been shut and the last rider had been chased home, when he and Lester slugged back bottles of flat distilled water from their humidity-still and sat on the ticket counter to get the weight off their tired feet.

"Now we ride," Lester said. "You're going to *love* this."

The first thing he noticed was that the ride had become a lot less open. When he'd left, there'd been the sense that you were in a giant room -- all that dead Wal-Mart -- with little exhibits spread around it, like the trade-floor at a monster-car show. But now the exhibits had been arranged out of one another's sight-lines, and some of the taller pieces had been upended to form baffles. It was much more like a carny haunted house trade-show floor now.

The car circled slowly in the first "room," which had acc.u.mulated a lot of junk that wasn't mad inventions from the heyday of New Work. There was a chipped doll-cradle, and a small collection of girls' dolls, a purse spilled on the floor with photos of young girls clowning at a birthday party. He reached for the joystick with irritation and slammed it toward minus one -- what the h.e.l.l was this c.r.a.p?

Next was a room full of boys' tanks and cars and trading cards, some in careful packages and frames, some lovingly scuffed and beaten up. They were from all eras, and he recognized some of his beloved toys from his own boyhood among the mix. The items were arranged in concentric rings -- one of the robots' default patterns for displaying materials -- around a writhing tower of juddering, shuddering domestic robots that had piled one atop the other. The vogue for these had been mercifully brief, but it had been intense, and for Perry, the juxtaposition of the cars and the cards, the tanks and the robots made something catch in his throat. There was a statement here about the drive to automate household ch.o.r.es and the simple pleasure of rolling an imaginary tank over the imaginary armies of your imaginary enemies. So, too, something about the collecting urge, the need to get every card in a set, and then to get each in perfect condition, and then to arrange them in perfect order, and then to forget them altogether.

His hand had been jerking the joystick to plus one all this time and now he became consciously aware of this.

The next room had many of the old inventions he remembered, but they were arranged not on gleaming silver tables, but were mixed in with heaps of clothing, mountains of the brightly colored ubiquitous t-s.h.i.+rts that had gone hand in hand with every New Work invention and crew. Mixed in among them were some vintage tees from the dotcom era, and perched on top of the mountain, staring gla.s.sily at him, was a little girl-doll that looked familiar; he was almost certain that he'd seen her in the first doll room.

The next room was built out of pieces of the old "kitchen" display, but there was disarray now, dishes in the sink and a plate on the counter with a cigarette b.u.t.ted out in the middle of it. Another plate lay in three pieces on the linoleum before it.

The next room was carpeted with flattened soda tins that crunched under the chair's wheels. In the center of them, a neat workbench with ranked tools.

The ride went on and on, each room utterly different from how he'd left it, but somehow familiar too. The ride he'd left had celebrated the New Work and the people who'd made it happen, and so did this ride, but this ride was less linear, less about display more --

"It's a story," he said when he got off.

"I think so too," Lester said. "It's been getting more and more story-like. The way that doll keeps reappearing. I think that someone had like ten of them and just tossed them out at regular intervals and then the plus-oneing snuck one into every scene."

"It's got scenes! That's what they are, scenes. It's like a Disney ride, one of those dark rides in Fantasyland."

"Except those suck and our ride rocks. It's more like Pirates of the Caribbean."

"Have it your way. Whatever, how freaking weird is that?"

"Not so weird. People see stories like they see faces in clouds. Once we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and reinforce the stuff that felt right, it was only natural that they'd anthropomorphize the world into a story."

Perry shook his head. "You think?"

"We have this guy, a cultural studies prof, who comes practically every day. He's been telling me all about it. Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories.

"Check out the Greeks. All those Greek plays, they end with the *deus ex machina* -- the playwright gets tired of writing, so he trots a G.o.d out on stage to simply point a finger at the players and make it all better. You can't do that in a story today, but back then, they didn't have the tools to help them observe and record the world, so as far as they could tell, that's how stuff worked!

"Today we understand a little more about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what's causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away. Causal stories for a causal universe. Thinking about the world in terms of causes and effects makes you seek out causes and effects -- even where there are none. Watch how gamblers play, that weird cargo-cult feeling that the roulette wheel came up black a third time in a row so the next spin will make it red. It's not superst.i.tion, it's kind of the *opposite*

-- it's causality run amok."

"So this is the story that has emerged from our collective unconscious?"

Lester laughed. "That's a little pretentious, I think. It's more like those j.a.panese crabs."

"Which j.a.panese crabs?"

"Weren't you there when Tjan was talking about this? Or was that in Russia? Anyway. There are these crabs in j.a.pan, and if they have anything that looks like a face on the backs of their sh.e.l.ls, the fishermen throw them back because it's bad luck to eat a crab with a face on its sh.e.l.l. So the crabs with face-like sh.e.l.ls have more babies. Which means that gradually, the crabs' sh.e.l.ls get more face-like, since all non-face-like sh.e.l.ls are eliminated from the gene-pool. This leads the fishermen to raise the bar on their selection criteria, so they will eat crabs with sh.e.l.ls that are a little face-like, but not *very* face-like. So all the slightly face-like crab-sh.e.l.ls are eliminated, leaving behind moderately face-like sh.e.l.ls. This gets repeated over several generations, and now you've got these crabs that have vivid faces on their sh.e.l.ls.

"We let our riders eliminate all the non-story-like elements from the ride, and so what's left behind is more and more story-like."

"But the plus-one/minus-one lever is too crude for this, right? We should give them a pointer or something so they can specify individual elements they don't like."

"You want to encourage this?"

"Don't you?"

Lester nodded vigorously. "Of course I do. I just thought that you'd be a little less enthusiastic about it, you know, because so much of the New Work stuff is being de-emphasized."

"You kidding? This is what the New Work was all about: group creation!

I couldn't be happier about it. Seriously -- this is so much cooler than anything that I could have built. And now with the network coming online soon -- wow. Imagine it. It's going to be so f.u.c.king weird, bro."

"Amen," Lester said. He looked at his watch and yelped. "s.h.i.+t, late for a date! Can you get yourself home?"

"Sure," Perry said. "Brought my wheels. See you later -- have a good one."

"She's amazing," Lester said. "Used to weigh 900 pounds and was shut in for ten years. Man has she got an imagination on her. She can do this thing --"

Perry put his hands over his ears. "La la la I'm not listening to you. TMI, Lester. Seriously. Way way TMI."

Lester shook his head. "You are such a prude, dude."

Perry thought about Hilda for a fleeting moment, and then grinned. "That's me, a total puritan. Go. Be safe."

"Safe, sound, and slippery," Lester said, and got in his car.

Perry looked around at the shuttered market, rooftops glinting in the rosy tropical sunset. Man he'd missed those sunsets. He snorted up damp lungsful of the tropical air and smelled dinners cooking at the shantytown across the street. It was different and bigger and more elaborate every time he visited it, which was always less often than he wished.

There was a good barbecue place there, Dirty Max's, just a hole in the wall with a pit out back and the friendliest people. There was always a mob scene around there, locals greasy from the ribs in their hands, a big bucket overflowing with discarded bones.

Wandering towards it, he was amazed by how much bigger it had grown since his last visit. Most buildings had had two stories, though a few had three. Now almost all had four, leaning drunkenly toward each other across the streets. Power cables, network cables and clotheslines gave the overhead s.p.a.ces the look of a carelessly spun spider's web. The new stories were most remarkable because of what Francis had explained to him about the way that additional stories got added: most people rented out or sold the right to build on top of their buildings, and then the new upstairs neighbors in turn sold *their* rights on. Sometimes you'd get a third-storey dweller who'd want to build atop two adjacent buildings to make an extra-wide apartment for a big family, and that required negotiating with all of the "owners" of each floor of both buildings.

Just looking at it made his head hurt with all the tangled property and owners.h.i.+p relations.h.i.+ps embodied in the high s.p.a.ces. He heard the easy chatter out the open windows and music and crying babies. Kids ran through the streets, laughing and chasing each other or bouncing b.a.l.l.s or playing some kind of networked RPG with their phones that had them peeking around corners, seeing another player and shrieking and running off.