Makers Part 80

"Yeah, across the road into the shantytown."

"OK," Death said. "See you soon." He hung up and patted Lacey's hand. "We're going over there," he said, pointing into the shantytown.

"Is it safe?"

He shrugged. "I guess so." He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable -- a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless.

"Should we drive?"

"I think we can make it across," he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn't afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage.

The guardrail s.h.i.+elding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a b.u.mp. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells -- barbecue and Cuban spices -- and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn't make any sense to Death's eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and sc.r.a.p lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti.

Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street -- hadn't these people heard of stranger danger -- stopped to stare at him with big shoe-b.u.t.ton eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called.

Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner.

Death hadn't known what to expect from this little town, but he certainly hadn't pictured so many little shops. He realized that he thought of shops as being somehow civilized -- tax paying, license-bearing ent.i.ties with commercial relations.h.i.+ps with suppliers, with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild.

But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop, advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating enticements -- *Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies, OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails*. He pa.s.sed twenty different shops in as many steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them.

Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it would be in full sight of all these people.

It was a funny thought. He'd grown up in spa.r.s.e suburbs where you'd never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their porches. Even though it was a "nice" neighborhood, there were muggings and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt like taking your life into your hands.

Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park, it felt somehow safer. Weird.

They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural -- a Mexican in a cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck, surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton s.h.i.+rts and blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper.

"You seem to be recovering quickly," he said, sizing up Death in his chair. "Good to see it." He seemed a little distant, which Death chalked up to being interrupted.

"It's great to see you again," Death said. "My friends and I have been coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never see you there, so I thought I'd call you."

"You'd call me."

"To see if we could help," Death said. "With whatever you're doing."

"Come in," Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for the first time the small sign that said *HOTEL ROTHSCHILD,* with a stately peac.o.c.k behind it.

The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The lobby -- such as it was -- was completely filled by him, Lacey and Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it couldn't have cornered to get there.

Lester looked embarra.s.sed. "Sorry, I didn't think of that. Um. OK, I could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We'd have to belt you in, but it's do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top floor -- it's how they get the beds into the upper stories."

"I can get up on canes," Death Waits said. "Is it safe to leave my chair outside, though?"

Lester's eyebrows went up. "Well of course -- sure it is." Death felt weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair?

He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood gingerly. He'd been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes all week, but he hadn't tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn't too many floors up.

Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an effort.

"OK," he said. "All done."

"Great," Lester said. "This is what I'm working on. You talked to Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I've cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it -- just stick it on a network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it becomes an open box -- it'll accept anyone's goop. You can send it your own plans."

Death hadn't seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn't felt since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began.

"So how does this tie in to the ride?" Death asked. "I was thinking of building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress people? No, I don't think so.

"So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region liked --"

Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. "Woah, wait a second. No, no, no --" Death was used to having his friends hang on his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was talking to.

"Sorry," he said. "Got ahead of myself."

"Look," Lester said, prodding at the printer. "This thing is its own thing. We're about more than the ride here. I know you really like it, and that's very cool, but there's no way that everything I do from now on is going to be about that f.u.c.king thing. It was a lark, it's cool, it's got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them."

Death couldn't make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn't *like* the ride. How was that possible? "I don't get it," he said at last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey, too. He didn't like how this was going at all.

Lester picked up a screwdriver. "You see this? It's a tool. You can pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it." He thumped the printer. "This thing is a tool, too, but it's not *your*

tool. It belongs to someone else -- Disney. It isn't interested in listening to you or obeying you. It doesn't want to give you more control over your life.

"This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own personal body, but it wasn't under my control. What's the word the academics use? 'Agency.' I didn't have any agency. It didn't matter what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and pains.

"If you don't control your life, you're miserable. Think of the people who don't get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids, mental patients. There's something inherently awful about living like that. Autonomy makes us happy."

He thumped the top of the printer again. "So here's this stupid thing, which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing that you use to better your life, but in reality, it's a tool that Disney uses to control your life. You can't program it. You can't change the channel. It doesn't even have an *off switch*. That's what gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control."

Lester's eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and the aftermath of the beating, and the life he'd lived. Lester was telling him that the ride wasn't important to him anymore, that he'd be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling of bitterness at the thought.

"So what about the ride?"

"The ride? I told you. I'm done with it. It's time to do the next thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?"

"With the ride," Death said patiently, with the manner of someone talking to a child.

Lester turned his back on Death.

"I'm done with the ride," Lester said. "I don't want to waste your time." It was clear he meant, *You're wasting my time.* He bent over the printer.

Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was all he could do to keep from crying.

Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned amus.e.m.e.nt, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and forth. She'd bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet c.o.ke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo.

Now she watched the kids tear a.s.s up and down the train, or sit mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its coffers.

The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian -- in that order -- and displayed on the porters' red coats with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons were name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne -- a veteran of innumerable hotels -- could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase.