Makers Part 77

"It's a series of three, telling a little story. Beginning, middle and end. The first one is a family sitting down to breakfast, and you can see, it's the same old c.r.a.p, boring microwave omelets and breakfast puddings. Mom's bored, dad's more bored, and sis and brother here are secretly dumping theirs onto mom's and dad's plates. All this stuff is run using the same printers, so it looks very realistic."

It did indeed. Sammy hadn't thought about it, but he supposed it was only natural that the omelets were printed -- how else could General Mills get that uniformity? He should talk to some of the people in food services about getting some of that tech to work at the parks.

"So in part two, they're setting up the kitchen around this mystery box -- one part Easy-Bake lightbulb oven, one part Tardis. You know what that is?"

Sammy grinned. "Why yes, I believe I do." Their eyes met in a fierce look of mutual recognition. "It's a breakfast printer, isn't it?" The other supplicants in the room sucked in a collective breath. Some chuckled nervously.

"It's about moving the apparatus to the edge. Bridging the last mile. Why not? This one will do waffles, breakfast cereals, bagels and baked goods, small cakes. New designs every day -- something for mom and dad, something for the kids, something for the sullen teens. We're already doing this at the regional plants and distributorships, on much larger scales. But getting our stuff into consumers' homes, getting them *subscribed* to our food --"

Sammy held up a hand. "I see," he said. "And our people are already primed for home-printing experiences. They're right in your sweet spot."

"Part three, Junior and little sis are going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but these things are shaped *like them*, with their portraits on each sugar-lump. Mom and dad are eating tres sophistique croissants and delicate cakes. Look at Rover here, with his own cat-shaped dog-biscuit. See how happy they all are?"

Sammy nodded. "Shouldn't this all be under nondisclosure?" he said.

"Probably, but what are you gonna do? You guys are pretty good at keeping secrets, and if you decide to shaft us by selling out to one of our compet.i.tors, we're probably dead, anyway. I'll be able to ship out half a million units in the first week, then we can ramp production if need be -- lots of little parts-and-a.s.sembly subcontractors will take the work if we offer."

Sammy liked the way she talked. Like someone who didn't need to spend a lot of time s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around, planning, like someone who could just make it happen.

"You're launching when?"

"Three days after you start running this campaign," she said, without batting an eyelash.

"My name's Sammy," he said. "How's Thursday?"

"Launch on Sunday?" She shook her head. "It's tricky, Sunday launches. Gotta pay everyone scale-and-a-half." She gave him a wink. "What the h.e.l.l, it's not my money." She stuck out her hand. She was wearing a couple of nice chunky obsidian rings in abstract curvy shapes, looking a little p.o.r.ny in their suggestion of b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs. He shook her hand and it was warm and dry and strong.

"Well, that's this week taken care of," Sammy said, and pointedly cleared the white-board surface running the length of the table. The others groaned and got up and filed out. The woman stayed behind.

"Dinah," she said. She handed him a card and he noted the agency. Dallas-based, not New York, but he could tell she was a transplant.

"You got any breakfast plans?" It was hardly gone 9AM -- Sammy liked to get these meetings started early. "I normally get something sent in, but your little prototypes there..."

She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. "Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I'm nothing *but* breakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?"

"Heh. Oh yeah."

"I'm on the next flight to DFW," she said. "I've got a cab waiting to take me to the airport."

"I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details," Sammy said.

"Only if you want to do it in the taxi."

"I was thinking we could do it on the plane," he said.

"You're going to buy a ticket?"

"On my plane," he said. They'd given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs.

"Oh yes, I think that can be arranged," she said. "It's Sammy, right?"

"Right," he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive.

Lester hadn't left Suzanne's apartment in days. She'd rented a place in the shantytown -- bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry's apartment had become so tense.

Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disa.s.sembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day.

She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry's ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-a.s.s broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof -- none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn't getting any rent.

She looked over Lester's shoulder for the fiftieth time. "How's it going?"

"Don't write about this, OK?"

He'd never said that to her.

"I'll embargo it until you ship."

He grunted. "Fine, I guess. OK, well, I've got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don't make it easy, which is weird. It's like they don't plan on updating it once it's in the field -- maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals."

"Why's the firmware matter to you?"

"Well, that's where it stores information about where to get the day's designs. If we're going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don't know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it's accessing their site when it's really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine -- no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that."

Suzanne nodded. She wondered if "a few hardcore geeks" summed up the total audience for this project in any event. She didn't mention it, though. Lester's brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the crease above his nose.

"Well, I'm sure you'll get it," she said.

"Yeah. It's just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader."

Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring, s.e.xy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering angrily about boot-loaders.

Suzanne missed Russia. She'd had a good life there, covering the biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry, but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to.

She'd liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the squalor. She'd bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners where they took apart the day's experiences on Planet Petrograd.

"I'm going out, Lester," she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation.

"Hey," he said. "Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I'm just -- I'm trying to work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I don't know what to do --" He broke off and thumped the side of the printer.

"How's Perry getting on with rebuilding?"

"He's getting on," Lester said. "As far as I know. I read that the Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that means."

"He freaks me out," Suzanne said. "I mean, I feel terrible for him, and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people -- the way they follow him around. It's just weird. Like the charismatic cults back home." She realized she'd just called Russia "home" and it made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these people, anyway?

Lester hadn't noticed. "I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they like what he has to say about stories. I just can't get a lot of spit in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something we did and completed and should move on from."