Cory Doctorow - Makers

They fell into a discussion of the minutiae of Perry and Lester’s businesses, franker than any business discussion she’d ever heard. Tjan talked about the places where they’d screwed up, and places where they’d scored big, and about all the plans he’d made for Westinghouse, the connections he had in Russia. He even talked about his kids and his ex in St Petersburg, and Kettlewell admitted that he’d known about them already.

For Kettlewell’s part, he opened the proverbial kimono wide, telling Tjan about conflicts within the board of directors, poisonous holdovers from the pre-Kodacell days who sabotaged the company from within with petty bureaucracy, even the problems he was having with his family over the long hours they were working. He opened the minibar and cracked a bottle of champagne to toast Tjan’s new job, and they mixed it with more orange juice, and then there were bagels and schmear, fresh fruit, power bars, and canned Starbucks coffees with deadly amounts of sugar and caffeine.

When Kettlewell disappeared into the tiny — but marble-appointed — bathroom, Suzanne found herself sitting alone with Tjan, almost knee to knee, lightheaded from lack of sleep and champagne and altitude.

“Some trip,” she said.

“You’re the best,” he said, wobbling a little. “You know that? Just the best. The stuff you write about these guys, it makes me want to stand up and salute. You make us all seem so fucking glorious. We’re going to end up taking over the world because you inspire us so. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, because you’re not very self-conscious about it right now, but Suzanne, you won’t believe it because you’re so goddamned modest, too. It’s what makes your writing so right, so believable — ”

Kettlewell stepped out of the bathroom. “Touching down soon,” he said, and patted them each on the shoulder as he took his seat. “So that’s about it, then,” he said, and leaned back and closed his eyes. Suzanne was accustomed to thinking of him as twenty-something, the boyish age of the magazine cover portraits from the start of his career. Now, eyes closed on his private jet, harsh upper atmosphere sun painting his face, his crowsfeet and the deep vertical brackets around his mouth revealed him for someone pushing a youthful forty, kept young by exercise and fun and the animation of his ideas.

“Guess so,” Tjan said, slumping. “This has been one of the more memorable experiences of my life, Kettlewell, Suzanne. Not entirely pleasant, but pleasant on the whole. A magical time in the clouds.”

“Once you’ve flown private, you’ll never go back to coach,” Kettlewell said, smiling, eyes still closed. “You still think my CFO should spank me for not selling this thing?”

“No,” Tjan said. “In ten years, if we do our jobs, there won’t be five companies on earth that can afford this kind of thing — it’ll be like building a cathedral after the Protestant Reformation. While we have the chance, we should keep these things in the sky. But you should give one to Lester and Perry to take apart.”

“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.

Embarrassingly, 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 shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.

They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped 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 competition 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 fucking pay me to do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.