Cory Doctorow - Makers

She stood up and moved quickly to him, stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him fiercely. He hugged her back and she kissed him on the cheek.

“I’ll see you in Florida,” she said.

And then he was gone. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for tears, but they didn’t come. So she picked up her laptop and started to work through her mountain of email.

When she saw him again, he was coming down the drive leading to the shantytown and the factory. She was having tea in the tea-room that had opened in a corkscrew spire high above the rest of the shantytown. The lady who operated it called herself Mrs Torrence, and she was exquisitely antique but by no means frail, and when she worked the ropes on her dumbwaiter to bring up supplies from the loading area on the ground, her biceps stood at attention like Popeye’s. There was a rumor that Mrs Torrence used to be a man, or still was, under her skirts, but Suzanne didn’t pay attention to it.

Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.

She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.

Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of Ewoks listening to C3PO.

“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their three-d printer project.

“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to be easy. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for a meth lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”

Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.

Suzanne took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks at a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.

The response was amazing. Every TV news-crew in the greater Miami area made a pilgrimage to their factory to film Lester working in a tight t-shirt over a three-d printer, wrangling huge vats of epoxy-mix goop in the sun with sweat beading over his big, straining biceps.

Her message boards exploded. It seemed that a heretofore unsuspected contingent of her growing readership was substantially obese. And they had friends. Lester eventually gave up on posting, just so he could get some work done. They had the printers to the point where they could turn out new printers, but the whole system was temperamental and needed careful nursing. Lester was more interested in what people had to say on the engineering message-boards than chatting with the fatties.

The fatties were skeptical and hopeful in equal measures. The big fight was over whether there was anything to this, whether Lester would keep the weight off, whether the new skinny Lester was really Lester, whether he’d undergone surgery or had his stomach stapled. America’s wallets had been cleaned out by so many snake-oil peddlers with a “cure” for obesity that no one could believe what they saw, no matter how much they wanted to.

Lord, but it was bringing in the readers, not to mention the advertising dollars. The clearing price for a thousand weight-loss ads targeted to affluent, obese English-speakers was over fifty bucks, as compared with her customary CPM of three bucks a thou. Inside of a week, she’d made enough to buy a car. It was weird being her own circulation and ad-sales department, but it wasn’t as hard as she’d worried it might be — and it was intensely satisfying to have such a nose-to-tail understanding of the economics of her production.

“You should go,” Lester told her as she clicked him through her earnings spreadsheet. “Jesus, this is insane. You know that these fatties actually follow me around on the net now, asking me questions in message boards about engineering? The board moderators are asking me to post under an assumed name. Madame, your public has spoken. There is a dire need for your skills in St Petersburg. Go. They have chandeliers in the subways and caviar on tap. All the blini you can eat. Bear steaks.”

She shook her head and slurped at the tea he’d brought her. “You’re joking. It’s all mafiyeh there. Scary stuff. Besides, I’m covering this beat right now, New Work.”

“New Work isn’t going anywhere, Suzanne. We’ll be here when you get back. And this story is one that needs your touch. They’re micro-entrepreneurs solving post-industrial problems. It’s the same story you’ve been covering here, but with a different angle. Take that money and buy yourself a business-class ticket to St Petersburg and spend a couple weeks on the job. You’ll clean up. They could use the publicity, too — someone to go and drill down on which clinics are legit and which ones are clip-joints. You’re perfect for the gig.”

“I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. Taking big chances had gotten her this far and it would take her farther, she knew. The world was your oyster if you could stomach a little risk.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hell yeah. You’re totally right, Lester.”

“Zasterovyeh!”

“What you said!”

“It’s cheers,” he said. “You’ll need to know that if you’re going to make time in Petrograd. Let me go send some email and get you set up. You book a ticket.”

And just like that she was off to Russia. Lester insisted that she buy a business-class ticket, and she discovered to her bemusement that British Airways had about three classes above business, presumably with even more exclusive classes reserved to royalty and peers of the realm. She luxuriated in fourteen hours of reclining seats and warm peanuts and in-flight connectivity, running a brief videoconference with Lester just because she could. Tjan had sent her a guide to the hotels and she’d opted for the Pribaltiyskaya, a crumbling Stalin-era four-star of spectacular, Vegasesque dimensions. The facade revealed the tragedy of the USSR’s unrequited love-affair with concrete, as did the cracks running up the walls of the lobby.

They checked her into the hotel with the nosiest questionnaire ever, a two-pager on government stationary that demanded to know her profession, employer, city of birth, details of family, and so forth. An American businessman next to her at the check-in counter saw her puzzling over it. “Just make stuff up,” he said. “I always write that I come from 123 Fake Street, Anytown, California, and that I work as a professional paper-hanger. They don’t check on it, except maybe the mob when they’re figuring out who to mug. First time in Russia?”

“It shows, huh?”

“You get used to it,” he said. “I come here every month on business. You just need to understand that if it seems ridiculous and too bad to be true, it is. They have lots of rules here, but no one follows ’em. Just ignore any unreasonable request and you’ll fit right in.”