What the hell was he doing with his life? The Wal-Mart ride was a lark -- it had been Lester's idea, but Lester had lost interest and Perry had done most of the work. They weren't quite squatting the Wal-Mart: Perry paid rent to a state commission that collected in escrow for the absentee landlord. It was a fine life, but the days blurred one into the next, directionless. Building the ride had been fun, setting up the market had been fun, but running them -- well, he might as well be running a laundromat for all the mental acuity his current job required. "You miss it," he said to himself over the whistle of the wind and the hiss of the fat contact-patches on the rear tires. "You want to be back in the shit, inventing stuff, making it all happen." For the hundredth time, he thought about calling Suzanne Church. He missed her, too, and not just because she made him famous (and now he was no longer famous). She put it all in perspective for him, and egged him on to greater things. She'd been their audience, and they'd all performed for her, back in the golden days. It was, what, 5AM in Russia? Or was it two in the afternoon? He had her number on his speed-dial, but he never rang it. He didn't know what he'd tell her. He could call Tjan, or even Kettlebelly, just ring them out of the blue, veterans together shooting the shit. Maybe they could have a Kodacell reunion, and get together to sing the company song, wearing the company t-shirt. He pulled the car off at a truck stop and bought an ice-cream novelty from a vending machine with a robotic claw that scooped the ice-cream, mushed it into the cone, then gave it a haircut so that it looked like Astro Boy's head, then extended the cone on a robotic claw. It made him smile. Someone had invented this thing. It could have been him. He knew where you could download vision-system libraries, and force-feedback libraries. He knew where you could get plans for the robotics, and off-the-shelf motors and sensors. Christ, these days he had a good idea where you could get the ice-cream wholesale, and which crooked vending-machine interests he'd have to grease to get his stuff into truck-stops. He was thirty four years old, he was single and childless, and he was eating an ice-cream in a deserted truck-stop at two in the morning by the side of a freeway in south Florida. He bossed a low-budget tourist attraction and he ran a pirate flea-market. What the hell was he doing with his life? Getting mugged, that's what. They came out of the woods near the picnic tables, four bangbangers, but young ones, in their early teens. Two had guns -- nothing fancy, just AK-47s run off a computer-controlled mill somewhere in an industrial park. You saw them all over the place, easy as pie to make, but the ammo was a lot harder to come by. So maybe they were unloaded. Speaking of unloaded. He was about to piss his pants.