"Boston's not Florida," Tjan said. "Lots of people here don't have cars. There were some dead malls out in Worcester and the like, but I got this place for nothing. The owners haven't paid taxes in the ten years since the hotel folded, and the only shops that were left open were a couple of Azerbaijani import-export guys, selling junky stuff from India. "We gutted the whole second floor and turned the ground-floor food-court into a flea-market. There's an old tunnel connecting this to the T and I managed to get it re-opened, so I expect we'll get some walk-in." Perry marveled. Tjan had a suit's knack for pulling off the ambitious. Perry had never tried to even rent an apartment in a big city, figuring that any place where land was at a premium was a place where people willing to spend more than him could be found. Give him a ghost-mall that was off the GPS grid anytime. "Have you managed to fill the flea market?" It had taken Perry a long time to fill his, and still he had a couple of dogs -- a tarot reader and a bong stall, a guy selling high-pressure spray-paint cans and a discount porn stall that sold naked shovelware by the petabyte. "Yeah, I got proteges up and down New England. A lot of them settled here after the crash. One place is as good as another, and the housing was wicked-cheap once the economy disappeared. They upped stakes and came to Boston as soon as I put the word out. I think everyone's waiting for the next big thing." "You think?" "Perry, New Work is the most important thing that ever happened to some of those people. It was the high-point of their lives. It was the only time they ever felt useful." Perry shook his head. "Don't you think that's sad?" Tjan negotiated a tricky tunnel interchange and got the car pointed to Cambridge. "No, Perry, I don't think it's sad. Jesus Christ, you can't believe that. Why do you think I'm helping you? You and me and all the rest of them, we did something *important*. The world changed. It's continuing to change. Have you stopped to think that one in five American workers picked up and moved somewhere else to do New Work projects? That's one of the largest American resettlements since the dustbowl. The average New Work collective shipped more inventions per year than Edison Labs at its peak. In a hundred years, when they remember the centuries that were America's, they'll count this one among them, because of what we made. "So no, Perry, I don't think it's sad." "I'm sorry. Sorry, OK? I didn't mean it that way. But it's tragic, isn't it, that the dream ended? That they're all living out there in the boonies, thinking of their glory days?" "Yes, that *is* sad. But that's why I agreed to do the ride -- not to freeze the old projects in amber, but to create a new project that we can all participate in again. These people uprooted their lives to follow us, it's the least we can do to give them something back for that."