It was shaping up to be a good day. His laptop rang and he screwed in his headset and started talking to Tjan. "Man, this place is excellent," he said. "I had the best night I've had in years last night." "Well then you'll love this: there's a crew in Madison that want to do the same thing and could use a little guidance. They spoke to me this morning and said they'd be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six o'clock flight at SFO?" They gave him cheese in Madison and introduced him to the biohackers who were the spiritual progeny of the quirky moment when Madison was one of six places where stem cells could be legally researched. The biohackers gave him the willies. One had gills. One glowed in the dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize. He got his hosts to bring him to the ratskeller where they sat down to comedy-sized beers and huge, suspicious steaming wursts. "Where's your site?" "We were thinking of building one -- there's a lot of farmland around here." Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasn't old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldn't. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever. "That's pretty weird. Everywhere else, they're just moving into spaces that have been left vacant." "We haven't got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups." "Heavily funded startups? In this day and age?" "Superbabies," the kid said with a shrug. "It's all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazy -- imagine being a twenty-year-old superbaby, with two-decade-old technology in your genes. In your germline! Breeding other obsolete superbabies. Crazy. But the Chinese are investing heavily." "So no dead malls? Christ, that's like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?" The kid laughed. "The campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But there's lots of farmland, like I said. Won't be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. It'll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska." "Wow." He wanted to say, *They have the ACLU in Nebraska?* but he knew that wasn't fair. The midwesterners he'd met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. "So why do you want to do this?"