"And then some." This was spoken by another man, one who puffed heavily up from behind her. He was enormous, not just tall but fat, as big around as a barrel. His green tee-shirt read IT'S FUN TO USE LEARNING FOR EVIL! in blocky, pixelated letters. He took her hand and shook it. "I love your blog," he said. "I read it all the time." He had three chins, and eyes that were nearly lost in his apple cheeks. "Meet Lester," Perry said. "My partner." "Sidekick," Lester said with a huge wink. "Sysadmin slash hardware hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org." She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar. "Right, let's get started. You wanna see what I do, right?" Perry said. "That's right," Suzanne said. "Lead the way, Lester," Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep into the center of the junkpile. "All right, check this stuff out as we go." He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop and plucked out a toy in a battered box. "I love these things," he said, handing it to her. She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE WOOGIE ELMO. "That's from the great Elmo Crash," Perry said, taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling a nut. "The last and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring world that bought millions of Li'l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide. "Poor Elmo was an orphan, and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint-in-package BWEs, getting rained on, waiting to start their long, half-million-year decomposition. "But check this out." He flicked a multitool off his belt and extracted a short, sharp scalpel-blade. He slit the grinning, disco-suited Elmo open from chin to groin and shucked its furry exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board. "That's an entire Atom processor on a chip, there," he said. "Each limb and the head have their own subcontrollers. There's a high-powered digital-to-analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs, and an analog-to-digital converter array for converting spoken and danced commands to motions. Basically, you dance and sing for Elmo and he'll dance and sing back for you." Suzanne nodded. She'd missed that toy, which was a pity. She had a five year old goddaughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a Boogie Woogie Elmo. They had come to a giant barn, set at the edge of a story-and-a-half's worth of anchor store. "This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment," Lester rumbled, aiming a car-door remote at the door, which queeped and opened.