He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych made
out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it
and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor.
The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a
high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it
were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes,
springs and other mechanical apparatus.
"It's a mechanical calculator," he said proudly. "About half as
powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What
you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with
Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal
to the product of the two values into this hopper, here." He put three
scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in
another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank
played a slow, irregular rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel" while the
hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and
adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few
times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He
picked them out carefully and offered them to her. "It's OK. They're
not from the trash," he said. "I buy them in bulk." He turned his
broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of
brown M&Ms in her direction. "See, it's a bit-bucket!" he said.
Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. "You guys are hilarious," she
said. "This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff." The gears on the
mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like
you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished
surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks
falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned
the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out.
"Who's the Van Halen fan?"
Lester beamed. "Might as well jump -- JUMP!" He mimed heavy-metal
air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he were
headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. "You're the first
one to get the joke!" he said. "Even Perry didn't get it!"
"Get what?" Perry said, also grinning.
"Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their
dressing room they'd trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I
used to *dream* about being so famous that I could act like that much
of a prick. Ever since, I've afforded a great personal significance to
brown M&Ms."
She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. "Look, I hate to break
this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly -- crap,
Kettle*well* -- said that you guys exemplified everything that he
wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you've done is all very
interesting, it's killer art, but I don't see the business-angle. So,
can you help me out here?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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