The goth kid looked expectantly at him. "I'm a huge fan, you know. I used to work for Disney, and I was always watching what you did to get ideas for new stuff we should do. That's why it's so totally suckballs that they're accusing you of ripping them off -- we rip you off all the time." Lester felt like he was expected to do something with that information -- maybe deliver it to some lawyer or whatever. But would it make a difference? He couldn't get any spit in his mouth over legal fights. Christ -- legal fights! "Thanks. You're Death Waits, right? Perry told me about you." The kid visibly swelled. "Yeah. I could help around here if you wanted, you know. I know a lot about ride-operating. I used to train the ride-runners at Disney, and I could work any position. If you wanted." "We're not really hiring --" Lester began. "I'm not looking for a job. I could just, you know, help. I don't have a job or anything right now." Lester needed to pee. And he was sick of sitting here taking people's money. And he wanted to go play with his mechanical computer, anyway. "Lester? Who's the kid taking ticket money?" Suzanne's hug was sweaty and smelled good. "Look at this," Lester said. He flipped up his magnifying goggles and handed her the soda can. He'd cut away a panel covering the whole front of the can, and inside he'd painstakingly assembled sixty-four flip-flops. He turned the crank on the back of the can slowly, and the correct combination of rods extended from the back of the can, indicating the values represented on the flip-flops within. "It's a sixty-four bit register. We could build a shitkicking Pentium out of a couple million of these." He turned the crank again. The can smelled of solder and it had a pleasant weight in his hand. The mill beside him hummed, and on his screen, the parts he'd CADded up rotated in wireframe. Suzanne was at his side and he'd just built something completely teh awesome. He'd taken his shirt off somewhere along the afternoon's lazy, warm way and his skin prickled with a breeze. He turned to take Suzanne in his arms. God he loved her. He'd been in love with her for years now and she was his. "Look at how cool this thing is, just look." He used a tweezer to change the registers again and gave it a little crank. "I got the idea from the old Princeton Institute Electronic Computer Project. All these geniuses, von Neumann and Dyson, they brought in their kids for the summer to wind all the cores they'd need for their RAM. Millions of these things, wound by the kids of the smartest people in the universe. What a cool way to spend your summer.