Lester didn't want to open the ride, but someone had to. Someone had to, and it wasn't Perry, who was off with his midwestern honey. Lester would have loved to sleep in and spend the day in his workshop rebuilding his 64-bit registers -- he'd had some good ideas for improving on the initial design, and he still had the CAD files, which were the hard part anyway. He walked slowly across the parking lot, the sunrise in his eyes, a cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He'd almost gone to the fatkins bars the night before -- he'd almost gone ten, fifteen times, every time he thought of Suzanne storming out of his lab, but he'd stayed home with the TV and waited for her to turn up or call or post something to her blog or turn up on IM, and when none of those things had happened by 4AM, he tumbled into bed and slept for three hours until his alarm went off again. Blearily, he sat himself down behind the counter, greeted some of the hawkers coming across the road, and readied his ticket-roll. The first customers arrived just before nine -- an East Indian family driving a car with Texas plates. Dad wore khaki board-shorts and a tank-top and leather sandals, Mom was in a beautiful silk sari, and the kids looked like mall-bangbangers in designer versions of the stuff the wild kids in the shantytown went around in. They came out of the ride ten minutes later and asked for their money back. "There's nothing in there," the dad said, almost apologetically. "It's empty. I don't think it's supposed to be empty, is it?" Lester put the roll of tickets into his pocket and stepped into the Wal-Mart. His eyes took a second to adjust to the dark after the brightness of the rising Florida sun. When they were fully adjusted, though, he could see that the tourist was right. Busy robots had torn down all the exhibits and scenes, leaving nothing behind but swarming crowds of bots on the floor, dragging things offstage. The smell of the printers was hot and thick. Lester gave the man his money back. "Sorry, man, I don't know what's going on. This kind of thing should be impossible. It was all there last night." The man patted him on the shoulder. "It's all right. I'm an engineer -- I know all about crashes. It just needs some debugging, I'm sure." Lester got out a computer and started picking through the logs. This kind of failure really should be impossible. Without manual oversight, the bots weren't supposed to change more than five percent of the ride in response to another ride's changes. If all the other rides had torn themselves down, it might have happened, but they hadn't, had they? No, they hadn't. A quick check of the logs showed that none of the changes had come from Madison, or San Francisco, or Boston, or Westchester, or any of the other ride-sites.