She laughed, but he'd only been halfway kidding. What he really wanted to do was have a big old dinner at home with Lester, just the two of them in front of the TV, eating Lester's fatkins cuisine, planning a new invention. He was tired of all these people. Even Suzanne was an outsider. It had just been him and Lester in the old days, and those had been the best days. Hilda put her arm around his shoulders and nuzzled his neck. "Poor Perry," she said. "Everyone picks on him." He smiled in spite of himself. "Come on, sulkypants, let's go find Lester and he can call me 'Yoko' some more. That always cheers you up." # It was two weeks before Death Waits could sit up and prod at a keyboard with his broken hands. Some of his pals brought a laptop around and they commandeered a spare dining tray to keep it on -- Death's lap was in no shape to support anything heavy with sharp corners. The first day, he was reduced to tears of frustration within minutes of starting. He couldn't use the shift key, couldn't really use the mouse -- and the meds made it hard to concentrate and remember what he'd done. But there were people on the other end of that computer, human friends whom he could communicate with if only he could re-learn to use this tool that he'd lived with since he was old enough to sit up on his own. So laboriously, peck by peck, key by key, he learned to use it again. The machine had a mode for disabled people, for *cripples*, and once he hit on this, it went faster. The mode tried to learn from him, learn his tremors and mis-keys, his errors and cursing, and so emerge something that was uniquely his interface. It was a kind of a game to watch the computer try to guess what was meant by his mashed keystrokes and spastic pointer-movements -- he turned on the webcam and aimed it at his eye, and switched it to retinal scanner mode, giving it control of the pointer, then watched in amusement as the wild leaping of the cursor every time a needle or a broken bone shifted inside his body was becalmed into a graceful, normalized curve. It was humiliating to be a high-tech cripple and the better the technology worked, the more prone it was to reducing him to tears. He might be like this for the rest of his life. He might never walk without a limp again. Might never dance. Might never be able to reach for and lift objects again. He'd never find a woman, never have a family, never have grandkids. But this was offset by the real people with their real chatter. He obsessively flew through the Brazilian mode, strange and wonderful but nowhere near what he loved from "his" variation on the ride. He could roll through all the different changes he'd made with his friends to the ride in Florida, and he became subtly attuned to which elements were wrong and which were right. It was on one of these flythroughs that he encountered The Story, leaping out of the ride so vividly that he yelped like he'd flexed his IV into a nerve again.