She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. "Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I'm nothing *but* breakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?" "Heh. Oh yeah." "I'm on the next flight to DFW," she said. "I've got a cab waiting to take me to the airport." "I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details," Sammy said. "Only if you want to do it in the taxi." "I was thinking we could do it on the plane," he said. "You're going to buy a ticket?" "On my plane," he said. They'd given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs. "Oh yes, I think that can be arranged," she said. "It's Sammy, right?" "Right," he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive. # Lester hadn't left Suzanne's apartment in days. She'd rented a place in the shantytown -- bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry's apartment had become so tense. Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day. She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry's ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof -- none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn't getting any rent. She looked over Lester's shoulder for the fiftieth time. "How's it going?" "Don't write about this, OK?" He'd never said that to her. "I'll embargo it until you ship." He grunted. "Fine, I guess. OK, well, I've got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don't make it easy, which is weird. It's like they don't plan on updating it once it's in the field -- maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals." "Why's the firmware matter to you?" "Well, that's where it stores information about where to get the day's designs. If we're going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don't know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it's accessing their site when it's really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine -- no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that."