"I'm sorry if I spoiled the movie," she said.
"Don't sweat it," Lester said, clearly grateful for the change of
subject. "It was a lousy movie anyway. You drowned out some truly foul
dialogue."
"Well, there's that."
"C'mon, let's go back to the office and get you your car. It's an hour
to Miami from here."
She was wide awake by the time she parked the rent-a-car in the
coffin-hotel's parking lot and crawled into her room, slapping the
air-con buttons up to full to clear out the stifling air that had
baked into the interior during the day.
She lay on her back in the dark coffin for a long time, eyes open and
slowly adjusting to the idiot lights on the control panel, until it
seemed that she was lying in a space capsule hurtling through the
universe at relativistic speeds, leaving behind history, the world,
everything she knew. She sat up, wide awake, on West Coast time
suddenly, and there was no way she would fall asleep now, but she lay
back down and then she did, finally.
The alarm woke her seemingly five minutes later. She did a couple laps
around the parking lot, padding around, stretching her legs, trying to
clear her head -- her internal clock thought that it was 4AM, but at
7AM on the east coast, the sun was up and the heat had begun to sizzle
all the available moisture into the air. She left the hotel and drove
around Miami for a while. She needed to find some toiletries and then
a cafe where she could sit down and file some copy. She'd tweeted a
bunch of working notes and posted a few things to her blog the day
before, but her editor expected something more coherent for those who
preferred their news a little more digested.
By the time she arrived at Perry's junkyard, the day had tipped for
afternoon, the sun no longer straight overhead, the heat a little
softer than it had been the day before. She settled in for another day
of watching the guys work, asking the occasional question. The column
she'd ended up filing had been a kind of wait-and-see piece,
describing the cool culture these two had going between them, and
asking if it could survive scaling up to mass production. Now she
experimented with their works-in-progress, sculptures and machines
that almost worked, or didn't work at all, but that showed the scope
of their creativity. Kettlewell thought that there were a thousand,
ten thousand people as creative as these two out there, waiting to be
discovered. Could it be true?
"Sure," Perry said, "why not? We're just here because someone dropped
the barrier to entry, made it possible for a couple of tinkerers to
get a lot of materials and to assemble them without knowing a whole
lot about advanced materials science. Wasn't it like this when the
Internet was starting out?"
"Woah," Suzanne said. "I just realized that you wouldn't really
remember those days, back in the early nineties."
"Sure I remember them. I was a kid, but I remember them fine!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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