"Not the whole thing," Lester said. "A lot of the logic needs an FPGA
burner. And we can't do some of the conductive elements, either. But
yeah, about 90 percent of the DiaB can be printed in a DiaB."
Suzanne hadn't heard about this one, though she remembered earlier
attempts, back in the golden New Work days, the dream of
self-replicating machines. Now she looked close, leaning in next to
Sammy, so close she could feel his warm breath. There was something,
well, *spooky* about the imps building a machine using another one of
the machines.
"It's, what, it's like it's alive, and reproducing itself," Sammy
said.
"Don't tell me this never occurred to you," Lester said.
"Honestly? No. It never did. Mr Banks, you have a uniquely twisted,
fucked up imagination, and I say that with the warmest admiration."
Guignol leaned in, too, staring at it.
"It's so obvious now that I see it," he said.
"Yeah, all the really great ideas are like that," Lester said.
Sammy straightened up and shook Lester's hand. "Thank you for the
tour, Lester. You have managed to simultaneously impress and depress
me. You are one sharp motherfucker."
Lester preened and Suzanne suppressed a giggle.
Sammy held his hand up like he was being sworn in. "I'm dead serious,
man. This is amazing. I mean, we manage some pretty out-of-the-box
thinking at Disney, right? We may not be as nimble as some little
whacked out co-op, but for who we are -- I think we do a good job.
"But you, man, you blow us out of the water. This stuff is just
*crazy*, like it came down from Mars. Like it's from the future." He
shook his head. "It's humbling, you know."
Guignol looked more thoughtful than he had to this point. He and
Lester stared at Sammy, wearing similar expressions of bemusement.
"Let's go into the apartment," Suzanne said. "We can sit down and have
a chat."
They trooped up the stairs together. Guignol expressed admiration for
the weird junk-sculptures that adorned each landing, made by a local
craftswoman and installed by the landlord. They sat around the living
room and Lester poured iced coffee out of a pitcher in the fridge,
dropping in ice-cubes molded to look like legos.
They rattled their drinks and looked uncomfortably at one
another. Suzanne longed to whip out her computer and take notes, or at
least a pad, or a camera, but she restrained himself. Guignol looked
significantly at Sammy.
"Lester, I'm just going to say it. Would you sell your business to us?
The ride, DiaBolical, all of it? We could make you a very, very rich
man. You and Perry. You would have the freedom to go on doing what
you're doing, but we'd put it in our production chain, mass-market the
hell out of it, get it into places you've never seen. At its peak, New
Work -- which you were only a small part of, remember -- touched 20
percent of Americans. *90 percent* of Americans have been to a Disney
park. We're a bigger tourist draw than *all of Great Britain.* We can
give your ideas legs."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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