"They're not assholes, that's the thing, Perry. They're some really smart people. They're nice. We have them over for dinner. They're fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, *every single one of them feels the same way I do*. They *all* have cool shit they want to do, but they can't do it." "Why?" "It's like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit." "Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent -- 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you'll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory. "Maybe people are like that. If you're 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who's 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that's 81 percent non-bogus." "I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it's depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others' flaws." "Well, maybe that's the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative." "So what are virtues?" "Additive, maybe. A shallower curve." "That'd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements." "So what do you do around here all day?" Lester blushed. "What?" "I'm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. There's something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant." "I think I'd like to see that," Perry said, laughing a little. "That can be arranged," Lester said. They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy. They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed. They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still. # Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian who'd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldn't drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didn't go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.