:: They're not the sole supplier. That's what an ecosystem is all :: about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition :: is great news for you and me, because it's already driven the :: price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that :: Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, :: before the margin disappears altogether -- and that's also good :: news for you and me. "Are you coming?" Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she'd dumped him and Perry had confided that she'd left him because he didn't live up to the press he'd gotten in Suzanne's column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment. "Up in a minute," she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well. On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts. "Jet engine," Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them ("They fucking *pay me* to do this," he'd told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again. "Good old Kettlebelly," she said. "Must have broken his heart." Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. "This thing wasn't going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he'd have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts." "Too bad," Lester said. "It's pretty. Gorgeous, even." He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop. "Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel," Francis said, and glared at the cowling. "You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers." "Is that why you were laid off?" Suzanne said. "I wasn't laid off, girl," he said. He jiggled his lame foot. "I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I'm not bitter -- why should the poor be allowed to live, huh?" His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.