"Oh, you needn't," he said. "That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It's pretty gorgeous, if you ask me." They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Suzanne ensconced herself at someone's vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on email before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket amid a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters' roar. Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn't have much by way of hands at their ends. "We just use rare-earth magnets," Fiona said. "Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars." Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together with *snick* sounds that were audible over the whine of their motors. Suzanne switched on her camera's night-vision mode and got shooting. "Where did you get all these robots?" Tjan grinned. "It's an open design -- the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There's a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren't proprietary enough and they were worried that they'd have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though." The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, shifting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch. "Can I go out and have a look?" she said. "I mean, is it safe?" "Sure," Fiona said. "Of course! Our robots won't harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction." "Still, try to stay out of their way," Tjan said. "Some of that stuff they're moving around is heavy." So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off.