Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Standing there amid the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she'd arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity's creations had evolved past their inventors. She was going to have to do a *lot* of writing before bed. Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she passed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy. She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina's Research Triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams. Another three weeks of this stuff and she'd get to go home -- Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling. It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn't been her idea, she'd been dragged back by impassioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who'd rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them. The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disassembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts' interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams with their latest bail-out and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they'd won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew. Lester emailed her and said that he'd seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he'd be in town too? They ate at Devil's Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades' worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Devil's Night was the pre-Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings, and all of Brush Park had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs.