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.

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.

Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement, and glass to preserve the look of a burned out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way glass that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below.

Suzanne showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decades since she’d left. She was flustered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread.

When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn’t there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days’ stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton shirt underneath. He was beaming at her.

“Suzanne,” he said.

Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. “Lester?” she said, wonderingly.

He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands.

When he let go of her, he laughed again. “Oh, Suzanne, I could not have asked for any better reaction than this. Thank you.” They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he.

“Lester?” she said again.

“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders.”

Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Suzanne picked one at random. So did Lester.

“So,” he said, patting his washboard tummy. “You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?”

“Can I take notes?” Suzanne said, pulling out her pad.

“Oh by all means,” he said. “I got a discount on my treatments on the basis that you would end up taking notes.”

The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn’t want to pay US prices for crowns. The treatment hadn’t originated there: The electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that the body burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still.

But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks.

“Is that safe?” she said.

“Everyone asks that,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, it’s safe if they’re monitoring you and standing by with lots of diagnostic equipment. But if you’re willing to take slower losses, you can go on a way less intensive regime that won’t require supervision. This stuff is the next big grey-market pharma gold. They’re violating all kinds of pharma patents, of course, but that’s what Cuba and Canada are for, right? Inside of a year, every fat person in America is going to have a bottle of pills in his pocket, and inside of two years, there won’t be any fat people.”

She shook her head. “You look… Lester, you look incredible. I’m so proud of you.”

He ducked his head. He really did look amazing. Dropping the weight had taken off ten years, and between that and the haircut and the new clothes, he was practically unrecognizable.