“Huh? Oh, those things are built like tanks. Have to be to keep the sand out. You need about four hours with an air-hammer to bust one open.”

“You tried it?”

Lester laughed. “Who, me?”

Now it was Perry’s date’s turn to be bored. She wandered away toward the boardwalk, with its strip of novelty sellers. Perry followed, because he had a professional interest in the kind of wares they carried. Most of them originated on one of his printers, after all. Plus, it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

“What have we here?” he said as he pulled up alongside her. She was trying on a bracelet of odd, bony beads.

“Ectopic fetuses,” she said. “You know, like the Christian fundies use for stem-cell research? You quicken an unfertilized egg in vitro and you get a little ball of fur and bone and skin and stem-cells. It can never be a human, so it has no soul, so it’s not murder to harvest them.”

The vendor, a Turkish teenager with a luxurious mustache, nodded. “Every bead made from naturally occurring foetus-bones.” He handed one to Perry.

It was dry and fragile in his hand. The bones were warm and porous, and in tortured Elephant Man shapes that he recoiled from atavistically.

“Good price,” the Turkish kid said. He had practically no accent at all, and was wearing a Japanese baseball-team uniform and spray-on foot-coverings. Thoroughly Americanized. “Look here,” he said, and gestured at a little corner of his table.

It was covered in roses made from fabric—small and crude, with pin-backs. Perry picked one up. It had a certain naive charm. The fabric was some kind of very delicate leather—

“It’s skin,” his date said. “Foetal skin.”

He dropped it. His fingers tingled with the echo of the feeling of the leather. Jesus I hate biotech. The rose fluttered past the table to the sandy boardwalk, and the Turkish kid picked it up and blew it clean.

“Sorry,” Perry said, sticking his hands in his pockets. His date bought a bracelet and a matching choker made of tiny bones and teeth, and the Turkish kid, leering, helped her fasten the necklace. When they returned to Lester and his date, Perry knew the evening was at a close. The girls played a couple rounds of eye-hockey, unreadable behind their lenses, and Perry shrugged apologetically at Lester.

“Well then,” Lester said, “it sure has been a nice night.” Lester got smooched when they saw the girls off in a pedicab. In the buzz and hum of its flywheel, Perry got a damp and unenthusiastic handshake.

“Win some, lose some,” Lester said as the girls rolled away in a flash of muscular calves from the pair of beach-perfect cabbies pedaling the thing.

“You’re not angry?” Perry said.

“Nah,” Lester said. “I get laid too much as it is. Saps me of my precious bodily fluids. Gotta keep some chi inside, you know?”

Perry raised up his funny eyebrow and made it dance.

“Oh, OK,” Lester said. “You got me. I’m meeting mine later, after she drops her friend off.”

“I’ll get a cab home then, shall I?”

“Take my car,” Lester said. “I’ll get a ride back in the morning. No way you’ll get a taxi to take you to our neighborhood at this hour.”

Perry’s car had been up on blocks for a month, awaiting his attention to its failing brakes and mushy steering. So it was nice to get behind the wheel of Lester’s Big Daddy Roth trike and give it a little gas out on the interstate, the smell of the swamp and biodiesel from the big rigs streaming past the windscreen. The road was dark and treacherous with potholes, but Perry got into the rhythm of it and found he didn’t want to go home, quite, so he kept driving, into the night. He told himself that he was scouting dead malls for future expansion, but he had kids who’d video-documented the status of all the likely candidates in the hood, and he kept tabs on his choicest morsels via daily sat photos that he subscribed to in his morning feed.

What the hell was he doing with his life? The Wal-Mart ride was a lark—it had been Lester’s idea, but Lester had lost interest and Perry had done most of the work. They weren’t quite squatting the Wal-Mart: Perry paid rent to a state commission that collected in escrow for the absentee landlord. It was a fine life, but the days blurred one into the next, directionless. Building the ride had been fun, setting up the market had been fun, but running them—well, he might as well be running a laundromat for all the mental acuity his current job required.

“You miss it,” he said to himself over the whistle of the wind and the hiss of the fat contact-patches on the rear tires. “You want to be back in the shit, inventing stuff, making it all happen.”

For the hundredth time, he thought about calling Suzanne Church. He missed her, too, and not just because she made him famous (and now he was no longer famous). She put it all in perspective for him, and egged him on to greater things. She’d been their audience, and they’d all performed for her, back in the golden days.

It was, what, 5AM in Russia? Or was it two in the afternoon? He had her number on his speed-dial, but he never rang it. He didn’t know what he’d tell her.

He could call Tjan, or even Kettlebelly, just ring them out of the blue, veterans together shooting the shit. Maybe they could have a Kodacell reunion, and get together to sing the company song, wearing the company t-shirt.

He pulled the car off at a truck stop and bought an ice-cream novelty from a vending machine with a robotic claw that scooped the ice-cream, mushed it into the cone, then gave it a haircut so that it looked like Astro Boy’s head, then extended the cone on a robotic claw. It made him smile. Someone had invented this thing. It could have been him. He knew where you could download vision-system libraries, and force-feedback libraries. He knew where you could get plans for the robotics, and off-the-shelf motors and sensors. Christ, these days he had a good idea where you could get the ice-cream wholesale, and which crooked vending-machine interests he’d have to grease to get his stuff into truck-stops.

He was thirty four years old, he was single and childless, and he was eating an ice-cream in a deserted truck-stop at two in the morning by the side of a freeway in south Florida. He bossed a low-budget tourist attraction and he ran a pirate flea-market.

What the hell was he doing with his life?

Getting mugged, that’s what.

They came out of the woods near the picnic tables, four bangbangers, but young ones, in their early teens. Two had guns—nothing fancy, just AK-47s run off a computer-controlled mill somewhere in an industrial park. You saw them all over the place, easy as pie to make, but the ammo was a lot harder to come by. So maybe they were unloaded.

Speaking of unloaded. He was about to piss his pants.

“Wallet,” one of them said. He had a bad mustache that reminded him of the Turkish kid on the beach. Probably the same hormones that gave kids mustaches gave them bad ideas like selling fetus jewelry or sticking up people by the ice-cream machines at late night truck-stops. “Keys,” he said. “Phone,” he added.

Perry slowly set down the ice-cream cone on the lid of the trash-can beside him. He’d only eaten one spike off Astro-Boy’s head.

His vision telescoped down so that he was looking at that kid, at his mustache, at the gun in his hands. He was reaching for his wallet, slowly. He’d need to hitch a ride back to town. Canceling the credit-cards would be tough, since he’d stored all the identity-theft passwords and numbers in his phone, which they were about to take off him. And he’d have to cancel the phone, for that matter.

“Do you have an older brother named Jason?” his mouth said, while his hands were still being mugged.

“What?”

“Works a stall by the Wal-Mart ride, selling contact lenses?”

The kid’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know me, man. You don’t want to know me. Better for your health if you don’t know me.”