“You’re restless, Perry,” Lester said. He put nine golf-balls, a ping-pong ball, and another nine golf balls in the machine’s input hopper. Two and a third seconds later, eighty one M&Ms dropped into the output hopper. “You’re just bored. You’re a maker, and you’re running things instead of making things.”

“No one cares about made things anymore, Les.”

“That’s sort of true,” Lester said. “I’ll allow you that. But it’s only sort of true. What you’re missing is how much people care about organizations still. That was the really important thing about the New Work: the way we could all come together to execute, without a lot of top-down management. The bangbanger arms dealers, the bio-terrorists and fatkins suppliers—they all run on social institutions that we perfected back then. You’ve got something like that here with your market, a fluid social institution that you couldn’t have had ten or fifteen years ago.”

“If you say so,” Perry said. The M&Ms were giving him heartburn. Cheap chocolate didn’t really agree with his stomach.

“I do. And so the answer is staring you right in the face: go invent some social institutions. You’ve got one creeping up here in the ride. There are little blogospheres of fans who coordinate what they’re going to bring down and where they’re going to put it. Build on that.”

“No one’s going to haul ass across the country to ride this ride, Les. Get real.”

“Course not.” Lester beamed at him. “I’ve got one word for you, man: franchise!”

“Franchise?”

“Build dupes of this thing. Print out anything that’s a one of a kind, run them as franchises.”

“Won’t work,” Perry said. “Like you said, this thing works because of the hardcore of volunteer curators who add their own stuff to it—it’s always different. Those franchises would all be static, or would diverge… It’d just be boring compared to this.”

“Why should they diverge? Why should they be static? You could network them, dude! What happens in one, happens in all. The curators wouldn’t just be updating one exhibit, but all of them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. A gigantic physical wiki. Oh, it’d be so very very very cool, Perry. A cool social institution.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“I’m gonna. But I need someone to run the project. Someone who’s good at getting people all pointed in the same direction. You, pal. You’re my hero on this stuff.”

“You’re such a flatterer.”

“You love it, baby,” Lester said, and fluttered his long eyelashes. “Like the lady said to the stamp collector, philately will get you everywhere.”

“Oy,” Perry said. “You’re fired.”

“You can’t fire me, I’m a volunteer!”

Lester dropped six golf-balls and a heavy medicine ball down the hopper. The machine ground and chattered, then started dropping hundred-loads of M&Ms—100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700—then some change.

“What operation was that?” Perry said. He’d never seen Lester pull out the medicine ball.

“Figure it out,” Lester said.

Perry thought for a moment. Six squared? Six cubed? Log six? “Six factorial? My God you’re weird, Les.”

“Genius is never appreciated.” He scooped up a double-handful of brown M&Ms. “In your face, Von Neumann! Let’s see your precious ENIAC top this!”

A month later, Perry was clearing security at Miami International, looking awkward in long trousers, closed-sole shoes, and a denim jacket. It was autumn in Boston, and he couldn’t show up in flip-flops and a pair of cutoffs. The security guards gave his leathery, lopsided face a hard look. He grinned like a pirate and made his funny eyebrow twitch, a stunt that earned him half an hour behind the screen and a date with Doctor Jellyfinger.

“What, exactly, do you think I’ve got hidden up there?” he asked as he gripped the railing and tried not to let the illegitimati carborundum.

“It’s procedure, sir.”

“Well, the doc said my prostate was the size of a guava about a month ago—in your professional opinion, has it shrunk or grown? I mean, while you’re up there.”

The TSA man didn’t like that at all. A minute later, Perry was buckling up and leaving the little room with an exaggerated bowlegged gait. He tipped an imaginary hat at the guard’s retreating back and said, “Call me!” in a stagey voice.

It was the last bit of fun he had for the next four hours, crammed in the tin can full of recycled discount air-traveller flatulence and the clatter of fingers on keyboards and the gabble of a hundred phone conversations as the salarymen on the flight stole a few minutes of cramped productivity from the dead travel time.

Touching down in Boston and getting his luggage, he felt like he’d landed on an alien planet. The feeling of disorientation and foreignness was new to Perry. He was used to being supremely comfortable, in control—confident. But he was nervous now, maybe even scared, a little.

He dialed Tjan. “I’ve got my bags,” he said.

“I’ll be right around,” Tjan said. “Really looking forward to seeing you.”

There were more cops than passengers in the arrivals area at Logan, and they watched Tjan warily as he pulled up and swung open a door of his little sports-car.

“What the fuck is this, a Porsche?” Perry said as he folded himself awkwardly into the front seat, stepping in through the sun-roof, pulling his bag down into his lap after him.

“It’s a Lada. I had it imported—they’re all over Russia. Evolutionary algorithm used to produce a minimum-materials/maximum-strength chassis. It’s nice to see you, Perry.”

“It’s nice to see you, Tjan,” he said. The car was so low to the ground that it felt like he was riding luge. Tjan hammered mercilessly on the gearbox, rocketing them to Cambridge at such speed that Perry barely had time to admire the foliage, except at stop-lights.

They were around the campus now, taking a screeching right off Mass Ave onto a tree-lined street of homely two-storey brick houses. Tjan pulled up in front of one and popped the sun-roof. The cold air that rushed in was as crisp as an apple, unlike any breath of air to be had in Florida, where there was always a mushiness, a feeling of air that had been filtered through the moist lungs of Florida’s teeming fauna.

Perry climbed out of the little Russian sports-car and twisted his back and raised his arms over his head until his spine gave and popped and crackled.

Tjan followed, and then he shut down the car with a remote that made it go through an impressive and stylish series of clicks, clunks and chirps before settling down over its wheels, dropping the chassis to a muffler-scraping centimeter off the ground.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you your room.”

Tjan’s porch sagged, with a couple kids’ bikes triple-locked to it and an all-covering chalk mosaic over every inch of it. The wood creaked and gave beneath their feet.

The door sprang open and revealed a pretty little girl, nine or ten years old, in blue-jeans and a hoodie sweater that went nearly to her ankles, the long sleeves bunched up like beach-balls on her forearms. The hood hung down to her butt—it was East Coast bangbanger, as reinterpreted through the malls.

“Daddy!” she said, and put her arms around Tjan’s waist, squeezing hard.

He pried her loose and then hoisted her by the armpits up to eye-height. “What have you done to your brother?”

“Nothing he didn’t deserve,” she said, with a smile that showed dimples and made her little nose wrinkle.

Tjan looked over at Perry. “This is my daughter, Lyenitchka, who is about to be locked in the coal cellar until she learns to stop torturing her younger brother. Lyenitchka, this is Perry Gibbons, upon whom you have already made an irreparably bad first impression.” He shook her gently Perrywards.

“Hello, Perry,” she said, giggling, holding out one hand. She had a faint accent, which made her sound like a tiny, skinny Bond villainess.