He had a burrito the size of a football for breakfast, stuffed with shredded pig-parts and two kinds of sloppy beans. He washed it down with a quart of a cinnamon/rice drink called horchata that was served ice-cold and did wonders for his hangover.

A couple hours’ noodling on his laptop and a couple bags of Tecate later and he was feeling almost human. Early mariachis strolled the street with electric guitars that controlled little tribes of dancing, singing knee-high animatronics, belting out old Jose Alfredo Jimenez tunes.

It was shaping up to be a good day. His laptop rang and he screwed in his headset and started talking to Tjan.

“Man, this place is excellent,” he said. “I had the best night I’ve had in years last night.”

“Well then you’ll love this: there’s a crew in Madison that want to do the same thing and could use a little guidance. They spoke to me this morning and said they’d be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six o’clock flight at SFO?”

They gave him cheese in Madison and introduced him to the biohackers who were the spiritual progeny of the quirky moment when Madison was one of six places where stem cells could be legally researched. The biohackers gave him the willies. One had gills. One glowed in the dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize.

He got his hosts to bring him to the ratskeller where they sat down to comedy-sized beers and huge, suspicious steaming wursts.

“Where’s your site?”

“We were thinking of building one—there’s a lot of farmland around here.” Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasn’t old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldn’t. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever.

“That’s pretty weird. Everywhere else, they’re just moving into spaces that have been left vacant.”

“We haven’t got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups.”

“Heavily funded startups? In this day and age?”

“Superbabies,” the kid said with a shrug. “It’s all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazy—imagine being a twenty-year-old superbaby, with two-decade-old technology in your genes. In your germline! Breeding other obsolete superbabies. Crazy. But the Chinese are investing heavily.”

“So no dead malls? Christ, that’s like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?”

The kid laughed. “The campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But there’s lots of farmland, like I said. Won’t be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. It’ll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska.”

“Wow.” He wanted to say, They have the ACLU in Nebraska? but he knew that wasn’t fair. The midwesterners he’d met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. “So why do you want to do this?”

The kid grinned. “Because there’s got to be a way to do something cool without moving to New York. I like it around here. Don’t want to live in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I don’t want to be a farmer or an academic or run a student bar. All that stuff is a dead-end, I can see it from here. I mean, who drinks beer anymore? There’s much sweeter highs out there in the real world.”

Perry looked at his beer. It was in a themed stein with Germano-Gothic gingerbread worked into the finish. It felt like it had been printed from some kind of ceramic/epoxy hybrid. You could get them at traveling carny midways, too.

“I like beer,” he said.

“But you’re—” The kid broke off.

“Old,” Perry said. “’Sok. You’re what, 16?”

“21,” the kid said. “I’m a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more important things than puberty.”

Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did look 21. “Hey Luke,” the girl said, kissing him on the cheek.

Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldn’t forget it again—Nebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew he’d keep the name for good now.

“This is Perry Gibbons,” Luke said. “Perry, this is Hilda and Ernie. Guys, Perry’s the guy who built the ride I was telling you about.”

Ernie shook his hand. “Man, that’s the coolest shit I’ve ever seen, wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow.”

Hilda flicked his ear. “Stop drooling, fanboy,” she said.

Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly.

“Sorry. It’s just—well, I’m a big fan is all.”

“That’s really nice of you,” Perry said. He’d met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadn’t known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days he’d meet reporters who called themselves fans, but that was just blowing smoke. Now he was meeting people who seemed to really mean it. Not many, thank God.

“He’s just like a puppy,” Hilda said, pinching Ernie’s cheek. “All enthusiasm.”

Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. “These two are going to help me build the ride,” he said. “Hilda’s an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic.”

“Women’s health clinic or something?” Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that he’d seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didn’t think he’d ever met one like her.

“No,” Hilda said. “Metabolic health. Lots of people get the fatkins treatment at puberty, either because their fatkins parents talk them into it or because they hate their baby fat.”

Perry shook his head. “Come again?”

“You think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? It’s hell on your digestive system. Not to mention you spend a fortune on food. A lot of people get to college and just switch to high-calorie powdered supplements because they can’t afford enough real food to stay healthy, so you’ve got all these kids sucking down vanilla slurry all day just to keep from starving. We provide counseling and mitigation therapies to kids who want it.”

“And when they get out of college—do they get the treatment again?”

“You can’t. The mitigation’s permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising.”

“Do they get fat?”

She looked away, then down, then back up at him. “Yes, most of them do. How could they not? Everything around them is geared at people who need to eat five times as much as they do. Even the salads all have protein powder mixed in with them. But it is possible to eat right. You’ve never had the treatment, have you?”

Perry shook his head. “Trick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog and not put on an ounce.”

Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. “Really—and I suppose that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism, too?”

She left her hand where it was.

“OK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But I’m just saying—if they get fat again after they reverse the treatment—”

“There are worse things than being fat.”

Her hand still hadn’t moved. He looked at Ernie, whom he’d assumed was her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that was showing competitive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing entities and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldn’t imagine how you’d make sense of it.