“Sure, will-power. Will-power nothing. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat—that tells you that this isn’t a will-power problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn’t moral, it’s epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That’s a maladaptive trait through most of human history—burning unnecessary calories when you’ve got to chase down an antelope to get more, that’s no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you’re not doing this on will-power—you’re doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.

“Would I like to be thinner? Sure. But I’m not gonna let the fact that I’m genetically better suited to famine than feast get to me. Speaking of, let’s eat. Tony, c’mere, buddy. I want a plate of candy!” He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, sexless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his, what, his inner beauty on that exterior, it disoriented her. She looked back over her notes.

“So, you say that there’s a third coming out to work with you?”

“To live with us,” Perry said. “That’s part of the deal. Geek houses, like in the old college days. We’re going to be a power-trio: two geeks and a suit, lean and mean. The suit’s name is Tjan, and he’s Singaporean by way of London by way of Ithaca, where Kettlebelly found him. We’ve talked on the phone a couple times and he’s moving down next week.”

“He’s moving down without ever having met you?”

“Yeah, that’s the way it goes. It’s like the army or something for us: once you’re in you get dispatched here or there. It was in the contract. We already had a place down here with room for Tjan, so we put some fresh linen on the guest-bed and laid in an extra toothbrush.”

“It’s a little nervous-making,” Lester said. “Perry and I get along great, but I haven’t had such good luck with business-types. It’s not that I’m some kind of idealist who doesn’t get the need to make money, but they can be so condescending, you know?”

Suzanne nodded. “That’s a two-way street, you know. ’Suits’ don’t like being talked down to by engineers.”

Lester raised a hand. “Guilty as charged.”

“So what’re you planning to do for the rest of the week?” It was Wednesday, and she’d counted on getting this part of the story by Saturday, but here she was going to have to wait, clearly, until this Tjan arrived.

“Same stuff as we always do. We build crazy stuff out of junk, sell it to collectors, and have fun. We could go to the Thunderbird Drive In tonight if you want, it’s a real classic, flea-market by day and drive in by night, practically the last one standing.”

Perry cut in. “Or we could go to South Beach and get a good meal, if that’s more your speed.”

“Naw,” Suzanne said. “Drive in sounds great, especially if it’s such a dying breed. Better get a visit in while there’s still time.”

They tried to treat her but she wouldn’t let them. She never let anyone buy her so much as a cup of coffee. It was an old journalism-school drill, and she was practically the only scribbler she knew who hewed to it: some of the whores on the Silicon Valley papers took in free computers, trips, even spa days! — but she had never wavered.

The afternoon passed quickly and enchantingly. Perry was working on a knee-high, articulated Frankenstein monster built out of hand-painted seashells from a beach-side kitsch market. They said GOD BLESS AMERICA and SOUVENIR OF FLORIDA and CONCH REPUBLIC and each had to be fitted out for a motor custom built to conform to its contours.

“When it’s done, it will make toast.”

“Make toast?”

“Yeah, separate a single slice off a loaf, load it into a top-loading slice-toaster, depress the lever, time the toast-cycle, retrieve the toast and butter it. I got the idea from old-time backup-tape loaders. This plus a toaster will function as a loosely coupled single system.”

“OK, that’s really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast-robot?”

Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off. He was really built, and his shaggy hair made him look younger than his crows-feet suggested. He turned a seashell with a half-built motor in it over and spun it like a top on the hand-painted WEATHER IS HERE/WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL legend.

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it’s a good hobby business, but that’s not really it.

“It’s like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn’t go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that’ll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity… But these days, there’s not much traditional constraint. I’ve got the engineer’s most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I’ll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.

“Now, it may be that there is a suite of tasks lurking in potentia that demand all this resource and more—maybe I’m like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don’t see many of those problems—none that interest me.

“What I’ve got here are my own constraints. I’m challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it’s leftovers. There’s enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that’s by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It’s because the iPod was only meant to last a year!

“It’s like tailfins—they were cool in the Tailfin Cretaceous, but wouldn’t it have been better if they could have disappeared from view when they became aesthetically obsolete, when the space age withered up and blew away? Oh, not really, obviously, because it’s nice to see a well-maintained land-yacht on the highway every now and again, if only for variety’s sake, but if you’re going to design something that is meant to be au fait then presumably you should have some planned obsolescence in there, some end-of-lifing strategy for the aesthetic crash that follows any couture movement. Here, check this out.”

He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. “Christ, it’s huge,” she said.

“Yeah, isn’t it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? ’A thousand songs in your pocket!’”

That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. “I think I’ve got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven’t run out of space yet, either.”

He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. “You won’t—I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I’ve got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet… Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today.” He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. “And that’s just the point! Tomorrow, we’ll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost—”