You do good work, madam. I'd be honored if you'd consider joining one of our little teams for a couple months and chronicling what they do. I feel like we're making history here and we need someone to chronicle it.

I don't know if you can square this with the Merc, and I suppose that we should be doing this through my PR people and your editor, but there comes a time about this time every night when I'm just too G.o.dd.a.m.ned hyper to bother with all that stuff and I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something.

Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent access, no oversight? Say you will. Please.

Your pal,

Kettlebelly

She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, "[email protected]" -- for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of Kettlewell checking his email at midnight before his big press-conference, catching Freddy's column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she'd heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term "Skunk Works" to describe a generic R&D department. That meant that Kettlewell had moved so fast that he hadn't even run this project by legal. She was willing to bet that he'd already ordered new business-cards with the address on them.

There was a guy she knew, an editor at a mag who'd a.s.signed himself a plum article that he'd run on his own cover. He'd gotten a book-deal out of it. A half-million dollar book-deal. If Kettlewell was right, then the exclusive book on the inside of the first year at Kodacell could easily make that advance. And the props would be mad, as the kids said.

Kettlebelly! It was such a stupid frat-boy nickname, but it made her smile. He wasn't taking himself seriously, or maybe he was, but he wasn't being a pompous a.s.s about it. He was serious about changing the world and frivolous about everything else. She'd have a hard time being an objective reporter if she said yes to this.

She couldn't possibly decide at this hour. She needed a night's sleep and she had to talk this over with the Merc. If she had a boyfriend, she'd have to talk it over with him, but that wasn't a problem in her life these days.

She spread on some expensive duty-free French wrinkle-cream and brushed her teeth and put on her nightie and double-checked the door locks and did all the normal things she did of an evening. Then she folded back her sheets, plumped her pillows and stared at them.

She turned on her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped the s.p.a.cebar until the thing woke from sleep.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn't possibly a.s.sociate myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly.

So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that, we've got a deal.

Suzanne

There had come a day when her readers acquired email and the paper ran her address with her byline, and her readers had begun to write her and write her and write her. Some were amazing, informative, thoughtful notes. Some were the vilest, most bilious trolling. In order to deal with these notes, she had taught herself to pause, breathe, and re-read any email message before clicking send.

The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly -- Kettlewell! -- and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send.

She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail.

From: [email protected]

To:

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

I will never call myself Kettlebelly again.

Your pal,

Kettledrum.

Oh-s.h.i.t-oh-s.h.i.t-oh-s.h.i.t. She did a little two-step at her bed's edge. Tomorrow she'd go see her editor about this, but it just felt *right*, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever.

It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour's worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell's insomnia was as contagious as his excitement.

Hollywood, Florida's biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne's Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn't ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates.

"Yeah, it's 'cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn't been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I'll get you some decent lat-long."

His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell's talent-scouts.

The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they'd been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they'd been abandoned, they hadn't been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she'd left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually *farmed* by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.

The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she pa.s.sed. She'd felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts -- nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn't the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-s.e.xed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick.

The GPS queeped when she came up on the junkyard, a sprawling, half-built discount mall whose waist-high walls had been used to parcel out different kinds of sorted waste. The mall had been planned with wide indoor boulevards between the shops wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and she cruised those lanes now in the hertzmobile, looking for a human. Once she reached the center of the mall -- a dry fountain filled with dusty Christmas-tree ornaments -- she stopped and leaned on the horn.

She got out of the car and called, "h.e.l.lo? Perry?" She could have phoned him but it always seemed so wasteful spending money on airtime when you were trying to talk to someone within shouting range.

"Suzanne!" The voice came from her left. She shielded her eyes from the sun's glare and peered down a spoke of mall-lane and caught her first glimpse of Perry Gibbons. He was standing in the basket of a tall cherry-picker, barechested and brown. He wore a sun-visor and big work gloves, and big, baggy shorts whose pockets jangled as he shinnied down the crane's neck.

She started toward him tentatively. Not a lot of business-reporting a.s.signments involved spending time with half-naked, sun-baked dudes in remote southern junkyards. Still, he sounded nice.

"h.e.l.lo!" she called. He was young, 22 or 23, and already had squint-creases at the corners of his eyes. He had a brace on one wrist and his steel-toed boots were the mottled grey of a grease-puddle on the floor of a m.u.f.fler and brake shop.

He grinned and tugged off a glove, stuck out his hand. "A pleasure. Sorry for the trouble finding this place. It's not easy to get to, but it's cheap as h.e.l.l."

"I believe it." She looked around again -- the heaps of interesting trash, the fountain-dish filled with thousands of shining ornaments. The smell was a mixture of machine-oil and salt, jungle air, Florida swamp and Detroit steel. "So, this place is pretty cool. Looks like you've got pretty much everything you could imagine."

"And then some." This was spoken by another man, one who puffed heavily up from behind her. He was enormous, not just tall but fat, as big around as a barrel. His green tee-shirt read IT'S FUN TO USE LEARNING FOR EVIL! in blocky, pixelated letters. He took her hand and shook it. "I love your blog," he said. "I read it all the time." He had three chins, and eyes that were nearly lost in his apple cheeks.

"Meet Lester," Perry said. "My partner."

"Sidekick," Lester said with a huge wink. "Sysadmin slash hardware hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org."

She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar.

"Right, let's get started. You wanna see what I do, right?" Perry said.

"That's right," Suzanne said.

"Lead the way, Lester," Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep into the center of the junkpile. "All right, check this stuff out as we go." He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop and plucked out a toy in a battered box. "I love these things,"

he said, handing it to her.

She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE WOOGIE ELMO.

"That's from the great Elmo Crash," Perry said, taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was sh.e.l.ling a nut. "The last and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring world that bought millions of Li'l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide.