Lester nodded. "Yeah, I figured that. Openness always costs something. But we get a lot of benefits out of openness too. The way it works now is that no one ride can change more than five percent of the status quo within 24 hours without a manual approval. The problem was that the Brazilians opened, like, *fifty* rides at the same time, and each of them zeroed out and tried to sync that and between them they did way more than 100 percent. It'd be pretty easy to set things up so that no more than five percent can be changed, period, within a 24-hour period, without manual approval."

"If you can do that, why not set every change to require approval?"

Kettlewell said.

"Well, for starters because we'd end up spending all our time clicking OK for five-centimeter adjustments to prop-positioning. But more importantly, it's because the system is all about community -- we're not in charge, we're just part of the network."

Kettlewell made a sour face and muttered something. Tjan patted his arm again. "You guys *are* in charge, as much as you'd like not to be. You're the ones facing the legal ha.s.sles, you're the ones who invented it."

"We didn't, really," Lester said. "This was a real standing on the shoulders of giants project. We made use of a bunch of stuff that was on the shelf already, put it together, and then other people helped us refine it and get it working well. We're just part of the group, like I keep saying." He had a thought. "Besides, if we were in charge, Brazil wouldn't have been able to zero us out.

"You guys are being really weird and suit-y about this, you know? I've fixed the problem: no one can take us down like this again. It just won't happen. I've put the fix on the version-server for the codebase, so everyone else can deploy it if they want to. The problem's solved. We'll be shut for an hour or two, but who cares? You're missing the big picture: Brazil opened fifty rides *yesterday*! I mean, it sucks that we didn't notice until it screwed us up, but Brazil's got it all online. Who's next? China? India?"

"Russia?" Kettlewell said, looking at the door that Suzanne had left by. He was clearly trying to needle Lester.

Lester ignored him. "I'd love to go to Brazil and check out how they've done it. I speak a little Portuguese even -- enough to say, 'Are you 18 yet?' anyway."

"You're *weird*," Lyenitchka said. Ada giggled and said, "Weird!"

Eva shook her head. "The kids have got a point," she said. "You people are all a little weird. Why are you fighting? Tjan, Landon, you came here to manage the business side of things, and that's what you're doing. Lester, you're in charge of the creative and technical stuff and that's what you're doing. Without Lester, you two wouldn't have any business to run. Without these guys, you'd be in jail or something by now. Make peace, because you're on the same side. I've got enough children to look after here."

Kettlewell snapped a nod at her. "Right as ever, darling. OK, I apologize, all right?"

"Me too," Lester said. "I was kidding about going to Brazil -- at least while Perry's still away."

"He's coming home," Tjan said. "He called me this morning. He's bringing the girl, too."

"Yoko!" Lester said, and grinned. "OK, someone should get online and find out how all the other rides are coping with this. I'm sure they're going nutso out there."

"You do that," Kettlewell said. "We've got another call with the lawyers in ten minutes."

"How's all that going?"

"Let me put it this way," Kettlewell said, and for a second he was back in his glory days, slick and formidable, a shark. "I liquidated my shares in Disney this morning. They're down fifty points since the NYSE opened. You wait until Tokyo wakes up, they're going to bail and bail and bail."

Lester smiled back. "OK, well that's good, then."

He hunkered down with a laptop and got his homebrew wireless rig up and running -- a card would have been cheaper, but his rig gave him lots of robustness against malicious interference, multi-path and plain old attenuation -- and got his headline reader running.

He set to reading the posts and dispelling the popups that tried to call his attention to this or that. His filters had lots to tell him about, and the areas of his screen designated for different interests were starting to pinken as they acc.u.mulated greater urgency.

He waved them away and concentrated on getting through to all the ride-maintainers who had questions about his patches. But there was one pink area that wouldn't go. It was his serendipity zone, where things that didn't match his filters but had lots of interestingness -- comments and reposts from people he paid attention to -- and some confluence with his keywords turned up.

Impatiently, he waved it up, and a page made of bits of LiveJournals and news reports and photo-streams a.s.sembled itself.

His eye fell first on the photos. But for the shock of black and neon green hair, he wouldn't have recognized the kid in the pictures as Death Waits. His face was a ruin. His nose was a b.l.o.o.d.y rose, his eyes were both swollen shut. One ear was ruined -- apparently he'd been dragged some distance with that side of his head on the ground. His cheeks were pulpy and bruised. Then he clicked through to the photos from where they'd found Death, before they'd cleaned him up in the ambulance, and he had to turn his head away and breathe deeply. Both legs and both arms were clearly broken, with at least one compound fracture. His crotch -- Jesus. Lester looked away again, then quickly closed the window.

He switched to text accounts from Death's friends who'd been to see him in the hospital. He would live, but he might not walk again. He was lucid, and he was telling stories about the man who'd beaten him --

*You should just shut the f.u.c.k up about Disney on the f.u.c.king Internet, you know that, kid?*

Lester got up and went to find Kettlewell and Tjan and Suzanne -- oh, especially Suzanne -- again. He didn't think for one second that Death would have invented that. In fact, it was just the sort of brave thing that the gutsy little kid might have had the b.a.l.l.s to report on.

Every step he took, he saw that ruin of a face, the compound fracture, the luminous blood around his groin. He made it halfway to the guesthouse before he found himself leaning against a shanty, throwing up. Tears and bile streaming down his face, chest heaving, Lester decided that this wasn't about fun anymore. Lester came to understand what it meant to be responsible for people's lives. When he stood up and wiped his face on the tail of his tight, glittering shirt, he was a different person.

Sweating in the suffocating afternoon heat, his re-casted arm on fire, Hilda had shown him the article about Death Waits while they were being screened for their connection at O'Hare. The TSA guy was swabbing his cast with a black-powder residue detector, and as Perry read it, he let out an involuntary yelp and a jump that sent him back for a full round of tertiary screening. No date with Dr. Jellyfinger, though it was a close thing.

Hilda was deep in her own phone, probing ferociously at it, occasionally picking it up and talking into it, then poking at it some more. Neither of them looked out the windows much, though in his mind, Perry had rehea.r.s.ed this homecoming as a kind of tour of his territory, picking out which absurd landmarks he'd point out, which funny stories he'd tell, pausing to nuzzle Hilda's throat.

But by the time he'd absorbed the mailing-list traffic and done a couple phoners with the people back in Madison -- particularly Ernie, who was freaking about Death Waits and calling for tight physical security for all their people -- they were pulling in at the ride. The cabbie, a Turk, wasn't very cool about the neighborhood, and he kept slowing down on the side of the road and offering to let them out there, and Perry kept insisting that he take them all the way.

"No, you can't just drop me here, man. For the tenth time, I've got a f.u.c.king *cast* on my *broken arm*. I'm not carrying my suitcase a mile from here. I live there. It's safe. G.o.d, it's not like I'm asking you to take me to a war-zone."

He didn't want to tip the guy, but he did. The cabbie was just trying to play it safe. Lots of people tried to play it safe. It didn't make them a.s.sholes, even if it did make them ineffectual and useless.

While Perry tipped him, Hilda pulled the suitcase out of the cab's trunk and she'd barely had time to shut the lid when the driver roared off like he was trying to outrun a sniper.

Perry grimaced. This was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. He was supposed to be showing off his toys, all he'd wrought, to this girl. The town was all around them and they were about to charge in without even pausing to consider its Dr Seuss wonderment.

"Wait a sec," Perry said. He took her hand. "See that? That was the first shanty they built. Five stories now." The building was made of prefab concrete for the first couple stories, then successively lighter materials, with the roof-shack made of bamboo. "The designs are experimental, from the Army Corps of Engineers mostly, but they say they'll stand a force-five hurricane." He grimaced again. "Probably not the bamboo one, of course."

"Of course," Hilda said. "What's that one?" She'd picked up on his mood, she knew he wanted to show her around before they ended up embroiled in ride-politics and work again.

"You've got a good eye, my dear. That's the finest BBQ on the continent. See how the walls are a little sooty looking? That's carbonized ambrosia, a mix of fat and spice and hickory that you could sc.r.a.pe off and bottle as perfume."

"Eww."

"You haven't tried Lemarr's ribs yet," he said, and goosed her. She squeaked and punched him in the shoulder. He showed her the tuck-shops, the kids playing, the tutor's place, the day-care center, the workshops, taking her on a grand-circle tour of this place he'd help conjure into existence.

"Now there's someone I haven't seen in far too long," Francis said. He'd aged something fierce in the last year, booze making his face subside into a mess of wrinkles and pouches and broken blood-vessels. He gave Perry a hard hug that smelled of booze, and it wasn't even lunchtime.

"Francis, meet Hilda Hammersen; Hilda, meet Francis Clammer: aeros.p.a.ce engineer and gentleman of leisure."

He took her hand and feinted a kiss at it, and Hilda good-naturedly rolled her eyes at this.

"What do you think of our lovely little settlement, then, Ms Hammersen?"

"It's like something out of a fairy-tale," she said. "You hear stories about Christiania and how good and peaceful it all was, but whenever you see squatters on TV, it's always crack houses and drive-bys. You've really got something here."

Francis nodded. "We get a bad rap, but we're no different really from any other place where people take pride in what they own. I built my place, with my two hands. If Jimmy Carter had been there with Habitat for Humanity, we would have gotten no end of good press. Because we did it without a dead ex-president on the scene, we're crooks. Perry tell you about what the law does around here?'

Perry nodded. "Yeah. She knows."

Francis patted his cast. "Nice hardware, buddy. So when some Bible-thumping do-gooder gives you a leg up, you're a folk-hero. Help yourself, you're a CHUD. It's the same with you people and your ride. If you had the backing of a giant corporation with claws sunk deep into kids' brains, you'd be every package-tour operator's wet dream. Build it yourself in the guts of a dead shopping center, and you're some kind of slimy undercla.s.s."

"Maybe that's true," said Hilda. "But it's not necessarily true. Back in Madison, the locals love us, they think we do great stuff. After the law came after us, they came by with food and money and helped us rebuild. Sc.r.a.ppy activists get a lot of love in this country, too. Not everyone wants a big corporation to spoon-feed them."