Perry looked down. "Sorry. I'm out of practice with people."

"I hope you'll stay with us," he said, thinking *I hope you leave soon and never come back*.

"You miss it, huh?"

"Sometimes."

"You said working here --"

"Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it's like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."

"I hate working with a.s.sholes."

"They're not a.s.sholes, that's the thing, Perry. They're some really smart people. They're nice. We have them over for dinner. They're fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, *every single one of them feels the same way I do*. They *all* have cool s.h.i.t they want to do, but they can't do it."

"Why?"

"It's like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be c.r.a.p. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is s.h.i.t."

"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent -- 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you'll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.

"Maybe people are like that. If you're 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who's 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that's 81 percent non-bogus."

"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But f.u.c.k me, it's depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others' flaws."

"Well, maybe that's the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."

"So what are virtues?"

"Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."

"That'd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quant.i.tative measurements."

"So what do you do around here all day?"

Lester blushed.

"What?"

"I'm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research a.s.sistants a.s.semble them. There's something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant."

"I think I'd like to see that," Perry said, laughing a little.

"That can be arranged," Lester said.

They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.

They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.

They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.

Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian who'd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldn't drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didn't go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.

Perry couldn't bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarra.s.sed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalid's subsidy to feel excessive.

"Kap," Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that he'd made of the back-seat.

Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. "Home now?" He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.

"No," Lester said. "Let's eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?"

"Ms Suzanne says --"

"We don't need to tell her," Lester said.

Perry spoke in a low voice, "Lester, I don't need anything special. Don't make yourself sick --"

"Perry, buddy, shut the f.u.c.k up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-a.s.s dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isn't going to fall out of my a.s.shole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there."

They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre d' gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium.

"We'd like Orson Welles's table, please," he said.

The maitre d' -- an elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beard -- nodded affably. "Give me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?"

They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. "Sorry," he said to the waitress. "Just having an indecisive kind of night, I guess."

Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the c-note, and decided that he hadn't been. He'd just gone native in LA, and a hundred for the maitre d' when you're in a hurry can't be much for a senior exec.

Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. "I like this place," he said, waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. "It's perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultra-modern place come here. They come because they've always come -- to sit in Orson Welles's booth."

"How's the food?"

"Depends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for steaks?"

"I'm down for whatever," Perry said. Lester was in his medium here, letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without taking any special notice of the old man.

The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity, though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a semi-subtle photo of her.

"Poor girl," Perry said with feeling.

"It's a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that it'll last forever -- that in thirty years, they'll come into Musso and Frank and ask for Miss Whatshername's table. Anyone who wants to know what stardom looks like can find out -- and no one becomes a star by accident."

"You think?" Perry said. "I mean, we were celebs, kind of, for a while there --"

"Are you saying that that happened by accident?"