Makers, Cory Doctorow [the beach read .TXT] 📗

where the air conditioning was blowing icy cold.
“You should have waited in the lobby, Luis,” Sammy said, reading the kid’s name off his badge. “You must be boiled.”
“I had instructions,” Luis said.
Sammy made a face. “They don’t sound like very reasonable instructions. All the more reason to sort this out, right?”
Sammy had his secretary get Luis a bottle of cold water and a little plate of grapes and berries out of the stash he kept for his visitors, then he called Guignol from his desk phone.
“It’s Sammy. I need to call an emergency meeting of the exec committee,” he said without preamble.
“This is about Hackelberg, isn’t it?”
“He’s already called you?”
“He was very persuasive.”
“I can be persuasive, too. Give me a chance.”
“You know what will happen if you push this?”
“I might save the company.”
“You might,” Guignol said. “And you might—”
“I know,” Sammy said. “What the hell, it’s only a career.”
“You can’t keep your data—Hackelberg is right about that.”
“I can send all the backups and my computer to your office right now.”
“I was under the impression that they were all on their way to IT for disposal.”
“Not yet. There’s a security castmember in my office with me named Luis. If you want to call dispatch and have them direct him to bring this stuff to you instead—”
“Sammy, do you understand what you’re doing here?”
Sammy suppressed a mad giggle. “I do,” he said. “I understand exactly what I’m doing. I want to help you all understand that, too.”
“I’m calling security dispatch now.”
A moment later, Luis’s phone rang and the kid listened intently, nodding unconsciously. Once he’d hung up, Sammy passed him his backups, hardcopy and computer. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Right,” Luis said, and led the way.
It was a short ride to the casting office building, where Guignol had his office. The wind felt terrific on his face, drying his sweat. It had been a long day.
When they pulled up, Sammy let Luis lead the way again, badging in behind him, following him up to the seventh-floor board-room. at the end of the Gold Coast where the most senior offices were.
Guignol met them at the door and took the materials from Luis, then ushered Sammy in. Sammy caught Luis’s eye, and Luis surprised him by winking and slipping him a surreptitious thumbs-up, making Sammy feel like they shared a secret.
There were eight on the executive committee, but they travelled a lot. Sammy had expected to see no more than four. There were two. And Hackelberg, of course. The lawyer was the picture of saurian calm.
Sammy sat down at the table and helped himself to a glass of water, watching a ring pool on the table’s polished and waxed wooden surface.
“Samuel,” Hackelberg said, shaking his head. “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
Sammy took a deep breath, looking for that don’t-give-a-shit calm that had suffused him before. It was there still, not as potent, but there. He drew upon it.
“Let’s put this to the committee, shall we? I mean, we already know how we feel.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Hackelberg said. “The committee has already voted on this.”
Sammy closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked at Hackelberg, who was smiling grimly, a mean grin that went all the way to the corners of his eyes.
Sammy looked around at Guignol and the committee members. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Guignol gestured Luis into the room and handed him Sammy’s computer, papers, and backups. He leaned in and spoke quietly to him. Luis turned and left.
Guignol cleared his throat. “There’s nothing else to discuss, then,” he said. “Thank you all for coming.”
In his heart, Sammy had known this was coming. Hackelberg would beat him to the committee—never let him present his side. Watching the lawyer get up stiffly and leave with slow, dignified steps, Sammy had a moment’s intuition about what it must be like to be that man—possessed of a kind of cold, furious power that came from telling everyone that not obeying you to the letter would put them in terrible danger. He knew that line of reasoning: It was the same one he got from the TSA at the airport before they bent him over and greased him up. You can’t understand the grave danger we all face. You must obey me, for only I can keep it at bay.
He waited for the rest of the committee to file out. None of them would meet his eye. Then it was just him and Guignol. Sammy raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands, miming What happens now?
“You won’t be able to get anything productive done until IT gets through with your computer. Take some time off. Call up Dinah and see if she wants to grab some holiday time.”
“We split,” Sammy said. He drank his water and stood up. “I’ve just got one question before I go.”
Guignol winced but stood his ground. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Don’t you want to know what the numbers looked like?”
“It’s not my job to overrule legal—”
“We’ll get to that in a second. It’s not the question. The question is, don’t you want to know?”
Guignol sighed. “You know I want to know. Of course I want to know. This isn’t about me and what I want, though. It’s about making sure we don’t endanger the shareholders—”
“So ignoring this path, sticking our heads in the sand, that’s good for the shareholders?”
“No, of course it’s not good for the shareholders. But it’s better than endangering the whole company—”
Sammy nodded. “Well, how about if we both take some time off and drive down to Hollywood. It’d do us some good.”
“Sammy, I’ve got a job to do—”
“Yeah, but without your computer...”
Guignol looked at him. “What did you do?”
“It’s not what I did. It’s what I might have done. I’m going to be a good boy and give Hackelberg a list of everyone I might have emailed about this. All those people are losing their computers to the big magnet at IT.”
“But you never emailed me about this—”
“You sure? I might have. It’s the kind of thing I might have done. Maybe your spam-filter ate it. You never know. That’s what IT’s for.”
Guignol looked angry for a moment, then laughed. “You are such a shithead. Fuck that lawyer asshole anyway. What are you driving these days?”
“Just bought a new Dell Luminux,” Sammy said, grinning back. “Rag-top.”
“When do we leave?”
“I’ll pick you up at 6AM tomorrow. Beat the morning traffic.”

Suzanne was getting sick of breakfast in bed. It was hard to imagine that such a thing was possible, but there it was. Lester stole out from between the covers before 7AM every day, and then, half an hour later, he was back with a laden tray, something new every day. She’d had steaks, burritos, waffles, home-made granola, fruit-salad with Greek yogurt, and today there were eggs Benedict with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. The tray always came with a French press of fresh-ground Kona coffee, a cloth napkin, and her computer, so she could read the news.
In theory, this was a warm ritual that ensured that they had quality time together every day, no matter what. In practice, Lester was so anxious about the food and whether she was enjoying it that she couldn’t really enjoy it. Plus, she wasn’t a fatkins, so three thousand calorie breakfasts weren’t good for her.
Most of all, it was the pressure to be a happy couple, to have cemented over the old hurts and started anew. She felt it every moment, when Lester climbed into the shower with her and soaped her back, when he brought home flowers, and when he climbed into bed with her in the morning to eat breakfast with her.
She picked at her caviar and blini glumly and poked at her computer. Beside her, Lester hoovered up three thousand calories’ worth of fried dough and clattered one-handed on his machine.
“This is delicious, babe, thanks,” she said, with as much sincerity as she could muster. It was really generous and nice of him to do this. She was just a bitter old woman who couldn’t be happy no matter what was going on in her life.
There was voicemail on her computer, which was unusual. Most people sent her email. This originated from a pay phone on the Florida Turnpike.
“Ms Church, this is—ah, this is a person whom you recently had the acquaintance of, while on your holidays. I have a confidential matter to discuss with you. I’m travelling to your location with a colleague today and should arrive mid-morning. I hope you can make some time to meet with me.”
She listened to it twice. Lester leaned over.
“What’s that all about?”
“You’re not going to believe it. I think it’s that Disney guy, the guy I told you about. The one Death used to work for.”
“He’s coming here?”
“Apparently.”
“Woah. Don’t tell Perry.”
“You think?”
“He’d tear that guy’s throat out with his teeth.” Lester took a bite of blini. “I might help.”
Suzanne thought about Sammy. He hadn’t been the sort of person she could be friends with, but she’d known plenty of his kind in her day, and he was hardly the worst of the lot. He barely rated above average on the corporate psychopath meter. Somewhere in there, there was a real personality. She’d seen it.
“Well, then I guess I’d better meet with him alone.”
“It sounds like he wants a doctor-patient meeting anyway.”
“Or confessor-penitent.”
“You think he’ll leak you something.”
“That’s a pretty good working theory when it comes to this kind of call.”
Lester ate thoughtfully, then reached over and hit a key on her computer, replaying the call.
“He sounds, what, giddy?”
“That’s right, he does, doesn’t he. Maybe it’s good news.”
Lester laughed and took away her dishes, and when he came back in, he was naked, stripped and ready for the shower. He was a very handsome man, and he had a devilish grin as he whisked the blanket off of her.
He stopped at the foot of the bed and stared at her, his grin quirking in a way she recognized instantly. She didn’t have to look down to know that he was getting hard. In the mirror of his eyes, she was beautiful. She could see it plainly. When she looked into the real mirror at the foot of the bed, draped with gauzy sun-scarves and crusted around the edges with kitschy tourist magnets Lester brought home, she saw a saggy, middle-aged woman with cottage-cheese cellulite and saddle-bags.
Lester had slept with more fatkins girls than she could count, women made into doll-like mannequins by surgery and chemical enhancements, women who read sex manuals in public places and boasted about their Kegel weight-lifting scores.
But when he looked at her like that, she knew that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever loved, that he would do anything for her. That he loved her as much as he could ever love anyone.
What the hell was I complaining about? she thought as he fell on her like a starving man.

She met Sammy in their favorite tea-room, the one