"This is Lester's workshop," Perry said, as they passed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland. Where Perry's domain had been clean and neatly organized, Lester's area was a happy shambles. His shelves weren't orderly, but rather with looming piles of amazing junk: thrift-store wedding dresses, plaster statues of bowling monkeys, box kites, knee-high tin knights-in-armor, seashells painted with American flags, presidential action-figures, paste jewelry and antique cough-drop tins.

"You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a statue? Like he cansee the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on the heaps and in roadside trash and I can just see how it can go together, like this."

He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor.

The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus.

"It's a mechanical calculator," he said, proudly. "About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here." He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel" while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. "It's OK. They're not from the trash," he said. "I buy them in bulk." He turned his broad back to her and heaved over a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms. "See, it's a bit-bucket!" he said.

Andrea giggled in spite of herself. "You guys are hilarious," she said. "This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff." The gears on the mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out.

"Who's the Van Halen fan?"

Lester beamed. "Might as well jump -- JUMP!" He mimed heavy-metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn scalp up and down and though he were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. "You're the first one to get the joke!" he said. "Even Perry didn't get it!"

"Get what?" Perry said, also grinning.

"Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their dressing room they'd trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I used to dream about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since, I've afforded a great personal significance to brown M&Ms."

She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. "Look, I hate to break this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly -- crap, Kettlewell -- said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you've done is all very interesting, it's killer art, but I don't see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?"

"That's step three," Perry said. "C'mere." He led her back to his workspace, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. "Three-dee scanner," he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester's machine and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned it over and pressed the button again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He moused one over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-down menu, selected an option, and then they were merged, rotating.

"Once we've got the three-dee scan, it's basically plasticine." He distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse. "So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-object out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap, like this." More fast mousing -- Barbie's head turned into a gridded mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic hair. Then she was wrapped in a Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup label, wrapped around her like a stocking pulled over her head. There was something stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a cartoon stretched out on a blob of Silly Putty.

"So we can build anything out of interesting junk, with any shape, and then we can digitize the shape. Then we can do anything we like with the shape. Then we can output the shape." He typed quickly and another machine, sealed and mammoth like an outsized photocopier, started to grunt and churn. The air filled with a smell like Saran Wrap in a microwave.

"The goop we use in this thing is epoxy-based. You wouldn't want to build a car out of it, but it makes a mean doll-house. The last stage of the output switches to inks, so you get whatever bitmap you've skinned your object with baked right in. It does about one cubic inch per minute, so this job should be almost done now."

He drummed his fingers on top of the machine for a moment and then it stopped chunking and something inside it went clunk. He lifted a lid and reached inside and plucked out the Barbie head, stretched and distorted, skinned with a Campbell's Soup label. He handed it to Andrea. She expected it to be warm, like a squashed penny from a machine on Fisherman's Wharf, but it was cool and had the seamless texture of a plastic margarine tub and the heft of a paperweight.

"So, that's the business," Lester said. "Or so we're told. We've been making cool stuff and selling it to collectors on the Web for you know, gigantic bucks. We move one or two pieces a month at about ten grand per. But Kettlebelly says he's going to industrialize us, alienate us from the product of our labor, and turn us into an assembly line."

"He didn't say any such thing," Perry said. Andrea was aware that her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the shoulder. "Lester's only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbodies and some bigger printers and we'll be able to turn out more modest devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the designs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there's no setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do another hundred. We can make 'em to order. "

"And we need an MBA," Lester said. "Kodacell's sending us a business manager to help us turn junk into pesos."

"Yeah," Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. "Yeah, a business manager."

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