She had the front desk call her a taxi -- she'd been repeatedly warned off of gypsy cabs and any vehicle that one procured by means of a wandering tout. She got into the back, had the doorman repeat the directions to Lester's clinic twice to the cabbie, watching him switch on the meter, and checked the tariff, then settled in to watch St Petersburg go flying by.

She switched on her phone and watched it struggle to associate with a Russian network. They were on the road for all of five minutes -- long enough to note the looming bulk to the Hermitage and the ripples left by official cars slicing through the traffic with their blue blinking lights -- when her phone went nutso. She looked at it -- she had ten texts, half a dozen voice-mails, a dozen new clipped articles, and it was ringing with a number in New York.

She bumped the New York call to voice-mail. She didn't recognize the number. Besides, if the world had come to an end while she was asleep, she wanted to know some details before she talked to anyone about it. She paged back through the texts in reverse chronological -- the last five were increasingly panicked messages from Lester and Perry. Then one from Tjan. Then one from Kettlebelly. They all wanted to discuss "the news" whatever that was. One from her old editor at the Merc asking if she was available for comment about "the news." Tjan too. The first one was from Rat-Toothed Freddy, that snake.

"Kodacell's creditors calling in debts. Share price below one cent. Imminent NASDAQ de-listing. Comments?"

Her stomach went cold, her breakfast congealed into a hard lump. The clipped articles had quotes from Kettlewell ("We will see to it that all our employees are paid, our creditors are reimbursed, and our shareholders are well-done-by through an orderly wind-down"), Perry ("Fuck it -- I was doing this shit before Kodacell, don't expect to stop now") and Lester ("It was too beautiful and cool to be real, I guess.") Where she was mentioned, it was usually in a snide context that made her out to be a disgraced pitchman for a failed movement.

Which she was. Basically.

Her phone rang. Kettlewell.

"Hi, Kettlewell," she said.

"Where have you been?" he said. He sounded really edgy. It was the middle of the night in California.

"I'm in St Petersburg," she said. "In Russia. I only found out about ten seconds ago. What happened?"

"Oh Christ. Who knows? Cascading failure. Fell short of last quarter's estimates, which started a slide. Then a couple lawsuits filed. Then some unfavorable press. The share price kept falling, and things got worse. Your basic clusterfuck."

"But you guys had great numbers overall--"

"Sure, if you looked at them our way, they were great. If you looked at them the way the street looks at them, we were in deep shit. Analysts couldn't figure out how to value us. Add a little market chaos and some old score-settling assholes, like that fucker Freddy, and it's a wonder we lasted as long as we did. They're already calling us the twenty-first century Enron."

"Kettlewell," she said, "I lived through a couple of these, and something's not right. When the dotcoms were going under, their CEOs kept telling everyone everything was all right, right up to the last minute. They didn't throw in the towel. They stood like captains on the bridge of sinking ships."

"So?"

"So what's going on here. It sounds like you're whipped. Why aren't you fighting? There were lots of dotcoms that tanked, but a few of those deep-in-denial CEOs pulled it off, restructured and came out of it alive. Why are you giving up?"

"Andrea, oh, Andrea." He laughed, but it wasn't a happy laugh. "You think that this happened overnight? You think that this problem just cropped up yesterday and I tossed in the towel?"

Oh. "Oh."

"Yeah. We've been tanking for months. I've been standing on the bridge of this sinking ship with my biggest smile pasted on for two consecutive quarters now. I've thrown out the most impressive reality distortion field the business world has ever seen. Just because I'm giving up doesn't mean I gave up without a fight."

Andrea had never been good at condolences. She hated funerals. "Lionel, I'm sorry. It must have been very hard--"

"Yeah," he said. "Well, sure. I wanted you to have the scoop on this, but I had to talk to the press once the story broke, you understand."

"I understand," she said. "Scoops aren't that important anyway. I'll tell you what. I'll post a short piece on this right away, just saying, 'yes, it's true, and I'm getting details.' Then I'll do interviews with you and Lester and Perry and put up something longer in a couple of hours. Does that work?"

He laughed again, no humor in it. "Yeah, that'll be fine."

"Sorry, Kettlewell."

"No, no," he said. "No, it's OK."

"Look, I just want to write about this in a way that honors what you've done over the past two years. I've never been present at the birth of anything remotely this important. It deserves to be described well."

It sounded like he might be crying. There was a snuffling sound. "You've been amazing, Andrea. We couldn't have done it without you. No one could have described it better. Great deeds are irrelevant if no one knows about them or remembers them."

Her phone was beeping. She snuck a peek. It was her old editor. "Listen," she said. "I have to go. There's a call coming in I have to take. I can call you right back."

"Don't," he said. "It's OK. I'm busy here anyway. This is a big day." His laugh was like a dog's bark.

"Take care of yourself, Kettlewell," she said. "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

"Nil carborundum illegitimis to you, too."

She clicked over to her editor. "Jimmy," she said. "Long time no speak. Sorry I missed your calls before -- I'm in Russia on a story."

"Hello, Andrea," he said. His voice had an odd, strained quality, or maybe that was just her mood, projecting. "I'm sorry, Andrea. You've been doing good work. The best work of your career, if you ask me. I follow it closely."

It made her feel a little better. She'd been uncomfortable about the way she and Jimmy had parted ways, but this was vindicating. It emboldened her. "Jimmy, what the hell do I do now?"

"Christ, Andrea, I don't know. I'll tell you what not to do, though. Off the record."

"Off the record."

"Don't do what I've done. Don't hang grimly on to the last planks from the sinking ship, chronicling the last few struggling, sinking schmucks' demise. It's no fun being the stenographer for the fall of a great empire. Find something else to cover."

The words made her heart sink. Poor Jimmy, stuck there in the Merc's once-great newsroom, while the world crumbled around him. It must have been heartbreaking.

"Thanks," she said. "You want an interview?"

"What? No, woman. I'm not a ghoul. I wanted to call and make sure you were all right."

"Jimmy, you're a prince. But I'll be OK. I land on my feet. You've got someone covering this story, so give her my number and have her call me and I'll give her a quote."

"Really, Andrea--"

"It's fine, Jimmy."

"Andrea," he said. "We don't cover that kind of thing from our newsroom anymore. Just local stuff. National coverage comes from the wires or from the Knight-Ridder national newsroom."

She sucked in air. Could it be possible? Her first thought when Jimmy called was that she'd made a terrible mistake by leaving the Merc, but if this is what the paper had come to, she had left just in time, even if her own life-raft was sinking, it had kept her afloat for a while.

"The offer still stands, Jimmy. I'll talk to anyone you want to assign."

"You're a sweetheart, Andrea. What are you in Russia for?"

She told him. Screw scoops, anyway. Not like Jimmy was going to send anyone to Russia, he couldn't even afford to dispatch a reporter to Marin County by the sounds of things.

"What a story!" he said. "Man!"

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah I guess it is."

"You guess? Andrea, this is the single most important issue in practically every American's life -- there isn't one in a thousand who doesn't worry endlessly about his weight."

"Well, I have been getting really good numbers on this." She named the figure. He sucked air between his teeth. "That's what the whole freaking chain does on a top story, Andrea. You're outperforming fifty local papers combined."

"Yeah?"

"Hell yeah," he said. "Maybe I should ask you for a job."

When he got off the phone, she spoke to Perry, and then to Lester. Lester said that he wanted to go traveling and see his old friends in Russia and that if she was still around in a couple weeks, maybe he'd see her there. Perry was morose and grimly determined. He was on the verge of shipping his 3D printers and he was sure he could do it, even if he didn't have the Kodacell network for marketing and logistics. He didn't even seem to register it when she told him that she was going to be spending some time there.

Then she had to go into the clinic and ask intelligent questions and take pictures and record audio and jot notes and pay attention to the small details so that she would be able to write the best account possible.

They dressed well in Russia, in the clinics. Business casual, but well tailored and made from good material. The Europeans knew from textiles, and expert tailoring seemed to be in cheap supply here.

She'd have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years' worth of Florida casual.

She'd see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle -- not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics.

She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room percolator.

"Hello, Freddy," she said.

"Andrea, darling!" He sounded like he was breathing hard.

"What can I do for you?"

"Just wanted a quote, love, something for color."

"Oh, I've got a quote for you." She'd given the quote a lot of thought. Living with the squatters had broadened her vocabulary magnificently.

"And those are your good points," she said, taking a sip of coffee. "Goodbye, Freddy."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A note from the author:

Here ends the first "book" of "Themepunks," a novel that I'm still hard at work on. There are two more books in the novel; the second one is about two-thirds done now, and will run about twice as long as this first section. The third section will wrap things up, resolving the stories of all the characters we meet on the way.

The next book opens with the New Work in ruins. Perry and Lester are now running a ride that is a kind of interactive museum of the accomplishments of the New Work movement, housed in the shell of a dead Wal-Mart. Riders pass through on stair-climbing Dean Kamen wheelchair knockoffs, "voting" on each exhibit's elements by hitting a "+1" and "-1" lever on the front of the chair. They also bring in their own treasures for display in the museum and leave them in the parts where they think they fit.

The ride gets cooler and cooler as time goes by. Tjan rounds up some of his Boston pals to open a second ride, networked to the first, kept in harmony by automated exhibit-tending robots. Soon there's a network of these rides, all around the U.S. This isn't invention, it's storytelling, the New Workers and their progeny talking to one another.

America has been transformed by the "fatkins" movement, body-hackers whose metabolisms have been boosted to 10,000-15,000 calories a day. These new sybarites are obsessed with pleasures of the flesh and biotech, and Lester lives among them, a reborn sybarite.

But all is not well. Sammy, an executive at Walt Disney World (a separate public company, divorced from the parent company) has conceived of a deep and abiding hatred of the ride and the riders. Add to that the reappearance of Kettlewell and Andrea, and Kettlewell's furious wife, and police raids on the ride and things start to spiral out of control...

I've been really delighted with this experiment so far! The feedback you've sent has been great, and has really helped me think about book 2 as I wrote it. It remains to be seen whether Salon will pick up the next book for syndication, but in any event I'm immensely grateful to them for seeing this through to now, and the whole thing will be published between covers by Tor Books once it's in the can.

Thanks again -- and keep watching the junkyards!

Cory

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