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The Man Who Sold The Moon

By Cory Doctorow

This novella (reading time: 2 hours) is from the collection Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It is nominated for a Locus award and a Sturgeon Award.

Here’s a thing I didn’t know: there are some cancers that can only be diagnosed after a week’s worth of lab work. I didn’t know that. Then I went to the doctor to ask her about my pesky achy knee that had flared up and didn’t go away like it always had, just getting steadily worse. I’d figured it was something torn in there, or maybe I was getting the arthritis my grandparents had suffered from. But she was one of those doctors who hadn’t gotten the memo from the American health-care system that says that you should only listen to a patient for three minutes, tops, before writing him a referral and/or a prescription and firing him out the door just as the next patient was being fired in. She listened to me, she took my history, she wrote down the names of the anti-inflammatories I’d tried, everything from steroids to a climbing buddy’s heavy-duty prescription NSAIDs, and gave my knee a few cautious prods.

“You’re insured, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good thing, too. I read that knee replacement’s going for seventy-five thousand dollars. That’s a little out of my price range.”

“I don’t think you need a knee replacement, Greg. I just want to send you for some tests.”

“A scan?”

“No.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “A biopsy.”

I’m a forty-year-old, middle-class Angeleno. My social mortality curve was a perfectly formed standard distribution—a few sparse and rare deaths before I was ten, slightly more through my teens, and then more in my twenties. By the time I was thirty-five, I had an actual funeral suit I kept in a dry-cleaning bag in the closet. It hadn’t started as a funeral suit, but once I’d worn it to three funerals in a row, I couldn’t wear it anywhere else without feeling an unnamable and free-floating sorrow. I was forty. My curve was ramping up, and now every big gathering of friends had at least one knot of somber people standing together and remembering someone who went too early. Someone in my little circle of forty-year-olds was bound to get a letter from the big C. There wasn’t any reason for it to be me. But there wasn’t any reason for it not to be either.

Bone cancer can take a week to diagnose. A week! During that week, I spent a lot of time trying to visualize the slow-moving medical processes: acid dissolving the trace of bone, the slow catalysis of some obscure reagent, some process by which a stain darkened to yellow and then orange and then, days later, to red. Or not. That was the thing. Maybe it wasn’t cancer. That’s why I was getting the test, instead of treatment. Because no one knew. not until those stubborn molecules in some lab did their thing, not until some medical robot removed a test tube from a stainless steel rack and drew out its contents and took their picture or identified their chemi­cal composition and alerted some lab tech that Dr. Robot had reached his conclusion and would the stupid human please sanity-check the results and call the other stupid human and tell him whether he’s won the cancer lottery (grand prize: cancer)?

That was a long week. The word cancer was like the tick of a metronome. Eyes open. Cancer. Need a pee. Cancer. Turn on the coffee machine. Cancer. Grind the beans. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.

On day seven, I got out of the house and went to Minus, which is our local hackerspace. Technically, its name is “Untitled-1,” because no one could think of a better name ten years ago, when it had been located in a dirt-cheap former car-parts warehouse in Echo Park. When Echo Park gentrified, Untitled-1 moved downtown, to a former furniture store near Skid Row, which promptly began its own gentrification swing. Now we were in the top two floors of what had once been a downscale dentist’s office on Ventura near Tarzana. The dentist had reinforced the floors for the big chairs and brought in 60 amp service for the X-ray machines, which made it perfect for our machine shop and the pew-pew room full of lasers. We even kept the fume hoods.

I have a personal tub at Minus, filled with half-finished projects: various parts for a 3D-printed chess-playing automata; a cup and saucer I was painstakingly covering with electroconductive paint and components; a stripped-down location sensor I’d been playing with for the Minus’s space program.

Minus’s space program was your standard hackerspace extraterrestrial project: sending balloons into the upper stratosphere, photographing the earth’s curvature, making air-quality and climate observations; sometimes lofting an ironic action figure in 3D-printed astronaut drag. Hacker Dojo, north of San Jose, had come up with a little powered guidance system, but they’d been whipped by navigation. Adding a stock GPS with its associated batteries made the thing too heavy, so they’d tried to fake it with dead-reckoning and it had been largely unsuccessful. I’d thought I might be able to make everything a lot lighter, including the battery, by borrowing some techniques I’d seen on a performance bike-racing site.

I put the GPS on a workbench with my computer and opened up my file of notes and stared at them with glazed eyes. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.

Forget it. I put it all away again and headed up to the roof to clear my head and to get some company. The roof at Minus was not like most roofs. Rather than being an empty gravel expanse dotted with exhaust fans, our roof was one of the busiest parts of the space. Depending on the day and time, you could find any or all of the above on Minus’s roof: stargazing, smoking, BASE jumping, solar experiments, drone dogfighting, automated graffiti robots, sensor-driven high-intensity gardening, pigeon-breeding, sneaky sex, parkour, psychedelic wandering, Wi-Fi sniffing, mobile-phone tampering, ham radio broadcasts, and, of course, people who were stuck and frustrated and needed a break from their workbenches.

I threaded my way through the experiments and discussions and build-projects, slipped past the pigeon coops, and fetched up watching a guy who was trying, unsuccessfully, to learn how to do a run up a wall and do a complete flip. He was being taught by a young woman, sixteen or seventeen, evidently his daughter (“Daaad!”), and her patience was wearing thin as he collapsed to the gym mats they’d spread out. I stared spacily at them until they both stopped arguing with each other and glared at me, a guy in his forties and a kind of miniature, female version of him, both sweaty in their sweats. “Do you mind?” she asked.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, and moved off. I didn’t add, I don’t mean to be rude, just worried about cancer.

I got three steps away when my phone buzzed. I nearly fumbled it when I yanked it out of my tight jeans pocket, hands shaking. I answered

It and clapped it to my ear.

“Mr. Harrison?”

“Yes.”

“Please hold for doctor Ficsor.” a click.

A click. “Greg?”

“That’s me,” I said. I’d signed the waiver that let us skip the pointless date-of-birth/mother’s maiden name “security” protocol.

“Is this a good time to talk?”

“Yes,” I said. One syllable, clipped and tight in my ears. I may have shouted it.

“Well, I’d like you to come in for some confirming tests, but we’ve done two analyses and they are both negative for elevated alkaline phos­phatase and lactate dehydrogenase.”

I’d obsessively read a hundred web pages describing the blood tests. I knew what this meant. But I had to be sure. “It’s not cancer, right?”

“These are negative indicators for cancer,” the doctor said.

The tension that whoofed out of me like a gutpunch left behind a kind of howling vacuum of relief, but not joy. The joy might come later. At the moment, it was more like the head-bees feeling of three more cups of espresso than was sensible. “Doctor,” I said, “can I try a hypothetical with you?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Let’s say you were worried that you, personally, had bone cancer. If you got the same lab results as me, would you consider yourself to be at risk for bone cancer?”

“You’re very good at that,” she said. I liked her, but she had the speech habits of someone who went to a liability insurance seminar twice a year. “Okay, in that hypothetical, I’d say that I would consider myself to be pro­visionally not at risk of bone cancer, though I would want to confirm it with another round of tests, just to be very, very sure.”

“I see,” I said. “I’m away from my computer right now. Can I call your secretary later to set that up?”

“Sure,” she said. “Greg?”

“Yes.”

“Congratulations,” she said. “Sleep easy, okay?”

“I will try,” I said. “I could use it.”

“I figured,” she said. “I like giving people good news.”

I thought her insurance adjuster would not approve of that wording, but I was glad she’d said it. I squeezed the phone back into my pocket and looked at the blue, blue sky, cloudless save for the scummy film of L.A. haze that hovered around the horizon. It was the same sky I’d been stand­ing under five minutes ago. It was the same roof. The same building. The same assemblage of attention-snagging interesting weirdos doing what they did. But I was not the same.

I was seized by a sudden, perverse urge to go and take some risks: speed down the highway, BASE jump from minus’s roof, try out some really inadvisable parkour moves. Some part of me that sought out patterns in the nonsense of daily randomness was sure that I was on a lucky streak and wanted me to push it. I told that part to shut up and pushed it down best as I could. But I was filled with an inescapable buoyancy, like I might float right off the roof. I knew that if I’d had a hard time concentrating before, i was in for an even harder time getting down to business now. It was a small price to pay.

“Hey,” someone said behind me. “Hey, dude?”

It occurred to me that I was the dude in question, and that this person had been calling out to me for some time, with a kind of mellow intensity— not angry, but insistent nonetheless. I turned around and found myself star­ing down at a surfer-looking guy half my age, sun-bleached ponytail and wraparound shades, ragged shorts and a grease-stained long-sleeved jersey and bare feet, crouched down like a Thai fisherman on his haunches, calf muscles springing out like wires, fingertips resting lightly on a gadget.

Minus was full of gadgets, half built, sanded to fit, painted to cover, with lots of exposed wiring, bare boards, blobs of hot glue and adhesive polymer clinging on for dear life against the forces of shear and torque and entropy. But even by those standards, surfer-guy’s gadget was pretty spectacular. It was the lens—big and round and polished, with the look of a precision-engineered artifact out of a real manufacturer’s shop—not something hacked together in a hack lab.

“Hey,” I said.

“Dude,” he said. “Shadow.”

I was casting a shadow over the lens. I stepped smartly to one side and the pitiless L.A. sun pierced it, focused by it down to a pinprick of white on a kind of bed beneath the lens. The surfer guy gave me an absentminded thumbs-up and started to squint at his laptop’s screen.

“What’s the story with this thing?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Solar sinterer. 3D printing with the sun.” the bed started to jerk and move with the characteristic stepper-motor dance of a 3D printer. The beam of light sizzled on the bed like the tip of a soldering iron, sending up a wisp of smoke like a shimmer in the sun’s glare. There was a sweet smell from it, and I instinctively turned upwind of it, not want­ing to be sucking down whatever aromatic volatiles were boiling off the print medium.

“That is way, way cool,” I said. “Does it work?”

He smiled. “Oh yeah, it works. This is the part I’m interested in.” he typed some more commands and the entire thing lifted up on recessed wheels and inched forward with the slow grace of a tortoise.

“It walks?”

“Yeah. the idea is, you leave it in the desert and come back in a couple of months and it’s converted the sand that blows over its in-hopper into prefab panels you can snap together to make a shelter.”

“Ah,” I said. “What about sand on the solar panel?” I was thinking of the mars rovers, which had had a tendency to go offline when too much Martian dust blew over their photovoltaics.

“Working on that. I can make the lens and photovoltaic turn sideways and shake themselves.” he pointed at a couple of little motors. “But that’s a lot of moving parts. Want it to run unattended for months at a time.”

“Huh,” I said. “This wouldn’t happen to be a burning man thing, would it?”

He smiled ruefully. “That obvious?”

Honestly, it was. Half of Minus were burners, and they all had a bit of his look of delightful otherworldly weirdness. “Just a lucky guess,” I said, because no one wants to be reminded that they’re of a certain type— especially if that type is nonconformist.

He straightened up and extended his hand. He was missing the tip of his index finger, and the rest of his fingernails were black with grease. I shook, and his grip was warm, firm and dry, and rough with callus. You could have put it in a museum and labeled it “Hardware hacker hand (typical).”

“I’m Pug,” he said.

“Greg.”

“So the plan is, bring it out to the desert for Fourth of Juplaya, let it run all summer, come back for burning man, and snap the pieces together.”

“What’s Fourth of Jup-whatever?”

“Fourth of Juplaya. It’s a July Fourth party in black rock. A lot like burning man used to be like, when ‘Safety third’ was the guiding light and not just a joke. Much smaller and rougher, less locked down. More guns. More weird. Intense.”

His gadget grunted and jammed. He looked down at it and nudged one of the stepper motors with his thumb, and it grunted again. “ ’Scuse me,” he said, and hunkered down next to it. I watched him tinker for a while, then walked away, forgotten in his creative fog.

I went back down into minus, put away my stuff, and chatted with some people I sort of knew about inconsequentialities, in a cloud of unreality. It was the hangover from my week of anxiety and its sudden release, and I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what we talked about. After an hour or two of this, I suddenly realized that I was profoundly beat, I mean beat down and smashed flat. I said goodbye—or maybe I didn’t, I wouldn’t swear to it—and went out to look for my car. I was wandering around the parking lot, mashing the alarm button on my key chain, when I ran into Pug. He was (barely) carrying a huge box, shuffling and peering over the top. I was so tired, but it would have been rude not to help.

“Need a hand?”

“Dude,” he said, which I took for an affirmative. I grabbed a corner and walked backward. The box was heavy, but it was mostly just huge, and when we reached his beat-up minivan, he kicked the tailgate release and then laid it down like a bomb-disposal specialist putting a touchy IED to sleep. He smacked his hands on his jeans and said, “Thanks, man. That lens, you wouldn’t believe what it’s worth.” now that I could see over the top of the box, i realized it was mostly padding, layers of lint-free cloth and bubblewrap with the lens in the center of it all, the gadget beneath it. “Minus is pretty safe, you know, but I don’t want to tempt fate. i trust

99.9 percent of ’em not to rip it off or use it for a frisbee, but even a one-in­-a-thousand risk is too steep for me.” he pulled some elasticated webbing over it and anchored it down with cleats bolted inside the oily trunk.

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Greg, buddy, can I ask you a personal question?”

“I suppose.”

“Are you okay? I mean, you kind of look like you’ve been hit upside the head with a brick. Are you planning on driving somewhere?”

“Uh,” I said. “Truly? I’m not really okay. Should be, though.” and I spilled it all out—the wait, the diagnosis.

“Well, hell, no wonder. Congratulations, man, you’re going to live! But not if you crash your car on the way home. How about if I give you a ride?”

“It’s okay, really—”

He held up a hand. “Greg, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but you’ve got no more business driving now than you would if you’d just slammed a couple tequila shots. So I can give you a ride or call you a cab, but if you try and get into your car, I will argue with you until I bore you into submission. So what is it? Ride? Taxi?”

He was absolutely, totally right. I hated that. I put my keys back into my pocket. “You win,” I said. “I’ll take that ride.”

“Great,” he said, and gave me a Buddha smile of pure SoCal serenity. “Where do you live?”

“Irvine,” I said.

He groaned. “Seriously?” Irvine was a good three-hour drive in traffic.

“Not seriously,” I said. “Just Burbank. Wanted to teach you a lesson about being too free with your generosity.”

“Lesson learned. I’ll never be generous again.” but he was smiling.

I slid into the passenger seat. The car smelled like sweat and machines. The floor mats were indistinct gray and crunchy with maker detritus: dead batteries, coffee cups, multidriver bits, USB cables, and cigarette-lighter­charger adapters. I put my head back on the headrest and looked out the grimy windows through slitted eyes as he got into the driver’s side and started the engine, then killed the podcast that started blasting from the speakers.

“Burbank, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. There were invisible weights on my chest, wrists, and ankles. I was very glad I wasn’t behind the wheel. We swung out onto Ventura Boulevard and inched through the traffic toward the freeway.

“Are you going to be all right on your own?”

“Tonight? Yeah, sure. Seriously, that’s really nice of you, but it’s just, whatever, aftermath. I mean, it’s not like I’m dying. It’s the opposite of that, right?”

“Fair enough. You just seem like you’re in rough shape.”

I closed my eyes and then I felt us accelerate as we hit the freeway and weaved over to the HOV lanes. He put down the hammer and the engine skipped into higher gear.

“You’re not a burner, are you?”

I suppressed a groan. Burners are the Jehovah’s witnesses of the counterculture. “Nope,” I said. Then I said what I always said. “Just seemed like a lot of work.”

He snorted. “You think burning man sounds like a lot of work, you should try Fourth of Juplaya. No rules, no rangers. A lot of guns. A lot of serious blowing shit up. Casual sex. No coffee shop. No sparkleponies. Fistfuls of drugs. High winds. Burning sun. Non-freaking-stop. It’s like pure distilled essence of playa.”

I remembered that feeling, like I wanted to BASE jump off the roof. “I have to admit, that sounds totally amazeballs,” I said. “And demented.”

“Both, yup. You going to come?”

I opened my eyes wide. “What?”

“Well, I need some help with the printer. I looked you up on the Minus database. You do robotics, right?”

“A little,” I said.

“And you’ve built a couple repraps, it says?”

“Two working ones,” I said. Building your own 3D printer that was capable of printing out nearly all the parts to build a copy of itself was a notoriously tricky rite of passage for hackerspace enthusiasts. “About four that never worked, too.”

“You’re hired,” he said. “First assistant engineer. You can have half my van, I’ll bring the cooler and the BBQ and pork shoulder on dry ice, a keg of beer, and some spare goggles.”

“That’s very nice of you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is. Listen, Greg, I’m a good guy, ask around. I don’t normally invite people out to the Fourth, it’s a private thing. But I really do need some help, and I think you do, too. A week with a near-death experience demands a fitting commemoration. If you let big stuff like this pass by without marking it, it just, you k now, builds up. Like arterial plaque. Gotta shake it off.”

You see, this is the thing about burners. It’s like a religion for them. Gotta get everyone saved.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Greg, don’t be offended?”

“Okay.”

“Right. Just that, you’re the kind of guy, I bet, spends a lot of time ‘thinking about it.’ ”

I swallowed the snappish reply and said nothing.

“And now you’re stewing. Dude, you are so buttoned down. Tell you what, keep swallowing your emotions and you will end up dying of something fast and nasty. You can do whatever you want, but what I’m offering you is something that tons of people would kill for. Four days of forgetting who you are, being whoever you want to be. Stars, dust, screwing, dope, explosions, and gunfire. You’re not going to get a lot of offers like that, is what I’m saying.”

“And I said I’d think about it.”

He blatted out a raspberry and said, “Yeah, fine, that’s cool.” he drove on in silence. The 101 degenerated into a sclerotic blockage. He tapped at the old phone velcroed to the dashboard and got a traffic overlay that showed red for ten miles.

“Dude, I do not want to sit in this car for the next forty-five minutes listening to you not say anything. How about a truce? I won’t mention the Fourth, you pretend you don’t think I’m a crazy hippie, and we’ll start over, ’kay?”

The thing that surprised me most was how emotionally mature the offer was. I never knew how to climb down from stupid fights, which is why I was forty and single. “Deal,” I said.

Just like that, he dropped it. We ended up talking about a related subject—selective solar laser-sintering—and some of the funky things he was having to cope with in the project. “Plenty of people have done it with sand, but I want to melt gypsum. In theory, I only have to attain about 85 percent of the heat to fuse it, but there’s a lot of impurities in it that I can’t account for or predict.”

“What if you sift it or something first?”

“Well, if I want it to run unattended, I figure I don’t want to have to include a centrifuge. Playa dust is nanofine, and it gets into everything. I mean, I’ve seen art cars with sealed bearings that are supposed to perform in space go gunky and funky after a couple of years.”

I chewed on the problem. “you could maybe try a settling tray, something that uses wind for agitation through graduated screens, but you’d need to unclog it somehow.” more thinking. “Of course, you could just melt the crap out of it when you’re not sure, just blaze it into submission.”

But he was already shaking his head. “Doesn’t work—too hot and I can’t get the set time right, goes all runny.”

“What about a sensor?” I said. “Try to characterize how runny it is, adjust the next pass accordingly?”

“Thought of that,” he said. “Too many ways it could go wrong is what I’m thinking. Remember, this thing has to run where no one can tend it. I want to drop it in July and move into the house it builds me by September. It has to fail very, very safe.”

I took his point, but I wasn’t sure I agreed. Optical sensors were pretty solved, as was the software to interpret what they saw. I was about to get my laptop out and find a video I remembered seeing when he slammed on the brakes and made an explosive noise. I felt the brakes’ ABS shudder as the minivan fishtailed a little and heard a horn blare from behind us. I had one tiny instant with which to contemplate the looming bumper of the gardener’s pickup truck ahead of us before we rear-ended him. I was slammed back into my seat by the airbag a second before the subcompact behind us crashed into us, its low nose sliding under the rear bumper and raising the back end off the ground as it plowed beneath us, wedging tight just before its windshield would have passed through our rear bumper, thus saving the driver from a radical facial rearrangement and possible decapitation.

Sound took on a kind of underwater quality as it filtered through the airbag, but as I punched my way clear of it, everything came back. Beside me, Pug was making aggrieved noises and trying to turn around. He was caught in the remains of his own airbag, and his left arm looked like it might be broken—unbroken arms don’t hang with that kind of limp and sickening slackness. “Christ, the lens—”

I looked back instinctively, saw that the rear end was intact, albeit several feet higher than it should have been, and said, “Its fine, Pug. Car behind us slid under us. Hold still, though. Your arm’s messed up.”

He looked down and saw it and his face went slack. “That is not good,” he said. His pupils were enormous, his face so pale it was almost green.

“You’re in shock,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, distantly.

I did a quick personal inventory, moving all my limbs and experimen­tally swiveling my head this way and that. Concluding that I was in one piece, I did a fast assessment of the car and its environs. Traffic in the adja­cent lane had stopped, too—looking over my shoulder, I could see a little fender bender a couple car lengths back that had doubtless been caused by our own wreck. The guy ahead of us had gotten out of his pickup and was headed our way slowly, which suggested that he was unharmed and also not getting ready to shoot us for rear-ending him, so I turned my attention back to Pug. “Stay put,” I said, and pushed his airbag aside and unbuckled his seat belt, carefully feeding it back into its spool without allowing it to jostle his arm. That done, I gave him a quick once-over, lightly running my hands over his legs, chest, and head. He didn’t object—or shout in pain— and I finished up without blood on my hands, so that was good.

“I think it’s just your arm,” I said. His eyes locked on my face for a moment, then his gaze wandered off.

“The lens,” he said, blearily.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“The lens,” he said, again, and tried once more to twist around in his seat. This time, he noticed his limp arm and gave out a mild, “Ow.” he tried again. “Ow.”

“Pug,” I said, taking his chin and turning his face to mine. His skin was clammy and cold. “Dude. You are in shock and have a broken arm. You need to stay still until the ambulance gets here. You might have a spinal injury or a concussion. I need you to stay still.”

“But the lens,” he said. “Can’t afford another one.”

“If I go check on the lens, will you stay still?” it felt like I was bargaining with a difficult drunk for his car keys. “Yes,” he said. “Stay there.” the pickup truck’s owner helped me out of the car. “You okay?” he asked. He had a Russian accent and rough gardener’s hands and a farm-

er’s tan.

“Yeah,” I said. “You?”

“I guess so. My truck’s pretty messed up, though.”

Pug’s minivan had merged catastrophically with the rear end of the pickup, deforming it around the van’s crumple-zone. I was keenly aware that this was probably his livelihood.

“My friend’s got a broken arm,” I said. “Shock, too. I’m sure you guys’ll be able to exchange insurance once the paramedics get here. Did you call them?”

“My buddy’s on it,” he said, pointing back at the truck. There was someone in the passenger seat with a phone clamped to his head, beneath the brim of a cowboy hat.

“The lens,” Pug said.

I leaned down and opened the door. “Chill out, I’m on it.” I shrugged at the guy from the truck and went around back. The entire rear end was lifted clean off the road, the rear wheels still spinning lazily. To a first approximation, we were unscathed. The same couldn’t be said for the low-slung hybrid that had rear-ended us, which had been considerably flattened by its harrowing scrape beneath us, to the extent that one of its tires had blown. The driver had climbed out of the car and was leaning unsteadily on it. She gave me a little half wave and a little half smile, which I returned. I popped the hatch and checked that the box was in one piece. It wasn’t even dented. “The lens is fine,” I called. Pug gave no sign of having heard.

I started to get a little anxious feeling. I jogged around the back of the subcompact and then ran up the driver’s side and yanked open Pug’s door. He was unconscious, and that gray sheen had gone even whiter. His breath was coming in little shallow pants and his head lolled back in the seat. Panic crept up my throat and I swallowed it down. I looked up quickly and shouted at the pickup driver. “You called an ambulance, right?” the guy must’ve heard something in my voice because an instant later he was next to me.

“Shock,” he said.

“It’s been years since I did first aid.”

“Recovery position,” he said. “Loosen his clothes, give him a blanket.”

“What about his arm?” I pointed.

He winced. “We’re going to have to be careful,” he said. “Shit,” he added. The traffic beyond the car was at a near standstill. Even the motor­cycles were having trouble lane-splitting between the close-crammed cars.

“The ambulance?”

He shrugged. “on its way, I guess.” he put his ear close to Pug’s mouth, listened to his breathing, put a couple fingers to his throat and felt around. “I think we’d better lay him out.”

The lady driving the subcompact had a blanket in her trunk, which we spread out on the weedy ground alongside the median, which glittered with old broken glass. She—young, Latina, wearing workout clothes— held Pug’s arm while the gardener guy and I got him at both ends and stretched him out. The other guy from the pickup truck found some flares in a toolkit under the truck’s seat and set them on the road behind us. We worked with a minimum of talk, and for me, the sounds of the highway and my weird postanxiety haze both faded away into barely discernible background noise. We turned Pug on his side, and I rolled up my jacket to support his arm. He groaned. The gardener guy checked his pulse again, then rolled up his own jacket and used it to prop up Pug’s feet.

“Good work,” he said.

I nodded.

“Craziest thing,” the gardener said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I fussed awkwardly with Pug’s hair. His ponytail had come loose and it was hanging in his face. It felt wiry and dry, like he spent a lot of time in the sun.

“Did you see it?”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Craziest thing. It crashed right in front of us.” he spoke in rapid Russian—maybe it was Bulgarian?—to his friend, who crunched over to us. The guy held something out for me to see. I looked at it, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was a tangle of wrecked plastic and metal and a second later, I had it worked out—it was a little UAV, some kind of copter. Four rotors—no, six. A couple of cameras. I’d built a few like it, and I’d even lost control of a few in my day. I could easily see how someone like me, trying out a little drone built from a kit or bought fully assembled, could simply lose track of the battery or just fly too close to a rising updraft from the blacktop and crash. It was technically illegal to fly one except over your own private property, but that was nearly impossible to enforce. They were all over the place.

“Craziest thing,” I agreed. I could hear the sirens.

The EMTs liked our work and told us so, and let me ride with them in the ambulance, though that might have been on the assumption that I could help with whatever insurance paperwork needed filling out. They looked disappointed when I told them that I’d only met Pug that day and I didn’t even know his last name and was pretty sure that “Pug” wasn’t his first name. It wasn’t. They got the whole thing off his driver’s license: Scott Zrubek. “Zrubek” was a cool name. If I’d been called “Zrubek,” I’d have used “Zee” as my nickname, or maybe “Zed.”

by the time they’d x-rayed Pug and put his arm in a sling and an air cast, he was awake and rational again and I meant to ask him why he wasn’t going by oz, but we never got around to it. As it turned out, I ended up giving him a lift home in a cab, then getting it to take me home, too. it was two in the morning by then, and maybe the lateness of the hour explains how I ended up promising Pug that I’d be his arm and hand on the playa-dust printer and that I’d come with him to Fourth of Juplaya in order to oversee the installation of the device. I also agreed to help him think of a name for it.

That is how I came to be riding in a big white rental van on the Thursday before July Fourth weekend, departing L.A. at zero-dark-hundred with Pug in the driver’s seat and classic G-funk playing loud enough to make me wince in the passenger seat as we headed for Nevada.

Pug had a cooler between us, full of energy beverages and electrolyte drink, jerky, and seed bars. We stopped in mono lake and bought bags of oranges from old guys on the side of the road wearing cowboy hats, and later on we stopped at a farm stall and bought fresh grapefruit juice that stung with tartness and was so cold that the little bits of pulp were little frost-bombs that melted on our tongues.

Behind us, in the van’s cargo area, was everything we needed for a long weekend of hard-core radical self-reliance—water cans to fill in Reno, solar showers, tents, tarps, rebar stakes, booze, bikes, sunscreen, first-aid k its, a shotgun, an air cannon, a flamethrower, various explosives, crates of fireworks, and more booze. all stored and locked away in accordance with the laws of both Nevada and California, as verified through careful reference to a printout sheathed in a plastic paper-saver that got velcroed to the inside of the van’s back door when we were done.

In the center of all this gear, swaddled in bubblewrap and secured in place with multiple tie-downs, was the gadget, which we had given a capital letter to in our e-mails and messages: the Gadget. I’d talked Pug out of some of his aversion to moving parts, because the Gadget was going to end up drowning in its own output if we didn’t. The key was the realization that it didn’t matter where the Gadget went, so long as it went somewhere, which is how we ended up in Strandbeest territory.

The Strandbeest is an ingenious wind-powered walker that looks like a blind, mechanical millipede. Its creator, a Dutch artist called Theo Jansen, designed it to survive harsh elements and to be randomly propelled by wind.

Ours had a broad back where the Gadget’s business end perched, and as the yurt panels were completed, they’d slide off to land at its feet, gradually hemming it with rising piles of interlocking, precision-printed pieces. To keep it from going too far afield, I’d tether it to a piece of rebar driven deep into the playa, giving it a wide circle through which the harsh winds of the black rock desert could blow it.

Once I was done, Pug had to admit I’d been right. It wasn’t just a better design, it was a cooler one, and the Gadget had taken on the aspect of a centaur, with the printer serving as rising torso and head. We’d even equipped it with a set of purely ornamental goggles and a filter mask, just to make it fit in with its neighbors on the Playa. They were a very accepting lot, but you never knew when antirobot prejudice would show its ugly head, and so anything we could do to anthropomorphize the Gadget would only help our cause.

Pug’s busted arm was healed enough to drive to the Nevada line, but by the time we stopped for gas, he was rubbing at his shoulder and wincing, and I took over the driving, and he popped some painkillers and within moments he was fast asleep. I tried not to envy him. He’d been a bundle of nerves in the run-up to the Fourth, despite several successful trial runs in his backyard and a great demo on the roof of Minus. He kept muttering about how nothing ever worked properly in the desert, predicting dire all-nighters filled with cursing and scrounging for tools and missing the ability to grab tech support online. It was a side of him I hadn’t seen up to that point—he was normally so composed—but it gave me a chance to be the grown-up for a change. It helped once I realized that he was mostly worried about looking like an idiot in front of his once-a-year friends, the edgiest and weirdest people in his set. It also hadn’t escaped my notice that he, like me, was a single guy who spent an awful lot of time wondering what this said about him. In other words: he didn’t want to look like a dork in front of the eligible women who showed up.

“I’m guessing two more hours to Reno, then we’ll get some last-minute supplies and head out. Unless you want to play the slots and catch a Liza Minnelli impersonator.”

“No, I want to get out there and get set up.”

“Good.” Suddenly he gorilla-beat his chest with his good fist and let out a rebel yell. “Man, I just can’t wait.”

I smiled. This was the voluble Pug I knew.

He pointed a finger at me. “Oh, I see you smiling. You think you know what’s going to happen. You think you’re going to go drink some beers, eat some pills, blow stuff up, and maybe get lucky. What you don’t know is how life-changing this can all be. You get out of your head, literally. It’s like—” he waved his hands, smacked the dashboard a couple times, cracked and swigged an energy beverage.

“Okay, this is the thing. We spend all our time doing, you know, stuff. Maintenance. Ninety-eight percent of the day, all you’re doing is thinking about what you’re going to be doing to go on doing what you’re doing. Worrying about whether you’ve got enough socked away to see you through your old age without ending up eating cat food. Worrying about whether you’re getting enough fiber or eating too many carbs. It’s being alive, but it’s hardly living.

“You ever been in a bad quake? No? Here’s the weird secret of a big quake: it’s actually pretty great, afterward. I mean, assuming you’re not caught in the rubble, of course. After a big one, there’s this moment, a kind of silence. Like you were living with this huge old refrigerator compressor humming so loud in the back of your mind that you’ve never been able to think properly, not once since about the time you turned, you know, eleven or twelve, maybe younger. Never been present and in the moment. And then that humming refrigerator just stops and there’s a ringing, amazing, all-powerful silence and for the first time you can hear yourself think. there’s that moment, after the earth stops shaking, when you realize that there’s you and there’s everyone else and the point of it all is for all of you to figure out how to get along together as best as you can.

“They say that after a big one, people start looting, raping, eating each other, whatever. But you know what I saw the last time it hit, back in 2019? People figuring it out. Firing up their barbecues and cooking dinner for the neighborhood with everything in the freezer, before it spoils anyway. Kids being looked after by everyone, everyone going around and saying, ‘what can I do for you? Do you have a bed? Water? Food? You okay? Need someone to talk to? need a ride?’ in the movies, they always show every­one running around looting as soon as the lights go out, but I can’t say as I’ve ever seen that. I mean, that’s not what I’d do, would you?”

I shook my head.

“ ’Course not. No one we know would. Because we’re on the same side. The human race’s side. But when the fridge is humming away, you can lose track of that, start to feel like its zero sum, a race to see who can squirrel away the most nuts before the winter comes. When a big shaker hits, though, you remember that you aren’t the kind of squirrel who could live in your tree with all your nuts while all the other squirrels starved and froze out there.

“The Playa is like a disaster without the disaster—it’s a chance to switch off the fridge and hear the silence. A chance to see that people are, you know, basically awesome. Mostly. It’s the one place where you actually confront reality, instead of all the noise and illusion.”

“So you’re basically saying that it’s like Buddhism with recreational drugs and explosions?”

“Basically.”

We rode awhile longer. The signs for Reno were coming more often now, and the traffic was getting thicker, requiring more attention.

“If only,” he said. “If only there was some way to feel that way all the time.”

“You couldn’t,” I said, without thinking. “Regression to the mean. The extraordinary always ends up feeling ordinary. Do it for long enough and it’d just be noise.”

“You may be right. But I hope you’re not. Somewhere out there, there’s a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.”

We crawled the last thirty miles, driving through Indian country, over cattle gratings and washed-out gullies. “The local cops are fine, they’re practically burners themselves. Everyone around here grew up with burning man, and it’s been the only real source of income since the gypsum mine closed. But the feds and the cops from over the state line, they’re bad news. Lot of jack Mormons over in Pershing County, don’t like this at all. And since the whole route to the Playa, apart from the last quarter mile, is in Washoe County, and since no one is supposed to buy or sell anything once you get to the Playa, all the money stays in Washoe County, and Pershing gets none of it. All they get are freaks who offend them to their very souls. So basically, you want to drive slow and keep your nose clean around here, because you never know who’s waiting behind a bush to hand you a giant ticket and search your car down to the floor mats.”

i slowed down even more. We stopped for Indian tacos—fried flat-bread smothered in ground beef and fried veggies—that sat in my stomach in an undigestable, salty lump. Pug grew progressively more manic as we approached the turnoff for black rock desert and was practically drumming on the dashboard by the time we hit the dusty, rutted side road. He played with the stereo, put on some loud electronic dance music that made me feel old and out of it, and fished around under the seat for a dust mask and a pair of goggles.

I’d seen lots of photos of burning man, the tents and shade structures and RVs and “mutant vehicles” stretching off in all directions, and even though I knew the Fourth was a much smaller event, I’d still been picturing that in my mind’s eye. but instead, what we saw was a seemingly endless and empty desert, edges shrouded in blowing dust clouds with the hints of mountains peeking through, and no sign at all of human habitation.

“Now where?” I said.

He got out his phone and fired up a GPS app, clicked on one of his waypoints, waiting a moment, and pointed into the heart of the dust. “That way.”

We rumbled into the dust cloud and were soon in a near-total white-out. I slowed the car to walking pace, and then slower than walking pace. “Pug, we should just stop for a while,” I said. “There’s no roads. Cars could come from any direction.”

“All the more reason to get to the campsite,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks out here for anyone else arriving.”

“That’s not really logic,” I said. “If we’re moving and they’re moving, we’ve got a much better chance of getting into a fender bender than if we’re staying still.”

The air in the van tasted dusty and alkali. I put it in park and put on the mask, noticed my eyes were starting to sting, added goggles—big, bug-eyed Soviet-era MIG goggles.

“Drive,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

I was starting to catch some of his enthusiasm. I put it back into drive and rode the brakes as we inched through the dust. He peered at his GPS, calling out, “left,” then “straight,” then “right” and back again. A few times I was sure I saw a car bumper or a human looming out of the dust before us and slammed on the brakes, only to discover that it had been a trick of the light and my brain’s overactive, nerve-racked pattern-matching systems.

When I finally did run something over, I was stretched out so tight that I actually let out a scream. In my defense, the thing we hit was a tent peg made out of rebar—the next five days gave the chance to become endlessly acquainted with rebar tent pegs, which didn’t scar the playa and were cheap and rugged—pushing it through the front driver’s-side tire, which exploded with a noise like a gunshot. I turned off the engine and tried to control my breathing.

Pug gave me a moment, then said, “We’re here!”

“Sorry about the tire.”

“Pfft. we’re going to wreck stuff that’s a lot harder to fix than a flat tire. You think we can get to the spare without unpacking?”

“No way.”

“Then we’ll have to unpack. Come on, buddy.”

The instant he opened the door, a haze of white dust followed him, motes sparkling in the air. I shrugged and opened my door and stepped out into the dust.

There were people in the dust, but they were ciphers—masked, goggled, indistinct. I had a job to do—clearing out the van’s cargo and getting it moved to our site, which was weirdly precise—a set of four corners defined as GPS coordinates that ran to the tenth of a second—and at the same time, such a farcically huge tract of land that it really amounted to “Oh, anywhere over there’s fine.”

The shadowy figures came out of the dust and formed a bucket brigade, into which I vanished. I love a good bucket brigade, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn’t just passing things from person to person. It’s a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don’t need to know anything about the system’s whole state in order to help optimize it. in a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person’s slowness is the whole line’s problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.

I love bucket brigades. It’s like proof that we can be more together than we are on our own, and without having to take orders from a leader. It wasn’t until the van was empty and I pulled a lounger off our pile of gear and set it up and sank down into it that I realized that an hour had slipped by and I was both weary and energized. Pug handed me a flask and I sniffed at it, got a noseful of dust and whiskey fumes, and then sipped at it. It was Kentucky bourbon, and it cut through the dust in my mouth and throat like oven cleaner.

Pug sprawled in the dust beside me, his blond hair splayed around his head like a halo. “Now the work begins,” he said. “How you holding up?”

“Ready and willing, Cap’n,” I said, speaking with my eyes closed and my head flung back.

“Look at you two,” an amused female voice said. Fingers plucked the flask out of my hands. I opened my eyes. Standing over us was a tall, broad-shouldered woman whose blue Mohawk was braided in a long rope that hung over her shoulder. “You just got here and you’re already pooped. You’re an embarrassment to the uniform.”

“Hi, blight,” Pug said, not stirring. “Blight, this is Greg. He’s never been to the Playa before.”

“A virgin!” she said. “My stars and garters.” She drank more whiskey. She was wearing overalls with the sleeves ripped off, showing her long, thick, muscled arms, which had been painted with stripes of zinc, like a barber pole. it was hard to guess her age—the haircut suggested mid-twenties, but the way she held herself and talked made me think she might be more my age. I tried not to consider the possibilities of a romantic entanglement. As much of a hormone-fest as the Playa was supposed to be, it wasn’t summer camp. “We’ll be gentle,” she said.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m just gathering my strength before leaping into action. Can I have the whiskey back, please?”

She drank another mouthful and passed it back. “Here you go. That’s good stuff, by the way.”

“Fighting Cock,” Pug said. “I bought it for the name, stayed for the booze.” he got to his feet and he and blight shared a long hug. His feet left the ground briefly.

“Missed you, Pug.”

“Missed you, too. You should come visit, sometime.”

They chatted a little like old friends, and I gathered that she lived in Salt Lake City and ran a Goth/alternative dance club that sounded familiar. There wasn’t much by way of freak culture out in SLC, so whatever there was quickly became legendary. I’d worked with a guy from Provo, a gay guy who’d never fit in with his Mormon family, who’d spent a few years in SLC before coming to L.A. I was pretty sure he’d talked about it. A kind of way station for Utah’s underground bohemian railway.

Then Pug held out his hand to me and pulled me to my feet and announced we’d be setting up camp. this involved erecting a giant shade structure, stringing up hammocks, laying out the heavy black rubber solar-shower bladders on the van’s roof to absorb the day’s heat, setting out the grill and the bags of lump charcoal, and hammering hundreds of lengths of bent-over rebar into the unyielding desert floor. Conveniently, Pug’s injured arm wasn’t up to the task, leaving me to do most of the work, though some of the others pitched in at the beginning, until some more campers arrived and needed help unloading.

Finally, it was time to set up the Gadget.

I’d been worried about it, especially as we’d bashed over some of the deeper ruts after the turnoff onto route 34, but Pug had been awfully generous with the bubblewrap. I ended up having to scrounge a heavy ammo box full of shotgun shells to hold down the layer after layer of plastic and keep it from blowing away. I drew a little crowd as I worked—now they weren’t too busy!—and blight stepped in and helped toward the end, bundling up armloads of plastic sheeting and putting it under the ammo box. Finally, the many-legged Gadget was fully revealed. There was a long considering silence that broke when a breeze blew over it and it began, very slowly, to walk, as each of the legs’ sails caught the wind. It clittered along on its delicate feet, and then, as the wind gusted harder, lurched forward suddenly, scattering the onlookers. I grabbed the leash I’d clipped to its rear and held on as best as I could, nearly falling on my face before I reoriented my body to lean away from it. It was like playing one-sided tug-of-war. I whooped and then there were more hands on the leash with mine, including blight’s, and we steadied it.

“Guess I should have driven a spike for the tether before I started,” I said.

“Where are you going to spike it?” blight asked.

I shrugged as best as I could while still holding the strong nylon cable. “I don’t know—close enough to the shade structure that we can keep tools and gear there while we’re working on it, but far enough away that it can really get around without bashing into anything.”

“Stay there,” she said, and let go, jogging off toward the back forty of our generous plot. She came back and grabbed our sledgehammer and one of the longest pieces of rebar, and I heard the ringing of a mallet on steel— sure, rhythmic strokes. She’d done this a lot more than me. She jogged back a moment later, her goggles pushed up on her forehead, revealing dark brown eyes, wide set, with thick eyebrows and fine crow’s-feet. The part of me that wasn’t thinking about the Gadget was thinking about how pretty she was and wondering if she was single, and wondering if she was with Pug, and wondering if she was into guys at all, anyway.

“Let’s get it tied off,” she said. We played out the rope and let it drag us toward the rebar she’d driven nearly all the way into the hardpack, the bent double tips both buried deep, forming a staple. I threaded the rope’s end through and tied a sailor’s knot I’d learned in the one week I’d attended Scouts when I was nine, the only knot I knew. It had never come loose. If it came loose this time, there was a chance the Gadget would sail all the way to Reno over the coming months, leaving behind a trail of interlocking panels that could be formed into a yurt.

The sun was starting to set, and though I really wanted to go through my maintenance check list for the Gadget, there was dance music playing (dubstep—I’d been warned by Pug in advance and had steeled myself to learning to love the wub-wub-wub), there were people milling about, there was the smell of barbecue. The sun was a huge, bloody red ball on the horizon and the heat of the day was giving way to a perfectly cool night. Laser light played through the air. Drones flew overhead, strobing with persistence-of-vision LED light shows and doing aerobatics that pushed their collision-avoidance routines to the limit (every time one buzzed me, I flinched, as I had been doing since the accident).

Blight dusted her hands off on her thighs. “Now what?”

I looked around. “Dinner?”

“Yeah,” she said, and linked arms with me and led me back to camp.

Sometime around midnight, I had the idea that I should be getting to bed and getting a good night’s sleep so I could get the Gadget up and running the next morning. then Pug and I split a tab of E and passed a thermosful of mushroom tea back and forth—a “ hippie flip,” something I hadn’t tried in more than a decade—and an hour later I was dancing my ass off and the world was an amazing place.

I ended up in a wonderful cuddle puddle around 2 a.m., every nerve alive to the breathing chests and the tingling skin of the people around me. Someone kissed me on the forehead and I spun back to my childhood, and the sensation of having all the time in the world and no worries about anything flooded into me. In a flash, I realized that this is what a utopian, postscarcity world would be like. A place where there was no priority higher than pleasing the people around you and amusing yourself. I thought of all those futures I’d read about and seen, places where everything was built atop sterile metal and polymer. I’d never been able to picture myself in those futures.

But this “future”—a dusty, meaty world where human skin and sweat and hair were all around, but so were lasers and UAVs and freaking wind-walking robots? That was a future I could live in. A future devoted to pleas­ing one another.

“Welcome to the future,” I said into the hollow of someone’s throat. That person chuckled. The lasers lanced through the dust overhead, clean multicolored beams sweeping the sky. The drones buzzed and dipped. The moon shone down upon us, as big as a pumpkin and as pale as ancient bone.

I stared at the moon. It stared back. It had always stared back, but I’d always been moving too quickly to notice.

I awoke the next day in my own airbed in the back of the van. It was oven hot inside and I felt like a stick of beef jerky. I stumbled out shirtless and in jeans and made it to the shade structure, where I found my water pack and uncapped the hose. I sucked it dry and then refilled it from a huge water barrel we’d set up on a set of sawhorses, drank some more. I went back into the van and scrounged my shades and goggles, found a t-shirt, and reemerged, made use of the chem toilet we’d set up behind a modesty screen hammered into the playa with rebar and nylon rope, and then col­lapsed into a hammock under the shade structure.

Some brief groggy eternity later, someone put a collection of pills and tablets into my left hand and a coffee mug into my right.

“No more pills, thank you.”

“These are supplements,” he said. “I figure half of them are harmless BS, but the other half really seem to help with the old seratonin levels. Don’t know which half is which, but there’re a couple neuroscientists who come out most years who could argue about it for your amusement if you’re interested. Take ’em.”

Pug thrust a paper plate of scrambled eggs, sausages, and slices of watermelon into my hands. Before I knew it, I’d gobbled it all down to the watermelon rind and licked the stray crispy bits of sausage meat. I brushed my teeth and joined Pug out by the Gadget. It had gone walking in the night, leaving a beautiful confusion of footprints in the dust. The wind was still for the moment, though with every gust it creaked a little. I steadied Pug as he climbed it and began to tinker with it.

We’d put a lot of energy into a self-calibration phase. In theory, the Gadget should be able to tell, by means of its array of optical sensors, whether its test prints were correct or not, and then relevel its build plate and recenter its optics. The unfolded solar collectors also acted as dust collectors, and they periodically upended themselves into the feedstock hopper. This mechanism had three fail-safes—first, it could run off the battery, but once the batteries were charged, power was automatically diverted to a pair of servos that would self-trip if the battery ran too low. they each had enough storage to flip, shake, and restore the panels—working with a set of worm-gears we’d let software design and had printed off in a ceramic-polymer mix developed for artificial teeth and guaranteed not to chip or grind away for years.

There was a part of me that had been convinced that the Gadget just couldn’t possibly work. Too many moving parts, not enough testing. It was just too weird. But as Pug unfurled the flexible photovoltaics and clipped them to the carbon-fiber struts and carefully positioned the big lens and pressed the big, rubberized on button, it made the familiar powering-up noises and began to calibrate itself.

Perfectly.

Dust had sifted into the feedstock hopper overnight and had blown over the build plate. The sun hit the lens, and smoke began to rise from the dust. The motors clicked minutely and the head zipped this way and that with pure, robotic grace. Moving with the unhurried precision of a master, it described a grid and melted it, building it up at each junction, adding an extra two-micron Z-height each time, so that a tiny cityscape emerged. the sensors fed back to an old phone I’d brought along—we had a box of them, anticipating a lot more failure from these nonpurpose-built gad­gets than our own—and it expressed a confidence rating about the overall accuracy of the build. The basic building blocks the Gadget was designed to print were five-millimeter-thick panels that snap-fit without any addi­tional fixtures, relying on a clever combination of gravity and friction to stay locked once they were put together. The tolerances were fine, and the Gadget was confident it could meet them.

Here’s a thing about 3D printing: it is exciting; then very, very boring; then it is exciting again. It’s borderline magic; when the print-head starts to jerk and shunt to and fro, up and down, and the melting smell rises up off the build platform, and you can peer through that huge, crystal-clear lens and see a precise form emerging. It’s amazing to watch a process by which an idea becomes a thing, untouched by human hands.

But it’s also s-l-o-w. From the moment at which a recognizable object begins to take shape to the moment where it seems about ready to slide off, there is a long and dull interregnum in which minute changes gradually bring the shape to fruition. It’s like watching soil erosion (albeit in reverse). This is the kind of process that begs for time-lapse. and if you do go away and come back later to check in on things, and find your object in a near-complete state, you inevitably find that, in fact