Hieroglyph (21 page)

“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, “It's 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 farmer'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 kits, 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.