Makers

She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. “Well, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca.”

“What? No, no. The St Petersburg in Russia.”

“Oh,” she said.

They concentrated on their food for a while.

“You know,” he said, after they’d ordered coffee and desert, “it’s all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it’s providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can’t find room for—that’s superabundance.”

“I have a locker in Milpitas,” she said.

“There you go. It’s a growth industry.” He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, “My daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I haven’t lived with their mother in three years.” He made a face. “Sasha’s circumstances were complicated. They’re good kids, though. It just couldn’t work with their mother. She’s Russian, and co

“Do you see them?”

“We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?”

“Yeah.”

That week, Suza

When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then said, “Let me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think you were right, but I’d like to have a say, all right?”

Perry looked at Suza

That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioning—calculated to survive the old slashdottings—shredded like wet kleenex.

From: [email protected] /* */

To: [email protected] /* */

Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. You’ve got a fantastic eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at this moment. Not to mention proud! Proud—you’ve made me so proud of the work these guys are doing, proud to have some role in it.

Kettlebelly

She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred emails from that day’s blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight, too late to get into it with Kettlewell.

Then her computer rang—the net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to when her computer was live and co

“Hi Jimmy,” she said—her editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time on a weeknight was still working hours for him.

“Suza

She waited. She’d half expected him to call with a little shower of praise, an echo of Kettlewell’s note. Jimmy wasn’t the most effusive editor she’d had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity.

“Suza

“Jimmy,” she said. “It’s late here. What’s up?”

“So, it’s like this. I love your reports but it’s not Silicon Valley news. It’s Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and I’m going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, ‘I can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,’ and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home.”

He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer’s screen. Her hands were gripping the laptop’s edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it began to bend.

“I can’t do that, Jimmy. This is stuff that Silicon Valley needs to know about. This may not be what’s happening in Silicon Valley, but it sure as shit is what’s happening to Silicon Valley.” She hated that she’d cussed—she hadn’t meant to. “I know you’re in a hard spot, but this is the story I need to cover right now.”

“Suza

“I see,” she said. “Can I think about it?”

“Think about what, Suza

“I think—” She felt that oh-shit-oh-shit feeling again, that needing-to-pee feeling, that tension from her toes to her nose. “Jimmy,” she said. “I need a leave of absence, OK?”

“What? Suza

“Not a vacation, Jimmy. Six months leave of absence, without pay.” Her savings could cover it. She could put some ba

“Are you quitting?”

“No, Jimmy—well, not unless you make me. But I need to stay here.”

“The work you’re doing there is fine, Suza

“What are you saying?”

“If you want to work for the Merc, you need to fly back to San Jose, where the Merc is published. I can’t make it any clearer than that.”

No, he couldn’t. She sympathized with him. She was really well paid by the Merc. Keeping her on would mean firing two junior writers. He’d cut her a lot of breaks along the way, too—let her feel out the Valley in her own way. It had paid off for both of them, but he’d taken the risk when a lot of people wouldn’t have. She’d be a fool to walk away from all that.