The tenth and final installment of my serialized novel-in-progress went live on Salon just now (previous installments). I’m working hard on the next section of the novel and hope to have it in the can by the new year, though it remains to be seen whether Salon will take up syndicating it, too. I’ve really, really appreciated the warm feedback I’ve gotten from you folks for this over the last two and a half months — it’s really helped me keep focused as I worked on the next section.
In today’s installment, Lester and Andrea reunite, but the New Work economy hits the skids:
Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.
She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.
Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of ewoks listening to C3PO.
“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their 3D printer project.
“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to be *easy*. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for an E lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”
Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.
Andrea took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks in a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.
