Makers by Cory Doctorow (read this if .txt) 📕

gather up their stuff and walk them down to our place. We’ve got space for everyone for now at least.”
Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester’s car and shouted for people to gather round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and it wasn’t long before nearly everyone was gathered around them.
“Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go.”
There were murmurs of assent. Suzanne had seen him meet with his people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect they afforded to him. He wasn’t the leader, per se, but when he spoke, people listened. It was a characteristic she’d encountered in the auto-trade and in technology, in the ones the others all gravitated to. Charismatics.
“We’ve got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It’s about a half hour walk. It’s indoors and there’s toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don’t have to come, but this isn’t going to be any fun tonight.”
A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. “What about our stuff? We can’t leave it here tonight. It’s all we’ve got.”
Francis nodded. “We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of five tonight. Young people. You’ll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out.” The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they’d get of this would come from the news-anchor who’d tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They’d never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.
Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.
Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester’s car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis’s discretion.
Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.
“What now?” she said.
“We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses.”
“At your place? You’re going to let them stay?”
“Why not? We don’t use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn’t been by in five years. He won’t care.”
She took a couple more steps. “Perry, I’m going to write about this,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. “Of course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I’ll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks.”
“What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?”
“This? Look, this is what I’ve been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They’re a huge untapped market.”
What she wanted to ask was What would Tjan say about this? but they didn’t talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he’d confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people wanted to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.
They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.
They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they’d found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.
“This is the place,” Francis said. “We’ll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there—orderly lines, no shoving.”
“What about food?” asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.
“This isn’t the Red Cross, Al,” Francis snapped. “We’ll organize food for ourselves in the morning.”
Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.
“There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It’s his place. He’s going to go to Costco for us when they open.”
The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They’d been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them—like making up for every panhandler she’d ignored and every passed-out drunk she’d stepped over.
There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.
Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet—she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket—and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn’t climb in between those sheets.
She couldn’t.
And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels—even the sofa cushions, which the landlord was not going to be happy about—and speeding back to the workshop.
She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman—apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny—sat up and said, “Hey, where’s one for me?” Suzanne recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester’s friend. The one who’d grabbed her and cursed her.
She didn’t want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor.
“Where’s one for me?” the woman said more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up.
Suzanne was shaking. Who the hell was she to decide who got a blanket? Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down?
Suzanne gave her a blanket, and she snatched one of the sofa cushions besides.
It’s why she’s still alive, Suzanne thought. How she’s survived.
She gave away the last blanket and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on tee-shirts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding.
The new shantytown went up fast—faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters—building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic—and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.
Little things went missing from the workshops—tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet—and they all started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in among the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.
She found the earrings later that day, at the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.
“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.
“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young men and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”
“Perry, this is the business. Kettlewell hasn’t sent a replacement for Tjan and you’ve filled in and you’ve turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That’s important news—the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you’ve found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it’s not just solving Kodacell’s problem, it’s solving the problem for all of those people, too.”
Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. “I don’t want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It’s going good. Scrutiny could kill it.”
“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about here,” she said. “There’s nothing here that isn’t as it should be.”
Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. “You do what you have to do,” he said.
:: The original shantytown was astonishing. Built around a nexus of
:: trailers and RVs that didn’t look in the least roadworthy, the
:: settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of
:: land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they
:: could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with
:: bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs
:: with palm-leaves, shingles, linoleum, corrugated tin—even
:: plywood with flattened beer-cans. Some walls were wood. Some had
:: windows. Some were made from old car-doors, with hand-cranked
:: handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at
:: night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on
:: nets.
::
:: A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived,
:: and rather than building out—and farther away from their
:: neighbors’ latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of
:: electrical power—they built