"Dude," he said. "What happened to your face?"
"Lost a bet," I said.
"Some bet. Can I help you with something?"
"I'm looking for Sharala Chandna. Professor Blackstone gave me his name."
The other two at work-another man and a woman, each perhaps in their mid-twenties-broke off from their respective tasks, listening. The man was Caucasian, and the closest to the cliche I'd walked in expecting, despite myself, in black cargo pants and white work shirt, pens and a calculator in his breast pocket. The woman looked to be Indian, wearing torn and weathered jeans, and a faded light blue T-shirt with the words Big Blue Marble barely legible beneath an iron-on Planet Earth.
"That would be me." The woman pushed the laptop she'd been working at to the side. There was a decal on the lid of the computer, a caricature of a girl in horn-rim glasses with a mop of black hair. The words Flirty, Dirty, and Nerdy had been printed beneath.
"Beg your pardon," I said. "He led me to believe I was looking for a guy."
"Yeah, Blackie does that." Sharala Chandna nodded. "Likes to poke holes in the stereotypes. He tell you to look for the one with a pocket protector, too?"
"Nerd glasses, actually."
Sharala Chandna approached, leaving her workbench and her laptop behind. Various pieces of equipment that I hadn't the first idea about populated the workshop, along with circuit boards, spare antennae, soldering equipment, oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and tools of every shape and size. The two men went back to their respective projects, and I didn't even try discerning what they were working on.
Sharala looked me over, and I had a good idea what she was seeing, and so didn't take it personally. Aside from my jeans, T-shirt, and boots, I had a new selection of bruises, including a cheerfully swelling one rising quickly on my right cheek. My lower lip had been split at the corner. In my short sleeves, the bandage covering the stitches on my forearm was clearly visible.
"I'd offer to shake your hand, but I'm afraid it'd fall off," she said.
"The right one works fine." I offered it to her. "My name's Matt."
She shook my hand briskly. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm looking for someone to build something for me, and to build it quickly. I'm willing to pay for the time and materials. Professor Blackstone said I should come down here and ask for you. He said you were a, uh, 'maker'?"
She grinned. "He said that? He'd know. What sort of thing are we talking about?"
I pulled the schematics I'd printed out that morning from my back pocket, handing them to her. I'd found them online, at a website that had offered the designs as open hardware. Once I'd found them, I'd brought up the website for UNLV, and in short order that had led me here.
"Oh fuck!" Sharala said. "Oh fuck yeah, it's Limor!"
Both men looked up sharply from what they were doing, immediately and visibly curious. The one with the pens in his pocket asked, "Which one?"
"The Wave Bubble! He fucking wants a Wave Bubble!"
"No shit?" This from the other one, the one who'd asked what had happened to my face. "Let me see!"
All three of them crowded around the schematic, and then Sharala handed them the sheets and grabbed her laptop, pulling it over to the worktable nearest them. She opened her web browser, typing in a URL from memory, then clicking once, twice, giggling to herself the whole while.
"Yeah, it's Limor's Wave Bubble, all right!" she said gleefully. "I made her Minty MP3 like a year ago, that was so cool."
"The POV-"
"On the bicycle wheels! Fuck yeah!"
"Excuse me," I said.
"Did you see the new Arduino stuff? Fucking awesome."
"No, the TV-B-Gone! The TV-B-Gone is genius, I fucking love that thing. You heard about Greenberg, right?"
"What'd he do?"
"He built one, took it down to the Strip. Started going through the casinos, hitting each of the sports bars, fried every LCD screen he could find. Got all the way to Caesar's before they caught him."
"Outstanding."
"Excuse me," I said again.
They all stared at me, seemingly having forgotten I was there.
"I assume this means you can make me one?" I asked Sharala.
"Oh yeah, hell yeah." She was almost dismissive. "Couple of weeks, sure. Limor lays everything out-she's fantastic, I love her, I would have her babies if I could, seriously."
"Thing is, I need it sooner. End of the week, if possible."
"That's harder. You gotta do the Gerber plots, then have the PCBs made. We can get those done in town, but it's more expensive. And some of the components, they'll have to be ordered."
"And I need it boosted."
That caught her by the curiosity. "How much?"
"It has to be able to blanket a house, a big one. Some of the exterior."
"But still this scale?"
"It can scale up," I said. "Just needs to be portable, something I can carry."
"Sure, yeah, you get a bigger battery, a power amplifier, that's one way to do it. Just factor up the math."
"Wait." The one with the pens in his pocket was staring at me. "Why?"
"Why?" Sharala asked.
"Why does this guy need a Wave Bubble, one that's stepped up?" He was still staring at me. It was a fair question, and I was a little surprised it had taken this long to be asked. "Why does he need to jam all forms of communication going into or out of a great big house running between eight hundred megahertz and two point eight gigahertz?"
All three of them gave me the hairy eyeball.
"I've got to do something," I told them. "And I don't want the people I'm doing it to making any phone calls while it's being done."
"Yeah, see," he said. "That kinda sounds like something maybe Sharala and Solomon and me wouldn't want to be a part of."
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"Augustyn."
"Auggie," said the one in the glasses. Solomon. "We call him Auggie."
"You guys mind if I close the door?" I asked.
"Why?" asked Sharala.
"Because I want to answer the question, and I don't want us being overheard while I do it."
"Go ahead," Auggie said. "But, man, you try anything and we'll shove a soldering iron so far up your ass you'll have smoke coming out your nose."
I nodded, turned to close the door. None of them had moved when I turned back, each of them watching me as if trying to determine how I myself was wired.
"Let me tell you about a girl," I said. Sharala, Auggie, and Solomon, it turned out, were all "makers," and all of them were looking to change the world. By "makers," I learned, they meant those who actually built things, who tinkered and dinked and took apart and put together and built workshops in their garages. They differentiated themselves from "abstracts" and the "normals." The "abstracts" were the abstract thinkers, the ones who, as they put it, sat around all day dreaming about what could work, would work, how to make this more efficient and that more powerful and this more elegant without ever getting their hands dirty. Professor Blackstone, who had referred me to them, they said, was "abstract." Conversely, Limor Fried, the creator of the Wave Bubble, was, by their account, a Saint of Makers.
"And the normals?" I asked. We were at a restaurant a few miles from the campus that they had suggested, a place called Metro Pizza. So far, they'd worked their way through a cheese pizza and a pitcher of beer, and seemed eager to start on a second round of each.
"Normals are the ones who do it for a living," Solomon said, pouring a fresh glass of beer for himself. "They get their degree and then they go to work for The Man. But never mind that, this stuff about this girl, Tiasa-this shit's for real?"
"Yeah," I said. I hadn't told them everything, because there were things they didn't need to know to help me. But I'd told them about Tiasa, about how she'd been taken from her home, about how I'd been chasing after her for a month.