This chapter is dedicated to DC's Politics and Prose, a wonderful store inside the beltway. As the name implies, the store is perfectly balanced mix of the wonky and the wonderful, policy and poetry living cheek-by-jowl. This is a store that puts a lie to the idea that the fanciful and the hard-nosed are incompatible -- a conclusion that I should hope was obvious from my own books.

Politics and Prose: 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008 +1 202 364 1919

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I'd had eight months to debug Secret Project X-1. I even made a special midsummer trip to the Mojave, where the gypsum dust was nearly identical to the stuff you got out on the playa. I'd watched with glee and pride as X-1 sucked up the sun's rays, turned them into a laser beam, and used that to sinter fine white powder into 3D shapes. First a little skull ring. Then a toy car. Then some chain mail, the links already formed and joined, one of the coolest tricks 3D printing had to offer. I gave a presentation on my progress one night at Noisebridge and resulting praise had given me a glow you could have seen with a spy drone.

But now, here, on the actual playa, the goddamned machine wouldn't work. Lemmy sat in his lounger nearby, sipping electrolyte drink from a camelbak and making helpful suggestions, as well as several unhelpful ones. Burners passing by stopped and asked what I was doing, and I let Lemmy explain it to them so that I could concentrate on the infernal and stubborn machine.

I only stopped when I found that even the light from my headlamp wasn't sufficient for seeing what I was doing, and then I stretched all the aches and pains out of my body, swilled a pint of cold-brew, and proceeded to dance my skinny ass off for forty-five minutes straight, chasing after a giant art car blasting ferocious dubstep as it crawled across the open playa. I stopped as a thunderstrike of inspiration struck me, and I ran straight back to camp, unlocked Lemmy's car, and used its dome light to confirm that yes, I had in fact inserted a critical part of the power assembly backwards. I turned it around, slotted it in, and heard the familiar boot sequence kick in as the stored power from the solar panels kicked the 3D printer to life.

I wasn't a total moron after all.

It didn't matter how much dancing I'd done the night before, I was for goddamned sure getting up at first light to crank up X-1. I had a lot of printing to do. I puttered around it as the blue arc of laser light shone out of its guts, making it glow like a lantern in the pink dawn.

People stopped and asked me what it was doing. I gave them trinkets: bone-white skull rings; renderings of perfect knots and other mathematical solids; strange, ghostly figurines. I had a whole library of 3D shapes I'd plundered from Thingiverse when I realized that I was going to have a real, functional 3D printer on the playa this year. Word got around, and by the time Lemmy got out of bed, a huge crowd had gathered around our camp, dancers who'd been up all night, their pupils the size of saucers; early risers with yoga mats; college kids who'd somehow found themselves at the burn; and a familiar jawa with crossed bandoliers over her chest, emphasizing her breasts.

"Hi, Ange," I said, leaving Lemmy to run the machine while I grabbed us a jar of cold-brew and walked off a ways with her. She pulled down her mask. The sun had toasted a smattering of freckles around her nose and cheeks. I gave her first slurp at the coffee, then I had one. Then we hugged. It was awkward.

It was wonderful.

"Hey, Marcus. Congratulations on getting it working."

"Yeah," I said. All I wanted to do was hug her again.

"So," I said.

"So," she said.

"I'm an idiot," I said.

"Yeah," she said.

"I've missed you."

"Yeah," she said again. "I missed you, too. Like fire. Like part of me had been cut away."

I dropped my voice. "I gave Johnstone's d0x to the FBI."

She blinked twice. "When?"

"Back in October."

"And you're still here, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. "I guess that means they didn't do anything with it."

"Or maybe it means they did do something with it."

I found my mouth was hanging open. "You know," I said. "That possibility never occurred to me."

"Yeah," she said. "You have a tendency to see the bad side of things."

"I guess I do."

We didn't say anything for a while, just drank our coffee.

"Have you seen anything great yet?"

"No," I said. "I've been working on that goddamned machine since the moment we arrived."

"I haven't been to the temple yet," she said.

I took the hint. "I bet Lemmy'll be okay with the printer for a while."

"You think?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

"You spending much time at the protests?" she said.

"Every day," I said. "Trying to figure out how to do more with the kind of technology we build at Noisebridge to help make them harder to bust up. Better anti-kettling stuff, HERF shielding, effective treatments for gas poisoning and those dazzler lasers and sound cannons they're using now. Been arrested a few times, but I keep going back."

"I think that's great," she said. "Seriously great. I'm proud of you."

"Thank you," I said. "That means a lot." It really did. I didn't hold her hand, but oh, how I wanted to. "What about you?"

"College," she said. "College, college, college. Doing a double courseload to get out as fast as I can. My student debt, God, it's like the national debt of some drowning island nation."

"There's still time to drop out," I said.

"Yeah, yeah. We can't all be professional revolutionaries."

Not if you're drowning in student debt, is what I didn't say, because I didn't want to fight with Ange. More than anything, I didn't want to fight with Ange.

The temple came into sight. It was even more amazing than last year's, and it was surrounded by art bikes and milling crowds of people dropping off their memorials or reading them or making them. By the same unspoken agreement, we walked to them in silence.

By some unspoken agreement, we took each others' hands.

When we sat down in the central atrium and the first deep Omm moved through us, tears began to flow. Ange was crying, and so was I. Our fingers were interlocked, and squeezed so hard that my knuckles creaked. But the sound kept coming, and with it, a kind of peace. Peace wasn't something I'd had much of in the last year, and I barely recognized it -- and then I sank into it.

My eyes closed, I sensed someone settle to the floor next to me. I opened my eyes. I knew before they opened who it would be.

Masha's hair was pink again, and she looked better than she had the last time I'd seen her, but she also looked older. There were deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes. They looked good on her somehow. Her eyes were the same, and just as I'd remembered them.

She and I looked into each other's eyes for a long time. I squeezed Ange's fingers and sensed her looking at Masha, too. The three of us stared at one another, three pairs of eyes, three brains, three sets of hands, three people inside the crowd, inside the temple, inside Black Rock City, on the skin of the planet.

Then Masha stood up, blew us both a kiss, and smiled in a way that made her look ten years old and made me feel like I'd been blessed by a holy woman. I gathered Ange into a hug that started off stiff and awkward and then turned into the most familiar feeling in the world.