“Oh, it depends on how horrendous it is, but it’s not usually about money. Big burly guy has a secret dream of being a ballerina? I’ll go easy. I’ll tell him he needs to give me a hug and go take a dancing lesson, pursue that beautiful dream. If he’s stubborn or scared then I’ll make him take me out for a frozen treat once a week instead, use those opportunities to turn the screws on him.”

“Is that how it works?” I asked.

She played at being serious as she looked down at her phone, tapping some keys. “Yep. If it’s a less beautiful innermost desire, like, I don’t know, skinning people, then I’d set the price at ten million dollars or something. Then I’d turn them in anyway.”

“Eminently reasonable,” I said. I bent down by the table, noting the various lenses and segments of metal with holes in them. There were computer chips that had been cannibalized, and others that had been rebuilt into Frankenstein abominations. “Where do you get the money for these parts?”

“Parents,” she said. “Some scavenging. There was a while where people were getting really bad computers that had been scavenged from Earth Bet and cleaned up, except a lot of those computers were total garbage. Every garbage day I could go out with a wagon and get at least two.”

I nodded. I couldn’t really parse the logic of some of the layout, organization, or what had actually been built. At a certain point, stuff ceased to become computer chips and became three-dimensional arrangements of pins. There was one that used magnets to suspend a part in between three other chips.

“I’m joking, by the way, about the desire camera. I tried that and it didn’t really work. I’d need a ton of scans to even know where to start.”

“I figured,” I said.

“This is the camera I’m working on for Tristan and Byron,” she said. She gave a box a pat. Whatever was inside, it was a pale energy that licked the clear lens. “It’s missing stuff.”

“Out of curiosity, what sort of thing would that see, besides them?”

“No idea. But if I can figure it out, I think I can leap from it to other things. It might open doors, if i can just figure out how to see into the keyhole. What those doors look like really depends on what Byron and Tristan are.”

“At my apartment, I have papers on stuff like where the physical bodies of breakers go when they’re in breaker mode, or offloaded consciousnesses in nonstandard brains. I’m not sure if any of it would help in terms of inspiring tech, but maybe it could help you make some educated guesses.”

“That’d be amazing. I don’t know if I’d understand it all. Could you explain what I don’t get?”