Cory DoctorowDown and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Cory Doctorow

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – del 1

Down and Outin theMagic KingdomCory Doctorow © 2003 Cory Doctorowdoctorow@craphound.comhttp://www.craphound.com/downTor Books, January 2003ISBN: 0765304368

BlurbsHe sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Sciencefiction needs Cory Doctorow!Bruce SterlingAuthor, The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction— • —In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our commonculture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new setof memes that will be with us for a generation at least.Lawrence LessigAuthor, The Future of Ideas— • —Cory Doctorow doesn’t just write about the future - I think he lives there.Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn’t just a really good read, it’s also,like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland ofTomorrow today, and while you’re there, why not drop by Frontierland, andthe Haunted Mansion as well? (It’s the Mansion that’s the haunted heart ofthis book.)

Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future - a dizzying, yetrather pleasant sensation, as if I’m spiraling down the tracks of SpaceMountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever!Kelly LinkAuthor, Stranger Things Happen— • —Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and excitingscience fiction story I’ve read in the last few years. I love page-turners,especially when they are as unusual as this novel. I predict big things forDown and Out—it could easily become a breakout genre-buster.Mark FrauenfelderContributing Editor, Wired Magazine Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world.Not only that, but money’s been abolished and somebody’s developed theCure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society—and make sure you’restrapped in tight, because it’s going to be a wild ride.

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In a world whereeveryone’s wishes can come true, one man returns to the original,crumbling city of dreams—Disney World. Here in the spiritual center of theBitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve the original, human faceof the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasinglyalien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated,human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny,mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like aprecious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, thetrue from the false.Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate EarlyAdopter—uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yetbehind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all payheed to. The future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it’s hardto see where we’re going.

But at least with this book Doctorow has given usa map of the park.Karl SchroederAuthor, Permanence— • —Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I’ve come across inyears. He starts out at the point where older SF writers’ speculations end.It’s a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie.Rudy RuckerAuthor, Spaceland

Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he’salways one of the first to notice a major incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle fornews from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about aworld that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, fromreputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where tolook, and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture.Howard RheingoldAuthor, Smart Mobs— • —Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions ofthose whose realities remain uncorrupted - though that should be enoughrecommendation to read his work. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isblack comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering ourconsensual hallucination to the regime.

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Fun to read, but difficult to sleepafterwards.Douglas RushkoffAuthor of Cyberia and Media Virus!— • —“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputationeconomy, and Ray Kurzweil’s transhuman future. As much fun as NealStephenson’s Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas aboutsocial changes cascading from the frontiers of science.”Tim O’ReillyPublisher and Founder, O’Reilly and Associates— • —Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and thenwrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn’t put the book down.Bruce SchneierAuthor, Secrets and Lies Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired worldof the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you’re going tofind.

Gardner DozoisEditor, Asimov’s SF— • —Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping,fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation fromtoday’s technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and definesthe spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remakeourselves and our world.Mitch KaporFounder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation

A Note About This Book, February 12, 2004As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I released thisbook a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons licensethat allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing anyfurther permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in theservice of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way intocultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked outvery satisfactorily.When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the nextsection, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's mostrestrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge.

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Iwanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooledby their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands betweenus and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though Ihad the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime wouldserve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to dosomething very foolish indeed.It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection:A Place So Foreign and Eight Morehttp://craphound.com/placeand a second novel:Eastern Standard Tribehttp://craphound.com/estin this fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotiveengine. I am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance for awriter!) at the way that this has all worked out.And so now I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge.

Today, in coincidencewith my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Bookshttp://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commons license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is alicense that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" this book —you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio and filmadaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes, youname it.

A number of you assumed that you had my blessing to do this inthe first place, and I can't say that I've been at all put out by the delightfuland creative derivative works created from this book, but now you have myexplicit blessing, and I hope you'll use it.Here's the license in summary:You are free:• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work• to make derivative worksUnder the following conditions:Attribution. You must give the original author credit.Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.Share Alike.

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If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you maydistribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.• For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licenseterms of this work.• Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from theauthor.Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.And here is the license in full:Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRMAND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES. DISTRIBUTION OF

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A Note About This Book, January 9, 2003“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It’s an actual, no-foolin’ words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books inNew York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by followinglinks like this one:http://www.craphound.com/down/buy.phpSo, what’s with this file? Good question.I’m releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email itto a friend, and, if you’re addicted to dead trees, you can even print it.Why am I doing this thing? Well, it’s a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot ofpromotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we riseand fall based on word-of-mouth. I’m not bad at word-of-mouth.

I have ablog, Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net), where I do a lot of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things that I like.And telling people about stuff I like is way, way easier if I can just send it to’em. Way easier.What’s more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music andmovies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. Inthe brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of theInternet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more,they’ve done it for cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I’ma stone infovore and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frissonof futurosity.Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people aregonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and aserious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot.

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It’s your basicend-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer,end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.I’m especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books (http://www.tor.com) and my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden(http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite) for being hep enough to let me try outthis experiment.All that said, here’s the deal: I’m releasing this book under a licensedeveloped by the Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/).This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license agreements forthe distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employedby the Free/Open Source Software movement. It’s a great project, and I’mproud to be a part of it.Here's a summary of the licence:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy,distribute, display, and perform the work.

In return,licensees must give the original author credit.Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy,distribute, display, and perform the work. In return,licensees may not use the work for commercialpurposes—unless they get the licensor's permission.No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others tocopy, distribute, display and perform only unalteredcopies of the work—not derivative works based on it.The full terms of the license are here:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode

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PrologueI lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the BitchunSociety, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize myboyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death ofthe workplace and of work.I never thought I’d live to see the day when Keep A-Movin’ Dan woulddecide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him,sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, allrawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitelycomfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate,and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus inToronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up atthe Grad Students’ Union—the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on abusy Friday night, spring-ish.

I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool atthe scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodiesshifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of cigarettejunk and empties, clearly encamped.Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we’re going to have to geta pre-nup.”I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being calledson, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime thathe could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little andapologized.He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender’shead. “Don’t worry about it. I’m probably a little over accustomed topersonal space.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard anyone on-world talk aboutpersonal space.

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With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero,the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with themigratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You’ve been jaunting?”I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant’sexperience to deadheading.He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I’m into the kind of macho shitheaderythat you only come across on-world. Jaunting’s for play; I need work. ” Thebar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had toresize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. Itried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then theirinvoluntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let aprideful grin show.“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful. ”He must’ve seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history.

“Wait,don’t go doing that—I’ll tell you about it, you really got to know.“Damn, you know, it’s so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.You’d think you’d really miss ’em, but you don’t.”And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benightedcorners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve,and choke on petrochem waste. It’s amazing that these communities survivemore than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outliveour detractors. The missionaries don’t have such a high success rate—youhave to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that’s alreadysuccessfully resisted nearly a century’s worth of propaganda—but whenyou convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give.More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after theyaren’t heard from for a decade or so.

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I’d never met one in the flesh before.“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked.“Figured it out, huh? I’ve just come off my fifth in twentyyears—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne MountainNORAD site, still there a generation later. ” He sandpapered his whiskerswith his fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life’s savingsvanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle.Plenty of those, though.”He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance ofthe mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle,beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching themtoward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn’t remember why they hadn’twanted to be a part of it from the start.

Now they were mostly off-world,exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies anddeadheading through the dull times en route.“I guess it’d be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. Theythink of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn upfor when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth,booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They justcan’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know they exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough and hard. ” He rubbedhis chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, thereal rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like analternate history of humanity—what if we’d taken the Free Energy, but notdeadheading? What if we’d taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill,not for people who didn’t want to be bored on long bus-rides?

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Or nohyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different andwonderful.”I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myselfsaying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let’s see, dying,starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain andmisery. I know I sure miss it.”Keep A-Movin’ Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?”I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren’t any junkies anymore!”He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie is, right? Junkiesdon’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everythingwas, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can’t remember what it waslike to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough, thatwe might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don’t remember what it was liketo take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it felt like to havethem pay off.”He had a point.

Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, andalready ready to toss it all in and do something, anything, else. He had apoint—but I wasn’t about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chancewhen I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love . . . And whatabout the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for tenthousand years! Tell me that’s not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almosteveryone I’d known in my eighty-some years were deadheading or jauntingor just gone. Lonely days, then.“Brother, that’s committing half-assed suicide. The way we’re going, they’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t just switch ’em off when it comes timeto reanimate. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a little crowdedaround here.”I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights.

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“Uh-huh, just likethe world was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before FreeEnergy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold.We fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. I’m gonna be herein ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I’ll do it the long wayaround.”He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been anyof the other grad students, I’d have assumed he was grepping for somebolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew hewas thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazyas hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-artwas a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizablyhuman in a hundred centuries? Me, I’m not interested in being a post-person.

I’m going to wake up one day, and I’m going to say, ’Well, I guessI’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped payingattention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid moreattention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see ifthere’s anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a fewmore? Why do anything so final?”He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, makingme feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I suppose it’s becausenothing else is. I’ve always known that someday, I was going to stopmoving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it.

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There’ll come aday when I don’t have anything left to do, except stop.”— • —On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, because of hiscowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to takeover every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffiea few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as heaccumulated more esteem from the people he met.I’d pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings fromthe symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at theGazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I’d expended all therespect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies.I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum asexotic as Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, the legendary missionary who visited theonly places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society.

I can’t say for surewhy he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he’d likedmy symphonies, and he’d read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to saythere. But I think it came down to us having a good time needling eachother.I’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, ofthe certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of theunimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He’d tell me that deadheadingwas a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspection andcreativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory.This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times withoutresolving.

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I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essenceof money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’tstarve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy yousecurity and peace. By measuring the thing that money reallyrepresented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—youmore accurately gauged your success.And then he’d lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led tomy allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien specieswith wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressinghomogeneity to the world.On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans andone prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness waspresent via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They allliked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in the sweet,flower-stinking streets.He’d gone.

The Anthro major he’d been torturing with his war-storiessaid that they’d wrapped up that morning, and he’d headed to the walledcity of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of USMarines who’d settled there and cut themselves off from the BitchunSociety.So I went to Disney World.In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabinreserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen and stackedlike cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one taking the trip inrealtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out thewindows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around theturbulence, and wondered when I’d see Dan next.

Chapter Chapter 1

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My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enoughthat it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was second-generationDisney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that tookover the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was,quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed.It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from hershining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in theanimatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars inKissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of theLiberty Belle’s riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag overFort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight.

The Magic Kingdomwas all closed up and every last guest had been chased out the gateunderneath the Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe aheavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together whilethe cicadas sang.I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic inhaving my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight,hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles, breathing thewarm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gave me abutterfly kiss under my jaw.“Her name was McGill,” I sang, gently.“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones.“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang.I’d been startled to know that she knew the Beatles. They’d been oldnews in my youth, after all. But her parents had given her a thorough—ifeclectic—education. “Want to do a walk-through?” she asked.

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It was one of her favoriteduties, exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, afterthe horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings ofthe magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship.“I’m a little pooped. Let’s sit a while longer, if you don’t mind.”She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old man. ” She reached upand gently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think theage difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting it get tome.“I think I’ll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, ifyou just give me a moment to rest my bursitis. ” I felt her smile against myshirt.

She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghosts anddance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try and stare downthe marble busts in the library that followed your gaze as you passed.I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watching thewater and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard a soft pinginside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I’ve got a call.”“Tell them you’re busy,” she said.“I will,” I said, and answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.”“Hi, Julius. It’s Dan. You got a minute?”I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately, thoughit’d been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. I mutedthe subvocal and said, “Lil, I’ve got to take this. Do you mind?”“Oh, no, not at all,” she sarcased at me.

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She sat up and pulled out hercrack pipe and lit up.“Dan,” I subvocalized, “long time no speak.”“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob.I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can Ihelp?” she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phoneto full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm.“Where you at, Dan?” I asked.“Down here, in Orlando. I’m stuck out on Pleasure Island.”“All right,” I said. “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer’s Club, upstairs onthe couch by the door. I’ll be there in—” I shot a look at Lil, who knew thecastmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me. “Tenminutes.”“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. ” He had his voice back under control. Iswitched off.“What’s up?” Lil asked.

“I’m not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he’s got aproblem.”Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture.“There,” she said. “I’ve just dumped the best route to Pleasure Island toyour public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?”I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and booteddown the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. I took theslidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out to Pleasure Island.— • —I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-uptrophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmembers wereworking the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests.Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He hadraccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly.

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As Iapproached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had droppedto nearly zero.“Jesus,” I said, as I sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.”He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case,they’re bang-on.”“You want to talk about it?” I asked.“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year every night atmidnight; I think that’d be a little too much for me right now.”I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared with Lil,out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minute ride,hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my runabout withstinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He had his eyesclosed, and in repose he looked dead. I could hardly believe that this wasmy vibrant action-hero pal of yore.Surreptitiously, I called Lil’s phone. “I’m bringing him home,” Isubvocalized. “He’s in rough shape.

Not sure what it’s all about.”“I’ll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Loveyou.”“Back atcha, kid,” I said.As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he openedhis eyes. “You’re a pal, Jules. ” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to thinkof who I could call, and you were the only one. I’ve missed you, bud.”“Lil said she’d put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you needit.”Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow on theside table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I’m Lil,” she said.“Dan,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surpriseddisapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it’s important; butto the kids, it’s the world. Someone without any is automatically suspect.

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Iwatched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand onher jeans. “Coffee?” she said.“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, and slumped on the sofa.She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table. “I’ll letyou boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom.“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don’t mind. I think it’d help if I could talkto someone . . . younger, too.”She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the second-gencastmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair. Shepulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crack period before shewas born, just after they made it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw herand her friends light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her andtaking the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back.Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped hiscoffee.

It was clear he was trying to figure out where to start.“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils down to,”he said.“Who doesn’t?” I said.“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I’d run out of thingsto do, things to see. I knew that I’d finish some day. You remember, weused to argue about it. I swore I’d be done, and that would be the end of it.And now I am. There isn’t a single place left on-world that isn’t part of theBitchun Society. There isn’t a single thing left that I want any part of.”“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.”“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I’m done. It’s over.”“So do it,” Lil said.“I can’t,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like ababy, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went into thekitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me.

I sat alongside him andawkwardly patted his back.“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.”“Dan?” I said, quietly.He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands. “Thanks,”he said. “I’ve tried to make a go of it, really I have. I’ve spent the last eightyears in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – del 2

did some followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me.I smoked a lot of hash. It didn’t help. So, one morning I woke up and wentto the bazaar and said good bye to the friends I’d made there. Then I went toa pharmacy and had the man make me up a lethal injection. He wished megood luck and I went back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo allafternoon, then I decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning anddid it all over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn’t have theguts. I just didn’t have the guts. I’ve stared down the barrels of a hundredguns, had a thousand knives pressed up against my throat, but I didn’t havethe guts to press that button.”“You were too late,” Lil said.We both turned to look at her.“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You’re pathetic. If you killedyourself right now, you’d just be a washed-up loser who couldn’t hack it.

Ifyou’d done it ten years earlier, you would’ve been going out on top—achampion, retiring permanently. ” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk.Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes, it’slike she’s on a different planet. All I could do was sit there, horrified, andshe was happy to discuss the timing of my pal’s suicide.But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it, too.“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed.“Well, don’t just sit there,” she said. “You know what you’ve got to do.”“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone.She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He’s got to getback on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get thatWhuffie up, too. Then he can kill himself with dignity.”It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking aneyebrow at her and thinking hard.

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“How old did you say you were?” heasked.“Twenty-three,” she said.“Wish I’d had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a sigh,straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job done?”I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded.“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.”“Beat doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said.“Good night, then,” I said.

Chapter Chapter 2

Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil’s folks had taken over therunning of Liberty Square with a group of other interested, compatiblesouls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of Whuffie, and anyone whocame around and tried to take it over would be so reviled by the guests theywouldn’t find a pot to piss in. Or they’d have such a wicked, radicalapproach that they’d ouster Lil’s parents and their pals, and do a better job.It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne—agroup who’d worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved offto other pursuits—some of them had gone to school, some of them hadmade movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help startthings up. A few had deadheaded for a couple decades.They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update theattractions.

The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservativesin the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of aPark that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-sidewith the rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might makea successful go of it.So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meagerattractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belleriverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attractionto come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers.I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering withLincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everythingrunning at speed, just in case.

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She could swap out a dead bot for a backup infive minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit.It had been two weeks since Dan’s arrival, and though I’d barely seenhim in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, somethingbarely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch.My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his roundsof the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. Hisexcitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into hisover-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.“You just missed Dan,” she said. She had her head in Lincoln’s chest,working with an autosolder and a magnifier.

Bent over, red hair tied back ina neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweatand machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewherebackstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggledappreciatively. “He’s looking better.”His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I rememberedhim. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that hadstartled me when I saw him at the Adventurer’s Club. “What did he want?”“He’s been hanging out with Debra—he wanted to make sure I knewwhat she’s up to.”Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil’s parents.She’d spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she hadher way, we’d tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park andreplace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.The problem was that she was really good at coding sims.

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Her GreatMovie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the Star Wars sequence hadalready inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits.She’d leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland ad-hocsto rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areas were piledhigh with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It wasterrifying to walk through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personallysupervised, and we’d thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built aPirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinesepirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity andruin.

The Florida iteration would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinesecousin—the AI-driven sims that communicated with each other and withthe guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through ofthe aquatic necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitchand yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking storm—but withWestern themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air;liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner ofthe pirates who plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulkyride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.“So, what’s she up to?”Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter’s mechanical guts and made acomical moue of worry.

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“She’s rehabbing the Pirates—and doing anincredible job. They’re ahead of schedule, they’ve got good net-buzz, thefocus groups are cumming themselves. ” The comedy went out of herexpression, baring genuine worry.She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him.Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum andwhine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kickedin low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not, byforce, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. Ifdestruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and itsfinisher. ” She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again.“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again,powering him down.

She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat,then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket.I put my arm around her shoulders. “You’re doing all you can—and it’sgood work,” I said. I’d fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking,voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush ofembarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for betterreassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze andlet her go.She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It’ll be fine, ofcourse,” she said.

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“I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will doher job very, very well, and make things even better than they are now.That’s not so bad.”This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the lasttime we’d talked, but you don’t live more than a century without learningwhen to point out that sort of thing and when not to.My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weeklybackup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. Iwaved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once Iwas close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready toback up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it.“Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from abackup—one of my enduring fears was that I’d forget the backup altogetherand leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder.

I’dlost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.“It’s Dan. ” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behindhim—children’s laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp ofthousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It’s prettyimportant.”“Can it wait for fifteen?” I asked.“Sure—see you in fifteen.”I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD,dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finishedand started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and mylife flashed before my eyes.

Chapter Chapter 3

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The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores frombackup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Somepeople get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won’t participate in it.Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, youknow, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn’t need to convertits detractors, just outlive them.The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. I wasSCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course, I don’tremember the incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-siteand having read the dive-logs of my SCUBA-buddies, I’ve reconstructedthe events.I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottleand mask.

I’d also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn’t wearing it—the blood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and myskin. The caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twistedlike intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there was ahollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters skitteredover the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as bright as jewelsdarted and executed breath-taking precision maneuvers as I disturbed theirbusy days. I do some of my best thinking under water, and I’m oftenslipping off into dangerous reverie at depth. Normally, my diving buddiesensure that I don’t hurt myself, but this time I got away from them,spidering forward into a tiny hole.Where I got stuck.My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with thehilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder.

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My buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottle andbuoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others exchanged handsignals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. Suddenly, I wasthrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared into the cave, minus my vestand bottle. I’d apparently attempted to cut through my vest’s straps andmanaged to sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of seawater, I’d thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrous patch ofspindly fire-coral.

I’d inhaled another lungful of water and kicked madly fora tiny hole in the cave’s ceiling, whence my buddies retrieved me shortlythereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts from the stingingcoral.In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; theprocedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic.Luckily, I’d had one made just before I left for Cuba, a few weeks earlier.My next-most-recent backup was three years old, dating from thecompletion of my second symphony.They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone atToronto General. As far as I knew, I’d laid down in the backup clinic onemoment and arisen the next. It took most of a year to get over the feelingthat the whole world was putting a monstrous joke over on me, that thedrowned corpse I’d seen was indeed my own.

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In my mind, the rebirth wasfigurative as well as literal—the missing time was enough that I foundmyself hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends.I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediatelypounced on the fact that I’d gone to Disney World to spend a week sortingout my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a crazylady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself at DisneyWorld. When I told him that I was going to live there someday, he asked meif that would mean that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ranmy fingers through Lil’s sweet red curls, I thought of that remark andsighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend Dan hadbeen so prescient.The next time I died, they’d improved the technology somewhat. I’d hada massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in themiddle of a house-league hockey game.

By the time they cut my helmetaway, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sottedmess. I’d been lax in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they wokeme gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of the missinginterval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt at homeagain in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself in Disney

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World, methodically flensing away the relationships I’d built and startingafresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and working the heavy-metalharvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T.After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity toappreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening tenyears. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to mythird death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from theAdventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan’s ownbackup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feelingpreternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way becauseof certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in placewhen I was restored.Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil’s tired, smiling face was limned withhairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail.

She took my hand and kissed thesmooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with awarm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really lovedme. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened mymouth and said, to my surprise, “I have to pee.”Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, andthumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with abrand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of myankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelousflexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee wasmissing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When Ilooked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller andperkier. The familiar crow’s-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrowswere gone. I had a day’s beard all over—head, face, pubis, arms, legs.

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I ranmy hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of it all. I wasbriefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling of newnessforever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense ofurgency over my murder was creeping up on me.I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom.The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose,effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room andhelped me to the bed. “Well, this sucks,” I said.I’d gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quick cutsof security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one atthe exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland.

Iseemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began toweave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I’d developed when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis.I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the TikiRoom, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut and painted tolook like long grass.Fuzzy shots now, from Dan’s POV, of me moving closer to him, passingclose to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearingenvironmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Centerlogomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Tradersshop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan’s gaze flicks away, to the TikiRoom’s entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, justas the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic pistol, like apenis with a tail that coils around her arm.

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Casually, grinning, she raises herarm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger whenshe’s uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan’s gaze flicks back tome. I’m pitching over, my lungs bursting out of my chest and spreadingbefore me like wings, spinal gristle and viscera showering the guests beforeme. A piece of my nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead,causing him to blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there,but the girl with the pistol is long gone.The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and thegirl is grayed-out. We’re limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the SwissFamily Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts to movetowards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol.

The self-guidingsmart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground level,weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below the speed ofsound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my spine,detonating once it’s entered my chest cavity.The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward theAdventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up,following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking andweaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping BeautyCastle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland,near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again.“Has anyone ID’d the girl?” I asked, once I’d finished reliving theevents. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fistsclenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen herbefore.

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The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope. ” The Seven Sisterswere a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them.“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of thepith helmet purchase?”Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months:only three matched the girl’s apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances areshe stole it.”“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind’s eye, I saw my lungs bursting outof my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. Isaw the girl’s smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me.“It wasn’t random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed toyou—that means that she’d gotten close to you at some point.”Right—which meant that she’d been to Disney World in the last tenyears. That narrowed it down, all right.“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said.“We don’t know,” Lil said.

“Something wrong with the cameras. Welost her and she never reappeared. ” She sounded hot and angry—she tookequipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.“Who’d want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. Itwas the first time I’d been murdered, but I didn’t need to be a drama-queenabout it.Dan’s eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things forreasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the worldcouldn’t hope to understand. I’ve seen a few assassinations, and they nevermade sense afterwards. ” He stroked his chin. “Sometimes, it’s better tolook for temperament, rather than motivation: who could do something likethis?”Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who’dvisited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it downconsiderably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been fourdays since my murder.

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I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at theHaunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just tokeep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while I was churningaway in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.“What are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed.“I’ve got a shift. I’m running late.”“You’re in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerkedfree of her.“I’m fine—good as new. ” I barked a humorless laugh. “I’m not goingto let those bastards disrupt my life any more.” Those bastards? I thought—when had I decided that there was morethan one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was allplanned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly.Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a second,” he said. “Youneed rest.”I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I’ll decide that,” I said.

He steppedaside.“I’ll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.”I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathyWhuffie—but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw’em.I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as Iput it in gear and sped out.“Are you sure you’re all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabouttaking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac.“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said. “I’m as good as new.”“Funny choice of words,” he said. “Some would say that you werenew.”I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no oneelse is making that claim. Who cares if I’ve been restored from a backup?”“All I’m saying is, there’s a difference between you and an exact copyof you, isn’t there?”I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, butI couldn’t resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actuallyhelped calm me down some.

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Dan was that kind of friend, a person whoknew you better than you knew yourself. “So you’re saying that if you wereobliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn’t be youanymore?”“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated isdifferent from not being destroyed at all, right?”“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You’re being destroyed andrecreated a trillion times a second.”“On a very, very small level—”“What difference does that make?”“Fine, I’ll concede that. But you’re not really an atom-for-atom copy.You’re a clone, with a copied brain—that’s not the same as quantumdestruction.”“Very nice thing to say to someone who’s just been murdered, pal. Yougot a problem with clones?”And we were off and running.

— • —The Mansion’s cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each ofthem made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starchedshoulder of my butler’s costume, letting me know that if there was anythingthey could do for me . . . I gave them all a fixed smile and tried toconcentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, how theydispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally takingthe eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interference forme with the other castmembers.He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and wewalked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as Irounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area.Dan groaned. “They did it already,” he said.I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board:Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel.

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“Excuse ourmess!” the sign declared. “We’re renovating to serve you better!”I spotted one of Debra’s cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfiedsmile on his face. He’d started off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but hadhad his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he lookedalmost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra hadestablished a toehold in Liberty Square.“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hourafter you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They’repromising not to touch the Mansion.”“You didn’t mention this,” I said, hotly.“We thought you’d jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, butthere’s no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone’s got analibi; furthermore, they’ve all offered to submit their backups for proof.”“Right,” I said. “Right. So they just happened to have plans for a newHall standing by.

And they just happened to file them after I got shot, whenall our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It’s all a big coincidence.”Dan shook his head. “We’re not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it’s acoincidence. Debra’s the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standingby, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not amurderer.”I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that Isought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeatseeped through me, saturating me.Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinningwryly. “Posit,” he said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you up so that she could take over.”I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing hewould do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the olddays.

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“All right, I’ve posited it.”“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island oreven the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspiciousmove?”“All right,” I said, warming to the challenge. “One: I’m importantenough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation.Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can’t rehab it without peopleseeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra’s coming off of a decade inBeijing, where subtlety isn’t real important.”“Sure,” Dan said, “sure. ” Then he launched an answering salvo, andwhile I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked meout to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed weweren’t at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed.— • —With all the Hall’s animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil hadmore time on her hands than she knew what to do with.

She hung aroundthe little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at thewindows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Floridaair. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and Ipecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she couldwatch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience.It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput withoutharming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of thequeue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirtyseconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience theMansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra’s people would suffer if theymade a move on it.

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So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found threeseconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the DoomBuggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: byexpanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenesmore quickly.I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing andinvited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out.It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocshad enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate anoff-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assortedboo-spookery from the hidden speakers.The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid’s uniform, hereyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor.

She gave us acold, considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey requests morebodies.”As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived togive my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and sawDebra’s elfin comrade looming over Lil’s shoulder. My smile died on mylips.The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something inthere—some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn’t know what tomake of. He looked away immediately. I’d known that Debra would havespies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to makethis the best show I knew how.It’s subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil hadalready slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, themost recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried tolead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attentiondirected at the new spotlights.

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When the newly remastered soundtrack camefrom behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonalroom, I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast myeyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so theywere watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling,jerking against the noose at its neck.The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded theDoom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as wemade our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy andan instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed hissidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelier andinto the corridor where the portraits’ eyes watched us.

Two years before, I’daccelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the DoomBuggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput capfrom 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the otherseconds I’d shaved away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy broughtme and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another, and when Ibrushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold andsweaty. He was nervous! He was nervous. What did he have to be nervousabout? I was the one who’d been murdered—maybe he was nervousbecause he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks athim, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the DoomBuggy’s pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggybehind us, with one of the Mansion’s regular castmembers.

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I rang hiscochlea and subvocalized: “Get ready to jump out on my signal. ” Anyoneleaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ridesystem. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of explaining,which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra’s crony.We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors,where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against thehinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it—if Iwanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to doit? The attic staircase—the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A coldclarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase,dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and thatwould be it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? Heseemed terribly nervous as it was.

I swiveled in my seat and looked himstraight in the eye.He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring athim, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down thestaircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the cemeteryand the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quakinggroundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out asubvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride system shuddered to astop.“Jules?” came Dan’s voice in my cochlea. “You all right?”He’d heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of theBuggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture ofsurprise and pity.“It’s all right, it’s all right.

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False alarm. ” I paged Lil and subvocalizedto her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right.I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes fixedahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I’d beenrunning. The demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off three seconds, I’dadded thirty. I wanted to cry.— • —I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaningheavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked.And I had no reason to be. Sure, I’d been murdered, but what had it costme? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup intomy new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backupterminal up until my death. I wasn’t one of those nuts who took deathseriously.

It wasn’t like they’d done something permanent.In the meantime, I had done something permanent: I’d dug Lil’s grave alittle deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I’dacted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, andswallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask mewhat had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing theelf.He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someonerunning a language module. “Hi there. We haven’t been introduced, but Iwanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I’m Tim Fung.”I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in theclose heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like abark it sounded. Careful, I thought, no need to escalate the hostilities. “It’skind of you to say that.

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I like what you-all have done with the Pirates.”He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he’d just been givenhigh praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it’s pretty good—thesecond time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarifythe vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? Imean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack ofsquatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out togive the children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while shewas evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine thedesigns, revisit them without the floor show.”I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real struggle for thead-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debraherself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a series ofprepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems.

It was faster thanrevising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuingexpedience.“I’m starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure,” I said, andnodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him lookembarrassed, then horrified.“We would never touch the Mansion,” he said. “It’s perfect!”Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked concerned—now that I thought of it, they’d both seemed incrediblyconcerned about me since the day I was revived.Dan’s gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. Theylooked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I wasan emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil’s big, scarred hand in mine as soon asshe was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively.

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She had changed outof her maid’s uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabricbreathed in time with her own respiration.“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me warstories from the Pirates project in Beijing.”Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hard work,”Dan said.It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally aninstantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. Ipinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered frompeople who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn’texpect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credenceto the rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher than my own. Iregretted my nonlinear behavior even more.

Respect from the elf—Tim, Ihad to remember to call him Tim—would carry a lot of weight in everycamp that mattered.Dan’s score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile.He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiouslybacktraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra’s people hadaccorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he hadscraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance infront of their wondrous Pirates.I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that gotme killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start,realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. Icould have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist ofthe conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So,how’re things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?”

I asked Tim.Lil shot me a cautioning look. She’d ceded the Hall to Debra’s ad-hocs,that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention tothe almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-naturedcooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses topounce on her work.Tim gave us the same half-grin he’d greeted me with. On his smooth,pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. “We’re doing good

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stuff, I think. Debra’s had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the olddays, before she went to China. We’re replacing the whole thing withbroadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents’ lives: newspaperheadlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It’ll be likehaving each President inside you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debrasaid we’re going to flash-bake the Presidents on your mind!” His eyesglittered in the twilight.Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim’sdescription struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattlingaround a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It madethe idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in along withit perversely appealing.“Wow,” I said. “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind forphysical plant?”

The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbedfrom a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it wouldbe like redesigning the stars-and-bars.“That’s not really my area,” Tim said. “I’m a programmer. But I couldhave one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want.”“That would be fine,” Lil said, taking my elbow. “I think we should beheading home, now, though. ” She began to tug me away. Dan took myother elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly weddingcake in the twilight.“That’s too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on thenew Hall. I’m sure they’d love to have you drop by.”The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sitby their fire, learn their secrets. “That would be great!” I said, too loudly.My head was buzzing slightly. Lil’s hands fell away.“But we’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” Lil said.

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“You’ve got ashift at eight, and I’m running into town for groceries. ” She was lying, butshe was telling me that this wasn’t her idea of a smart move. But my faithwas unshakeable.“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I’ll be right here when it starts. I’ll justgrab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorailback in time to change. All right?”Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella’sRoyal Table, remember? I made reservations.”“Aw, we can eat any time,” I said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.”“It sure is,” Dan said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?”He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, If he’sgoing to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him. I was past caring—I was going to beard the lion in his den!Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it’s settled!

Let’s go.”— • —On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sendinghim straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk withhim and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansionwith Tim, win him over.Debra’s people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, theanimatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra wassprawled in Lincoln’s armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extendedbefore her. The Hall’s normal smells of ozone and cleanliness wereoverridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple ofdays to tear down.She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she’d been born with, albeitone that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It waspatrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down.

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She wasat least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense thatshe picked this age because it was one that afforded boundless reserves ofenergy.She didn’t deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously atme. The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched overterminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics,even Debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously.Did you have me killed? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she’dbeen killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big dealfor her.“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You knowDan, right?”Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?”Dan’s poker face didn’t twitch a muscle. “Hello, Debra,” he said. He’dbeen hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to theMansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use.

They knew whathe was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he workedlike a mule, so they tolerated him. But it seemed like he’d violated aboundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he wasmore a part of Debra’s ad-hoc than Lil’s was shattered by my presence.Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?”Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not. You’ll like this,guys.”

Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over theanimatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose,packed up, stacked. They hadn’t wasted a moment—they’d spent a weektearing down a show that had run for more than a century. The scrim thatthe projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground intothe floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil.Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing wasoff, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewnabout it. It had the look of a prototype.“This is it—our uplink. So far, we’ve got a demo app running on it:Lincoln’s old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch onguest access and I’ll core-dump it to you. It’s wild.”I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access.

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Tim pointed a fingerat the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln:every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, hiswarts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I was Lincoln, for a moment,and then it passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery flavor ofcannon-fire and chewing tobacco.I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra’s Hall of thePresidents was going to be a hit.Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as hisexpression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly atme.“That’s really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.”Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming—it’s myspecialty.”Debra spoke up from behind him—she’d sauntered over while Dan wasgetting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot.

There’ssomething wonderful about having memories implanted, like you’re reallyworking your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all.”Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It’s nice andsoft, right?”I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debrasaid: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He’s wrong, of course. We don’t want to simulate the experience ofwatching the show—we want to transcend it.”Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that isby making the experience human, a mile in the presidents’ shoes. Empathy-driven. What’s the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone’s brain?”

Chapter Chapter 4

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One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:1. That Debra’s people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,2. That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make aplay for the Haunted Mansion,3. That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strikeagainst them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in theHall of Presidents, Debra’s people working with effortless cooperation bornof the adversity they’d faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team,making suggestions with body language as much as with words, leavingbursts of inspired activity in her wake.It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc thistight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc?

Hell, callthem what they were: an army.Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Timfinished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation withDebra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around,as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. TheMansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into yourexperience on each successive ride.Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride asI switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory,and, gingerly, I executed it.God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs andmules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashedagainst the inside of my skull and rebounded.

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The first pass through, therehad been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spilling over. It waspanicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten myown personality, and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded,leaving behind a rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want tojump.“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was . . .” Words failed me. I wanted to hughim. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directlyimprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; thethick, deaf ears.Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne.“You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seatwhere Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat.Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire.How dare they?

The wonderful compromises of technology and expensethat had given us the Disney rides—rides that had entertained the world fortwo centuries and more—could never compete head to head with what theywere working on.My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn’t they dothis somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved torealize this? They could build this tech anywhere—they could distribute itonline and people could access it from their living rooms!But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the oldWhuffie—they’d make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hocwhere three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a park twicethe size of Manhattan.I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and thePark. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chillthat crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat.

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I turned tocontemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since myboyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated theBitchun Society, inspired it.I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He gruntedunintelligibly in my cochlea.“They did it—they killed me. ” I knew they had, and I was glad. It madewhat I had to do next easier.“Oh, Jesus. They didn’t kill you—they offered their backups,remember? They couldn’t have done it.”“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, andthey fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It’s all too neatand tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell methat you think they just had these plans lying around and moved on themwhen they could.”Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have beenstretching.

The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crewsscurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don’t. It’s not the firsttime we’ve disagreed. So now what?”“Now we save the Mansion,” I said. “Now we fight back.”“Oh, shit,” Dan said.I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.— • —My opportunity came later that week. Debra’s ad-hocs wereshowboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the keyinfluencers in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out.

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Asmooth run would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteedcontinued support while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them.There were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachmentto the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra’s people came up with wouldhave to answer their longing.“I’m going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted therunabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him togauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.“I’m not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It’s better that she doesn’tknow—plausible deniability.”“And me?” he said. “Don’t I need plausible deniability?”“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. You’re an outsider. You can make the casethat you were working on your own—gone rogue. ” I knew it wasn’t fair.Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirtyscheme, he’d have to start over again. I knew it wasn’t fair, but I didn’tcare.

I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It’s good versusevil, Dan. You don’t want to be a post-person. You want to stay human.The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience.We’re physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses.What Debra’s people are building—it’s hive-mind shit. Directly implantingthoughts! Jesus! It’s not an experience, it’s brainwashing! You gotta knowthat. ” I was pleading, arguing with myself as much as with him.I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, linedwith sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was lookingthoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about it—I’d gotten through to him.“Jules, this isn’t one of your better ideas. ” My chest tightened, and hepatted my shoulder.

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He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even whenhe was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if Debra was behind yourassassination—and that’s not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that’sthe case, we’ve got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion,competing with her head to head, that’s smart. Give it a little while and wecan come back at her, take over the Hall—even the Pirates, that’d really pissher off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination, we canchase her off right now. Sabotage is not going to do you any good. You’vegot lots of other options.”“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionallysatisfying. This way has some goddamn balls.”We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot andstalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heardDan’s door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind.We took to the utilidors grimly.

I walked past the cameras, knowing thatmy image was being archived, my presence logged. I’d picked the timing ofmy raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditionalpattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I’d made a point ofvisiting twice during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in thecommissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in therunabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be discrepant.Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and thenhugged the wall, in the camera’s blindspot. Back in my early days in thePark, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumaticwaste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s.

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The kids who grew upin the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still whiffedfaintly of the garbage bags they’d once whisked at 60 mph to the dump onthe property’s outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes were asubterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated experiences ofthe Park lost their luster.I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they hadn’tkilled me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn’t beflexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?”I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching myway under the Hall of Presidents.— • —My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn’toccur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer’s.How was I going to reach into my pockets?Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my backpants-pocket, when I couldn’t even bend my elbows?

The HERF gun wasthe crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with adirectional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hallof Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on thepremises. I’d gotten the germ of the idea during Tim’s first demo, when I’dseen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to betinkered with. Unshielded.“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube’s walls.“Yeah?” he said. He’d been silent during the journey, the sound of hispainful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my onlyindicator of his presence.“Can you reach my back pocket?”“Oh, shit,” he said.“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can youreach it or not?”I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his handgroping up my calf.

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Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tube’sfloor and his hand was pawing around my ass.“I can reach it,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t toohappy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider anapology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did hisslow burn.He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my palm—out of mypocket. “Now what?” he said.“Can you pass it up?” I asked.Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage metmy glutes. “I can’t get any further,” he said.“Fine,” I said. “You’ll have to fire it, then. ” I held my breath. Would hedo it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of thedestruction.“Aw, Jules,” he said.“A simple yes or no, Dan. That’s all I want to hear from you. ” I wasboiling with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamnthing.“Fine,” he said.“Good.

Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.”I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I’d confiscated from amischievous guest a decade before, when they’d had a brief vogue.“Hang on to it,” I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bitof evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next servicehatch, near the parking lot, where I’d stashed an identical change of clothesfor both of us.— • —We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra’s ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, acollection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behindthe crowd.

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He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiledback, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down inflames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into theauditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and freshelectronics.We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, whileDebra, dressed in Lincoln’s coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech.There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now,something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst.Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round ofapplause, and they started the demo.Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face asnothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my publicdirectory, no rush of sensation, nothing.

I turned to Lil to make some snottyremark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath comingin short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude ofdeep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.Nothing.I was offline.— • —Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lil’s handand walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for privateconversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that.Tears pricked her eyes.“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment’s staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river.“Tell you?” I said, dumbly.“They’re really good. They’re better than good. They’re better than us.Oh, God.”Offline, I couldn’t find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter.Offline, I tried it without help. “I don’t think so.

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I don’t think they’ve gotsoul, I don’t think they’ve got history, I don’t think they’ve got any kind ofconnection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they visit thisplace for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that. ” I’moffline, and they’re not—what the hell happened?“It’ll be okay, Lil. There’s nothing in that place that’s better than us.Different and new, but not better. You know that—you’ve spent more timein the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how muchwork there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a coupleweeks possibly be better that this thing we’ve been maintaining for all theseyears?”She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,”she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flushof her cheeks. “Sorry—it’s just shocking. Maybe you’re right. And even ifyou’re not—hey, that’s the whole point of a meritocracy, right?

The beststuff survives, everything else gets supplanted.“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let’s go congratulatethem.”As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for havingimproved her mood without artificial assistance.— • —Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall,where Debra’s ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating bypassing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in anextreme state of relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies,pipe between her teeth.She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through someinsincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied atorch to the bowl.“Thanks,” she said, laconically.

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“It was a team effort. ” She hugged hercronies to her, almost knocking their heads together.Lil said, “What’s your timeline, then?”Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones,requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for thatprocess stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they weren’t floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—aFaraday cage. That’s why the HERF gun hadn’t done anything; that’s whythey’d been so casual about working with the shielding off their computers.With my eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and upthe walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling.

Once again, I was struck bythe evolvedness of Debra’s ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China hadarmored them against the kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzybunnies in Florida—myself included—came up with.For instance, I didn’t think there was a single castmember in the Parkoutside of Deb’s clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once I’dmade that leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they stagedanother one—and another, and another. Whatever they could get away with.Debra’s spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stoppedin front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square andFantasyland. “When was the last time you backed up?” I asked her. If theycould go after me, they might go after any of us.“Yesterday,” she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking morelike an overmediated guest than a tireless castmember.“Let’s run another backup, huh?

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We should really back up at night andat lunchtime—with things the way they are, we can’t afford to lose anafternoon’s work, much less a week’s.”Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she wastired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. “You can back upthat often if you want to, Julius, but don’t tell me how to live my life,okay?”“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and it’d make me feel a lotbetter. Please?” I hated the whine in my voice.“No, Julius. No. Let’s go home and get some sleep. I want to do somework on new merch for the Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.”“For Christ’s sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I backup, then, all right?”Lil groaned and glared at me.I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh,yeah, right, I was offline.

A cool sweat broke out all over my new body.— • —Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something aboutwanting to work on some revised merch ideas she’d had. I glared at her asshe subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn’ttold her that I was offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personalbitching relative to the crises she was coping with.

Besides, I’d been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, andoften as not the system righted itself after a good night’s sleep. I could visitthe doctor in the morning if things were still screwy.So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I hadto go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. Itwas 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces,anyway?Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried torouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone.I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt ofendorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. Ipreferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I’d long agoprogrammed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except inemergencies.

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The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into thekitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee.“Why didn’t you wake me up last night? I’m one big ache from sleepingon the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in.She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct hernervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt likepunching the wall.“You wouldn’t get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the generaldirection of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift forme—the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit theImagineering shop and try some prototyping.”“Can’t. ” I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumbyplate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.“Really?” she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammedDan’s plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.“Yes. Really.

It’s your shift—fucking work it or call in sick.”Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when Iwas hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What’s wrong, honey?” she said,going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit somethingbesides the wall.“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I’ve gotreal work to do—in case you haven’t noticed, Debra’s about to eat you andyour little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. ForGod’s sake, Lil, don’t you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don’tyou have any goddamned passion?”Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said.Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of herparents threw, a kind of castmember mixer.

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She’d been just 19—apparentand real—and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, asjust another airhead castmember.Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other hand, were fascinatingpeople, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in WaltDisney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholderswho’d been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 orso, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threwher daughter’s superficiality into sharp relief.They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use.

In aworld where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel andaccess the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient torepeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over.The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had useda cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumesand name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, firstby the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. Theshareholders’ lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part ofthe magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions—putup a token resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority hadthrown in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes andpitching in.“But we knew the shareholders wouldn’t give in as easy as that,” Lil’smother said, sipping her lemonade.

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“We kept the Park running 24/7 for thenext two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight backwithout doing it in front of the guests. We’d prearranged with a couple ofairline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouringin. ” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in repose wereLil’s almost identically. It was only when she was talking that her facechanged, muscles tugging it into an expression decades older than the facethat bore it.“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota’soutside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back andforth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in asleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in threehour shifts.

That was when I met this asshole”—she chucked her husbandon the shoulder—“he’d gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake andwouldn’t budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history.”Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus, Rita, no one needsto hear about that part of it.”Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you’re an adult—if you can’t stomach hearingabout your parents’ courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin andbear it. But you don’t get to dictate the topic of conversation.”Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook herhead at Lil’s departing backside. “There’s not much fire in that generation,”she said. “Not a lot of passion. It’s our fault—we thought that Disney Worldwould be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe itwas, but . . .”

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She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gestureI’d come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren’t enough challengesfor them these days. They’re too cooperative. ” She laughed and herhusband took her hand.“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “’When we were growing up,we didn’t have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff—we took ourchances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!’” Tom wore himself older,apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better topresent a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truismamong the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wearthemselves young, men old. “We’re just a couple of Bitchunfundamentalists, I guess.”Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they telling you what apack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don’t youcome over here and have a smoke?”

I noticed that she and her cohort werepassing a crack pipe.“What’s the use?” Lil’s mother sighed.“Oh, I don’t know that it’s as bad as all that,” I said, virtually my firstwords of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there bycourtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando everyyear, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. “They’re passionateabout maintaining the Park, that’s for sure. I made the mistake of lifting aqueue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnestlecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember whocouldn’t have been more than 18. I think that they don’t have the passionfor creating Bitchunry that we have—they don’t need it—but they’ve gotplenty of drive to maintain it.”Lil’s mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn’t know whatto make of.

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I couldn’t tell if I had offended her or what.“I mean, you can’t be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn’t we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn’t have to?”“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same consideringlook on his face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing.We were talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, whonodded—“about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changedmuch in fifty or a hundred years.”I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my timeschmoozing with these two, when they wouldn’t be around when the timecame to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came—I wastalking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation hadto be strategically important.“Really?

Deadheading. ” I remember that I thought of Dan then, abouthis views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending itwhen you found yourself obsolete. He’d comforted me once, when my lastliving relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. Myuncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it.Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthood and my onlychildhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we’d spent the daybounding around the countryside on seven-league boots, sailing high overthe lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumnleaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune he knew where they stillmade cheese from cow’s milk and there’d been a thousand smells andbottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I’d long since forgotten butwhose exuberant laugh I’d remember forever.

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And it wasn’t so important,then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whateverhappened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the colorof blood and the girl’s laugh.“Have you talked to Lil about it?”Rita shook her head. “It’s just a thought, really. We don’t want to worryher. She’s not good with hard decisions—it’s her generation.”They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort,knew that they had told me too much, more than they’d intended. I driftedoff and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled alittle.Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Ritawere invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be wokenuntil their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worththeir while, and Lil and I were a hot item.Lil didn’t deal well with her parents’ decision to deadhead.

For her, itwas a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering

Polyannic castmembers.For God’s sake, Lil, don’t you ever get fucking angry about anything?Don’t you have any goddamned passion?The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, andLil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil,my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lilturned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen.She got in her runabout and went to the Park to take her shift.I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns,and felt like shit.

Chapter Chapter 5

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When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had notcome back to the house. If she’d tried to call, she would’ve gotten myvoicemail—I had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, shehadn’t been trying to reach me at all.I’d spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible,irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship,taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents andthreatening the Mansion. Even in my addled state, I knew that this waspretty unproductive, and I kept promising that I would cut it out, take ashower and some sober-ups, and get to work at the Mansion.I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in.“Jesus,” he said, shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on thesofa in my underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot.“Hey, Dan.

How’s it goin’?”He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weirdreversal of roles that we’d undergone at the U of T, when he had becomethe native, and I had become the interloper. He was the together one withthe wry looks and I was the pathetic seeker who’d burned all his reputationcapital. Out of habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stoppedbeing startled by its low score and was instead shocked by the fact that Icould check it at all. I was back online!“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismalWhuffie.“What?” he said.I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized.He started. “You were offline?”I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. “I was, but I’m not now. ” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat theworld—or at least Debra.“Let me take a shower, then let’s get to the Imagineering labs.

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I’ve got apretty kickass idea.”— • —The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab of theMansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I’d gottenwhat I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society was to bemore reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery,despite assassinations and the like.So a rehab it would be.“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,” Iexplained, “Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first DoomBuggy curve, he’d leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they wentby. It didn’t last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched outby startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn’t too comfortable for longshifts.”Dan chuckled appreciatively.

The Bitchun Society had all but doneaway with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tendingbar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure inyour off-hours.“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. You’d get aslightly different show every time. It’s like the castmembers who spiel onthe Jungleboat Cruise. They’ve each got their own patter, their own jokes,and even though the animatronics aren’t so hot, it makes the show worthseeing.”“You’re going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Danasked, shaking his head.I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifyinga pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property.“No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Notat all. But what if all of the animatronics had humanoperators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes?

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We’ll let them interactwith the guests, talk with them, scare them . . . We’ll get rid of the existinganimatronics, replace ’em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts overthe Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operatorsonline at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion . .. We’ll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts’ll be basedon popular vote. In effect, we’ll be adding another ten thousand guests tothe Mansion’s throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – del 4

castmembers.”“That’s pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI andflash-baking, but you’ll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggestMansion-fans in the world—”“And those are the very fans Debra’ll have to win over to make a playfor the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”— • —The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch theidea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My moodstarted to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminumbuildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventorssince the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocswho had built an Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thingwere the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types whowould work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool.

Not caring aboutWhuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty on both the left and righthands.Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He coulddesign, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts,sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They werecollaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in themiddle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarkedtchotchkes and gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisiblescreens.Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab,leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted by whathe saw.I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed.Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pagesstarted to roll out of a printer in the lab’s corner.

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Anyone else would havemade a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into the discussion.If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the designsshe and Suneep had come up with were more than enough. She’d beenthinking just the way I had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale of theMansion. There were miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in ablack-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plasticclothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one inproximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors—theraven cawed, Mme. Leota’s head incanted, the singing busts sang. She’d worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in thisyear’s stylish lines.It was good merch, is what I’m trying to say. In my mind’s eye, I wasseeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatarsof Mansion-nuts the world ’round, Mme.

Leota’s gift cart piled high withbrilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in thequeue area . . .Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored overthe hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped.I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere betweenanger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than a centuryolder than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature. Also, I’d startedthe fight.“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn’t soften. “Reallychoice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, therobots, the rehab. She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling,showing me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners.“This isn’t easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who’d been politelypretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter.

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“But that’s thepoint—what Debra does isn’t easy either. It’s risky, dangerous. It made herand her ad-hoc better—it made them sharper. ” Sharper than us, that’s forsure. “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just asquickly. We need to be able to do that, too.”Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words’d justpopped out, but I saw that I’d been right—we’d have to beat Debra at herown game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.“I understand what you’re saying,” Lil said. I could tell she wasupset—she’d reverted to castmemberspeak. “It’s a very good idea. I thinkthat we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach the groupand put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans, laying outthe critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from some of them.”I felt like I was swimming in molasses.

At the rate that the LibertySquare ad-hoc moved, we’d be holding formal requirements reviews whileDebra’s people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a differenttactic.“Suneep, you’ve been involved in some rehabs, right?”Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animalbeing drawn into a political discussion.

“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you topull together a production schedule—one that didn’t have any review, justtake the idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would it takeyou to execute it?”Lil smiled primly. She’d dealt with Imagineering before.“About five years,” he said, almost instantly.“Five years?” I squawked. “Why five years? Debra’s people overhauledthe Hall in a month!”“Oh, wait,” he said. “No review at all?”“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and doit. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts aroundthe clock.”He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers whilemuttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of curlydark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingerswhile he thought.“About eight weeks,” he said.

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“Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability . . .”He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUDand started making a list.“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eightweeks?”Now it was my turn to smirk. I’d seen how Imagineering worked whenthey were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—Iknew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, theever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissionedtheir work.Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself thatmy plans are good and my buildings won’t fall down, I can make it happenvery fast. Of course, my plans aren’t perfect. Sometimes, I’ll be halfwaythrough a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach thatmakes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it’s back to the drawingboard . . .

So I stay at the drawing board for a long time at the start, getfeedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups andthe Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see ifanyone has had a great idea we haven’t thought of and incorporate it,sometimes rolling back the work.“It’s slow, but it works.”Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks,why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do that one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?”“Because that’s how it’s done,” I said to Lil. “But that’s not how it hasto be done. That’s how we’ll save the Mansion.”I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization needed toturn on a dime—that would be even more Bitchun.“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her.

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“Wehave to do this. It’s our only chance. We’ll recruit hundreds to come toFlorida and work on the rehab. We’ll give every Mansion nut on the planeta shot at joining up, then we’ll recruit them again to work at it, to run thetelepresence rigs. We’ll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders inthe world, and we’ll build something better and faster than any ad-hoc everhas, without abandoning the original Imagineers’ vision. It will beunspeakably Bitchun.”Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor,hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with me, butexcited and scared and yes, passionate.“It’s not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and Iexchanged wicked grins. She was in.“I know,” I said.

But it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader inthe Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth,someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in acrisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This planwould burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in shortorder, but by the time that happened, she’d have plenty of Whuffie with thenew, thousands-strong ad-hoc.“I mean, I can’t guarantee anything. I’d like to study the plans thatImagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs—”I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but shebeat me to it.“But I won’t. We have to move fast. I’m in.”She didn’t come into my arms, didn’t kiss me and tell me everythingwas forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.— • —My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, Iwas so preoccupied with the new Mansion.

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Holy shit, was it ever audacious:since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever hadthe guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, PhantomManor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit oftweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I’d been to DisneyWorld any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told,it had never been my absolute favorite.But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly boredstupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I’d found myselfcrowd-driven to it.I’m a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with.

Since I was apunk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling intothe only seat on a packed car, I’d been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I’d known a blackjack player, acompulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy,unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderatelysuccessful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with softwareagents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulouslywealthy: he’d never raised a cent of financing for his company, and hadowned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money.

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Hissecret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he’d pilgrim off to everytime his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards andcalculate the odds and Beat The House.Long after his software company was sold, long after he’d made his nut,he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding outhand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating TheHouse. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every timethe dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of facecards.Though I’d never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately gothis compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of leastresistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic,changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precision and graceand, above all, expedience.On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground,pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over to theMain Gate.Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketingqueues.

Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beatingmy ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, Istepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks andevaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I’d have beenprimarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuingstyles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.You can tell more about someone’s ability to efficiently negotiate thecomplexities of a queue through what they carry than through any othermeans—if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is theunladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupialpocket.

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To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure betfor a fast transaction, but I’d done an informal study and come to theconclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, leftsmiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitlesssearch for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit’s foot, arosary, a tuna sandwich.No, for my money, I’ll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Sucha person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of onedescription or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-gradestrap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures.

The thing to watch foris the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance,are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access?Someone who’s given that much consideration to their gear is likelyspending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they’ll needwhen they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing.This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs whopack everything because they lack the organizational smarts to figure outwhat they should pack—they’re just as apt to be burdened with bags andpockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging.

Thesepack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushingoverloose straps up on their shoulders.I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queuethat was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervouslyas I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could’ve chosen. I wasborne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was saunteringdown Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates.Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parentshad brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first inklingsof the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone’s consciousness: thedeath of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy thathad grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death.

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My memories ofthe trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smilingfaces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama.I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by therichness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week therestunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, Iknew, I’d come to live there.The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world whereeverything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, groundingmyself, communing with all the people I’d been.That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the shortlines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity.

I’d takehigh ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do a visualreccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow ofthe crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, Iprobably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would’ve spent liningup like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got more exercise.The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the SnowCrash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route toFantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to the JapRapsounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of the brave HiroProtagonist.

When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghost town, and Igrabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in a row, walking onevery time.The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion, butto tell the truth it was the other way around.The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive airconditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But onthe third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was.There wasn’t a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projectorin the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion ofa haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroomwere ghosts, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic.

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The ghoststhat sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were equallyconvincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy.My fourth pass through, I noticed the detail, the hostile eyes workedinto the wallpaper’s pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, thechandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to “GrimGrinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether insinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the spritelysinging of the four musical busts in the graveyard.It’s a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious chills thatblew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presence felt. Bythe time I debarked for the fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzyimprovisations in a mixed-up tempo.That’s when Lil and I ran into each other.

She was picking up adiscarded ice-cream wrapper—I’d seen a dozen castmembers picking uptrash that day, seen it so frequently that I’d started doing it myself. Shegrinned slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectantperfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with myself forhaving so completely experienced a really fine hunk of art.I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainment shouldnotice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.“That’s really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanicmountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her.She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembersof her generation can’t help but be friendly.

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She compromised betweenghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me,thumped through a zombie’s curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we do tryto keep it spirited.”I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute shewas, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid’s uniform and herfeather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed and happyabout everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch hercheeks—either set.The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let you ghoulsoff?

I’d love to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary.”Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for acouple at the Adventurer’s Club, learning her age in the process and losingmy nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could possibly have tosay to each other across a century-wide gap.While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, thereverse is indeed true. But it’s also true—and I never told her this—that thething I love best about the Mansion is:It’s where I met her.— • —Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for thetelepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in a totallycreative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it. Jammingon ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-time could be.

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I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down.She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking amongthe rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and she didn’t wantthe appearance of impropriety that would come from having outsiders beingbrought in before the ad-hoc.Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a skill I’d neverreally mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I think that Iwas too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In myyounger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyoneelse, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who just didn’t get it.The truth of the matter is, I’m a bright enough guy, but I’m hardly agenius. Especially when it comes to people.

Probably comes from BeatingThe Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemy ofexpedience.I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own.Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I’dassumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining up,but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay muchattention to a newcomer like me.Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talkingme up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work. Andshe did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the others Imet, so that I knew what there was to respect about them and couldn’t helpbut treat them as individuals.In the years since, I’d lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with Lil,and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world.

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The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not muchfriendliness.I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, theywere a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy worldof consensus-building to ever do much of anything.Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for addresslists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheetingthem against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie.“That’s weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I wasusing—my systems were back offline. They’d been sputtering up and downfor a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I’d nevergotten ’round to it. Periodically, I’d get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansionalways took precedence.“Huh?” he said.I tapped the display. “See these?”

It was a fan-site, displaying acollection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, partof a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to buildan accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I’d used thosemeshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total fiend. ” Themeshes’ author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated everyghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for fullmotion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might’ve used a standard humankinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written his own fromthe ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that wasutterly unhuman.“Who’s the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?”I scrolled down to display the credits. “I’ll be damned,” Dan breathed.The author was Tim, Debra’s elfin crony.

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He’d submitted the designs aweek before my assassination.“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideason the subject myself.“Tim’s a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.”“You knew?”He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back when you had mehanging out with Debra’s gang.”Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it hadbeen his suggestion. Too much to think about.“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruithim? Or is he the one that’d convinced Debra she needs to take over theMansion?”Dan shook his head. “I’m not even sure that she wants to take over theMansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as fastand as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She’sacquisitive, sure, but she’s cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents, andso she took over. I never heard her talk about the Mansion.”“Of course you didn’t.

She’s cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hallof Presidents?”Dan fumbled. “Not really . . . I mean, not in so many words, but—”“But nothing,” I said. “She’s after the Mansion, she’s after the MagicKingdom, she’s after the Park. She’s taking over, goddamn it, and I’m the only one who seems to have noticed.”— • —I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting.Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken tosleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it.I’d started it, of course. “We’re going to get killed if we don’t get offour asses and start the rehab,” I said, slamming myself down on the sofaand kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and unreasonin my voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not being ableto check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to callanyone and do anything about it.

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By the morning, I’d have forgotten again.From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I’m doing what I can, Jules. Ifyou’ve got a better way, I’d love to hear about it.”“Oh, bullshit. I’m doing what I can, planning the thing out. I’m ready togo. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling methey’re not. When will they be?”“Jesus, you’re a nag.”“I wouldn’t nag if you’d only fucking make it happen. What are youdoing all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deckchairs on the Great Titanic Adventure?”“I’m working my fucking ass off. I’ve spoken to every goddamn one ofthem at least twice this week about it.”“Sure,” I hollered at the kitchen. “Sure you have.”“Don’t take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs.”She waited.“Well? Check them!”“I’ll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going.“Oh, no you don’t,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming.

“You can’tcall me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence. ” She planted herhands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She’d gone pale and I couldcount every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of hercleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I’d given her on a day-trip to Nassau.“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck.“I can’t,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes.“Yes you can—here, I’ll dump it to your public directory.”Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locateme on her network. “What’s going on?”So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.“Well, why haven’t you gone to the doctor? I mean, it’s been weeks. I’llcall him right now.” “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him outof bed.”But I didn’t see him the day after, or the day after that.

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Too much to do,and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from apublic terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came online acouple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grewaccustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, to printing outher annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—toliving like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by deadtrees and ticking clocks.Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it—Iobsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I’d brought home all day, every day,crunching plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had tohaul ass out to the house, and speak to me.I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was myturn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn’t keephim up nights.

He and Lil were working a full-time campaign to recruit thead-hoc to our cause, and I started to feel like we were finally in harmony,about to reach our goal.I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst intothe living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my originalplan that would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasing thenumber of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasing throughput.I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The publicchatter in the room sprang up on my HUD.And then I’m going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.And then what?I’m going to bang you till you limp.Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters.Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who wasflushed and distracted. Dan looked scared.“What’s going on, Dan?” I asked quietly.

My heart hammered in mychest, but I felt calm and detached.“Jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at Lil.Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their secretmessaging had been discovered.“Having fun, Lil?” I asked.Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I’ll send your stuffto the hotel.”

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“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?”“This is my house, Julius. I’m asking you to get out of it. I’ll see you atwork tomorrow—we’re having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on therehab.”It was her house.“Lil, Julius—” Dan began.“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.”I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them,flump, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close thedoor behind me.— • —Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on mydoor. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle oftequila—my tequila, brought over from the house that I’d shared with Lil.He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I tookthe bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured.“It’s my fault,” he said.“I’m sure it is,” I said.“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset.

Hadn’tseen you in days, and when she did see you, you freaked her out. Snappingat her. Arguing. Insulting her.”“So you made her,” I said.He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did. It’s been a longtime since I . . .”“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away,working.”“Jules, I’m sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I’m not much of afriend to either of you.“She’s pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you itwas all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.”We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own.“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I’m worried about you. You haven’t beenright, not for months. I don’t know what it is, but you should get to adoctor.”“I don’t need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbnessand left burning anger and bile, my constant companions.

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“I need a friendwho doesn’t fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.”I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on thewallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated. If he’dstood up, I would’ve hit him. Dan’s good at crises. “If it’s any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. Hegave me a wry grin. “My Whuffie’s doing good. This rehab should take itup over the top. I’ll be ready to go.”That stopped me. I’d somehow managed to forget that Dan, my goodfriend Dan, was going to kill himself.“You’re going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to thinkabout it. I really liked the bastard. He might’ve been my best friend.There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking thepeephole. It was Lil.She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snideremark died in my throat.

I wanted to hold her.She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of herembrace.“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down atthe Seven Seas Lagoon.“Dan’s just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in acouple months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn’t it,Lil?”Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. “I’lltake what I can get,” she said.I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil,whose loss upset me the most.Lil took Dan’s hand and led him out of the room.I guess I’ll take what I can get, too, I thought.

Chapter Chapter 6

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Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, Ipondered the possibility that I was nuts.It wasn’t unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and eventhough there were cures, they weren’t pleasant.I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I wasliving for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed.We met in orbit, where I’d gone to experience the famed low-gravitysybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten tothe neg eight, it’s a blast. You don’t stagger, you bounce, and when you’rebouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous nakedpeople, things get deeply fun.I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter,filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity,deadly concoctions.

Musical instruments littered the sphere’s floor, and ifyou knew how to play, you’d snag one, tether it to you and start playing.Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied fromterrific to awful, but they were always energetic.I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever Ithought I had a nice bit nailed, I’d spend some time in the sphere playing it.Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interesting linesof inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn’t, playing an instrumentwas a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded outbarrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of themovement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I cameto a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it wasreally good. I’m a sucker for musicians.

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We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously asspheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into thehydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp whokilled her partner.I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble. Thesingles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud. She tooka bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the hatch.I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate toreach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving.“Hey!” I said. “That was great! I’m Julius! How’re you doing?”She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unitsimultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” she said,and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on.I chased after her.

“Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke ofthe station towards the gravity.She had a pianist’s body—re-engineered arms and hands that stretchedfor impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand’s grace,vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on myfreshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of thestation, she was gone.I didn’t find her again until the next movement was done and I went tothe bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when shepassed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to herbefore moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano’s top,looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time andI-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk,teasing at the edge of my own melodies.

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She noodled at me, I noodled backat her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a smidge oftuneful wit.She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downyfur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter’s style, suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating Lil,another redhead, but Zed was my first.I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at thekeyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out aparticularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge orgave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile,I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch.When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it.

She calmlyuntied and floated over to me.I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I’d been staringinto all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their corners andspread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me, then, atlength, grabbed ahold of my joint again.“You’ll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across thestation.We didn’t sleep.— • —Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadbandconstellations that went up at the cusp of the world’s ascent into Bitchunry.She’d been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generallybecome pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewilderingarray of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw throughmost of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee jointsand a completely mechanical spine that wasn’t prone to any of theabsolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain,intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.I thought I lived for fun, but I didn’t have anything on Zed.

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She onlytalked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn’t do,and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim thatcrossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinnedand spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle hertwice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floatingaround the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had noway of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching.

Ormaybe she didn’t, and she was making faces for anyone’s benefit.But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and hereyes full of the stars she’d seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath ofempty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, themess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding,the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like amonkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand actsof coitus.You’d have thought that we’d have followed it up with an act of ourown, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we startedthe game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfwaythrough, I’d lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I gotwhenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn.

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Ithink we became legendary on the station, that crazy pair that’s alwayszipping in and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked,coed Marx Brothers.When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live withme until the universe’s mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my noseand my willie and shouted, “YOU’LL DO!”I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten storiesunderground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn’tso hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feel athome while affording her opportunities for mischief.But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. Atfirst, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was finallyacting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of pranking themwith endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns.

We gave up thesteeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, her eyesunsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silver hadbeen inscrutable.We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony inlow-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and shecame out and didn’t play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiled with asmile that never went beyond her lips.She went nuts.She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. Sheaccused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors’ apartments,wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture.She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of ourbedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant.

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I smiledand nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed her andhauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor’s office on the second floor.She’d been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but it took me that longto face up to it.The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way ofsaying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In other words,I’d driven her nuts.You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically trying totalk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn’t want to.She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of luciditythat she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from a backup

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – del 5

that was made before we came to Toronto.I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared awritten synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she read itover the next couple days.“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterraneanapartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediatelythat the news wouldn’t be good.“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups ofcoffee.“I’m going to go back to space, and revert to an older version. ” She hada shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.Oh, shit. “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mentalinventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I’llpack up. I miss space, too.”She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel eyes.“No. I’m going back to who I was, before I met you.”It hurt, bad.

I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun andmischief. The Zed she’d become after we wed was terrible and terrifying,but I’d stuck with her out of respect for the person she’d been.Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she metme. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revertto a saved version.Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in thesphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his hips.He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano, and whenher silver eyes lit on me, there wasn’t a shred of recognition in them. She’dnever met me.I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning toDisney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a newcareer, a new life.

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I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil, whohardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes.— • —If I was nuts, it wasn’t the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone. Itwas a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends,sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend’s arms.I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we’d run the rehabpast the ad-hoc’s general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight.I pulled on last night’s clothes and walked out to the Monorail station inthe main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun.

I tried to makemyself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept turninginto a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep fromweaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace inAdventureland, just steps from where I’d been turned into a road-pizza bythe still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the LibertySquare crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf, so theyhad given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida sunstreamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shaftsof light across the room.

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The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spielingJungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzzfrom two of the Park’s oldest rides.There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almostall second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the roomto capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before themeeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was too small for thede rigeur ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podiumand command a smidge of respect.“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still presentaround her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert atputting on a brave face no matter what the ache.The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at theirown corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the MagicKingdom.“Everybody knows why we’re here, right?”

Lil said, with a self-deprecating smile. She’d been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Doesanyone have any questions about the plans? We’d like to start executingright away.”A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in theair. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ’right away,’ do youmean—”I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We’re on an eight-weekproduction schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be finished.”The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. Ishrugged. Politics was not my game.Lil said, “Don, we’re trying something new here, a really streamlinedprocess. The good part is, the process is short. In a couple months, we’llknow if it’s working for us. If it’s not, hey, we can turn it around in a couplemonths, too. That’s why we’re not spending as much time planning as we usually do.

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It won’t take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks arelower.”Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherlydemeanor said, “I’m all for moving fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn’talways been that hot. But I’m concerned about all these new people youpropose to recruit—won’t having more people slow us down when it comesto making new decisions?”No, I thought sourly, because the people I’m bringing in aren’t addictedto meetings.Lil nodded. “That’s a good point, Lisa. The offer we’re making to thetelepresence players is probationary—they don’t get to vote until afterwe’ve agreed that the rehab is a success.”Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blew hisspiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I thinkyou’re really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us,and so do the guests.

It’s a piece of history, and we’re its custodians, not itsmasters. Changing it like this, well . . .” he shook his head. “It’s not goodstewardship. If the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guysjumping out of the shadows saying ’booga-booga,’ they’d go to one of theHalloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion’s better than that. Ican’t be a part of this plan.”I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I’d delivered essentiallythe same polemic a thousand times—in reference to Debra’s work—andhearing it from this jerk in reference to mine made me go all hot and redinside.“Look,” I said. “If we don’t do this, if we don’t change things, they’llget changed for us. By someone else. The question, Dave, is whether aresponsible custodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him, orwhether he does everything he can to make sure that he’s still around toensure that his charge is properly cared for.

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Good custodianship isn’tsticking your head in the sand.”I could tell I wasn’t doing any good. The mood of the crowd was gettingdarker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until the meetingwas done, no matter what the provocation.Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it lookedlike the objections would continue all afternoon and all night and all thenext day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all at the sametime, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervous smoothing of herhair over her ears. Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collected insecret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group’s eyesunfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolled in.I was offline and unable to vote or watch.At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her handsbehind her back.“All right then,” she said, over the crowd’s buzz.

“Let’s get to work.”I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other’s eyes, a meaningfulglance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My vision washed overpink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. I took two lumberingsteps towards them and opened my mouth to say something horrible, andwhat came out was “Waaagh. ” My right side went numb and my legslipped out from under me and I crashed to the floor.The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as I triedto struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black.— • —I wasn’t nuts after all.The doctor’s office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and white anddecorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors’ whites with an outsizedstethoscope.

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I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to geta check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shieldmy eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, anddiscovered that I couldn’t move my arms. Further investigation revealedthat this was because I was strapped down, in full-on four-point restraint.“Waaagh,” I said again.Dan’s worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full ofcrow’sfeet and smile-lines.“Welcome back, Julius. I’m Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindlyvoice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with castmemberbullshit, I found his schtick comforting.I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my eyesand consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence, tooconfounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech.

Thedoc would tell me what was going on when he was ready.“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my headurgently. Being tied up wasn’t my idea of a good time.The doc smiled kindly. “I think it’s for the best, for now. Don’t worry,Julius, we’ll have you up and about soon enough.”Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him out of the room. He took my hand instead.My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until itwas all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip ofmy nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. The docabsentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched my nose witha gloved finger. The relief was fantastic.

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I just hoped my nuts didn’t startitching anytime soon.Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused thehead of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye.“Well, now,” he said, stroking his chin. “Julius, you’ve got a problem.Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than amonth. It sure would’ve been better if you’d come in to see me when itstarted up.“But you didn’t, and things got worse. ” He nodded up at JiminyCricket’s recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! “It’s good advice, son,but what’s done is done. You were restored from a backup about eightweeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can’t be sure, but my theory is thatthe brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a material defect.It’s been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting.

The shut-downsare a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the kind ofseizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface sensesmalfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic mode, attempts tofix itself and come back online.“Well, that’s fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it’s badnews. The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it’s only a matter oftime before it does some serious damage.”“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, All right, but what’s wrong with mymouth?The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don’t try. The interface has locked up,and it’s taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time,it’ll probably shut down, but for now, there’s no point. That’s why we’vegot you strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard when they broughtyou in, and we didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”Probably shut down? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever.

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Istarted shaking.The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed atransdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal’s sedativeoozed into my bloodstream.“There, there,” he said. “It’s nothing permanent. We can grow you anew clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that backup is a few months old. If we’d caught it earlier, we may’ve been able tosalvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you’ve displayed todate . . . Well, there just wouldn’t be any point.”My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose it all, neverhappened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shamefulattempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. My plans forthe rehab! All of it, good and bad, every moment flensed away.I couldn’t do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one whounderstood how it had to be done.

Without my relentless prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave ithalf-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a soft bellyfor Debra to savage.I wouldn’t be restoring from backup.— • —I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shutitself down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding strobesand uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the secondhappened without waking me from deep unconsciousness.When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had aday’s growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newlyrejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head.“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I’ve drawn up the consentforms for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two. Inthe meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order.

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Once the restore’s beencompleted, we’ll retire this body for you and we’ll be all finished up.”Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under mycontrol!“Oh, really now. ” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperationslip through. “There’s nothing else for it. If you’d come to me when it allstarted, well, we might’ve had other options. You’ve got no one to blamebut yourself.”“No,” I repeated. “Not now. I won’t sign.”Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but therestraints and his grip held me fast. “You’ve got to do it, Julius. It’s for thebest,” he said.“I’m not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. Hisfingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond thenormal call of duty.“No one’s killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew.

“It’s just the opposite: we’resaving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. The seizures,mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don’t want that.”I thought of Zed’s spectacular transformation into a crazy person. No, Isure don’t. “I don’t care about the interface. Chop it out. I can’t do it now. ”I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.”— • —The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of theroom and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge work ashe subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait.No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have beenten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn’t know it untilurgent necessity made the discovery for me.When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantlyrecognized: a HERF gun.Oh, it wasn’t the same model I’d used on the Hall of Presidents.

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Thisone was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgicaltool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said,flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, he knows, he knows, the Hall ofPresidents. But he didn’t know. That episode was locked in my mind,invulnerable to backup.“I know,” I said.“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate theinterface’s shielding and fuse it. It probably won’t turn you into a vegetable.That’s the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your lastbackup. You have to sign the consent before I use it. ” He’d dropped allkindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. I waspitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all butobsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you cangrow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body?

Some peopleswapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold.I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of theutilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineeringcompound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: usingthe HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood. They hadto shield me before they pulled the trigger.The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. Hesealed the cage and retreated to the lab’s door. He pulled a heavy apron andhelmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door.“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger. I’ll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on thefloor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I have nodesire to find out I’m wrong.”He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand.

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It was heavy, densewith its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone.I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found thetrigger-stud.I paused. This wouldn’t kill me, but it might lock the interface forever,paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that I wouldnever be able to pull the trigger. The doc must’ve known, too—this was hisway of convincing me to let him do that restore.I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was “Waaagh!”The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, andthere was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.I had no more interface.— • —The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on thegurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool andpointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitryin it dead.

For the first time since my twenties, I was no more advanced thannature had made me.The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I’dthrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab undermy own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning from the inadvertentisometric exercises of my seizure.Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall.The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching thedoc’s in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan’s old line ofwork here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc’sarm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal,the action hero.Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physicalstate and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. Ididn’t have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep.“I’m taking you home,” he said.

“We’ll fight Debra off tomorrow.”“Sure,” I said, and boarded the waiting tram.But we didn’t go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, theContemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock andstood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home,as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now.

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With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we’dshared.I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, andadded a mood-equalizer that he’d recommended to control my “personalityswings. ” In seconds, I was asleep.

Chapter Chapter 7

The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehabon the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around thefacade, though no real work would be done on it—we wanted theappearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea.I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling mycalls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as theDisney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down for afull-blown rehab. We didn’t exchange any unnecessary words, standing sideby side without ever looking into one another’s eyes. I couldn’t really feelawkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides we had ourhands full directing disappointed guests away from the Mansion. Adepressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of Presidents.We didn’t have to wait long for the first panicked screed about theMansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: “Hey!

Anyone hearanything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on theway to the new H of P’s and it looks like some big stuff’safoot—scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hopethey’re not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don’t miss the new H ofP’s—very Bitchun.”“Right,” I said. “Who’s the author, and is he on the list?”Dan cogitated a moment. “She is Kim Wright, and she’s on the list.Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership.”“Call her,” I said.This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get ’em in costume, andput ’em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools and getthem to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time,Suneep and his gang would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we’d move to them, get them wandering the queue area,interacting with curious guests.

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The new Mansion would be open forbusiness in 48 hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding madefor a nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that throngedDebra’s Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or two. Buzz city.I’m a pretty smart guy.— • —Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking thePirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the job:she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew hadperformed. If I’d had more time, I would’ve run a deep background checkon every one of the names on my list, but that would’ve taken months.Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to myhandicap, before coming to the point. “We read your post about theMansion’s rehab. You’re the first one to notice it, and we wondered if you’dbe interested in coming by to find out a little more about our plans.”Dan winced.

“She’s a screamer,” he whispered.Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fanswe hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I’d done that a dozentimes that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn’t seem to getlathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the hickeyjust visible under Dan’s collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicepwas seeing to that—doctor’s orders.“Fine, fine. We’re standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members,male, in Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can’t missus.”She didn’t. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She wasapparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-controlcowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set, including the girl who’d shotme.But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body.

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Shewasn’t wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections tobe the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and slightlysquashed.I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low butwithout jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.”She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn’t brushagainst a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I’m Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with the peculiarviolence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeatedthe process with Dan.“So,” she said, “what’s the deal?”I took her hand. “Kim, we’ve got a job for you, if you’re interested.”She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I’ll take it!” she said.I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh,but underneath it was relief.

“I think I’d better explain it to you first,” I said.“Explain away!” she said, and gave my hand another squeeze.I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehabplans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it all ingreedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. It wasdisconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are you recording this?”Kim blushed. “I hope that’s okay! I’m starting a new Mansionscrapbook. I have one for every ride in the Park, but this one’s gonna be aworld-beater!”Here was something I hadn’t thought about. Publishing ad-hoc businesswas tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn’t occurred to me that the newcastmembers we brought in would want to record every little detail andpush it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector.“I can switch it off,” Kim said.

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She looked worried, and I really startedto grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting,how much of a privilege we were offering them.“Leave it rolling,” I said. “Let’s show the world how it’s done.”We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-nakedby the time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation ofgetting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we’d stashed atcostuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid’s uniformwith an oversized toolbelt.We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-basedcement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new spot.

Itlooked boring to me, but I could believe that we’d have to tear her awaywhen the time came.We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.— • —By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling newcastmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing“Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old time.“This’ll do,” I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, andthe transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through mymood. I needed to get offstage.Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered inmy ear, “This was a great idea, Julius. Really.”We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride.Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first generation of mobiletelepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a prototype for thatafternoon.

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The robots were easy enough—just off-the-shelf stuff,really—but the costumes and kinematics routines were something else.Thinking about what he and Suneep’s gang of hypercreative super-geniuseswould come up with cheered me up a little, as did being out of the publiceye.Suneep’s lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packsrolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative knots inthe corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying. Inthe middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was barely restrainingan urge to shout Yippee! He was clearly in his element.He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threwthem wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “Whatwonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted, over the noise.“Sure is,” I agreed. “How’s the prototype coming?”Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the air.“In due time, in due time.

I’ve put that team onto something else, akinematics routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to stayaloft—silent and scary. It’s old spy-tech, and the retrofit’s comingtremendously. Take a look!” He pointed a finger at me and, presumably,squirted some data my way.“I’m offline,” I reminded him gently.He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his face,and gave me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of course. Here. ” He unrolledan LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen,rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically consistentwith the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary, and their faceswere familiar. I looked around the lab and realized that they’d caricaturedvarious Imagineers.“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. “A verygood joke, yes?”“This is terrific,” I said, carefully.

“But I really need some robots up andrunning by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?”Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans like

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Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than that.Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don’t like tostop my people when they have good ideas, but there’s a time and a place.I’ll put them on it right away. Leave it to me.”Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil. Ofcourse. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out for Dan’shand, saw me, and changed her mind.“Hi, guys,” she said, with studied casualness.“Oh, hello!” said Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, Iimagined. Lil’s eyes rolled up for a moment, then she nodded exhaustedlyat him.“Very good,” she said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoorcrews are on-schedule. They’ve got most of the animatronics dismantled,and they’re taking down the glass in the Ballroom now. ” The Ballroomghost effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glassthat laterally bisected the room.

The Mansion had been built around it—itwas too big to take out in one piece. “They say it’ll be a couple days beforethey’ve got it cut up and ready to remove.”A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of theImagineers rushing in to fill it.“You must be exhausted,” Dan said, at length.“Goddamn right,” I said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess Iam.”We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil’s and myshoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of industriallubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons.“You two should go home and give each other a massage,” he said.“You’ve earned some rest.”Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out fromunder Suneep’s arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to theContemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of sleep.— • —I came back to the Mansion at sundown.

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It was cool enough that I took asurface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of riding through theclattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors.As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for realweather, the kind of climate I’d grown up with in Toronto. It was October,for chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it was May. Istopped and leaned on a bench for a moment and closed my eyes.Unbidden, and with the clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreenand earthy brown. God, I needed a vacation.I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the Hall ofPresidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one that stretchedback and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked air between myteeth: they had enough people for five or six full houses waitinghere—easily an hour’s wait.

The Hall never drew crowds like this. Debrawas working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eyeand snapped a nod at me.I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new recruitshad formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their way through“Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A smallaudience participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding.“Well, at least that’s going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was,except that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from thesidelines, and the looks weren’t kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a goodmeasure of a ride’s popularity, but they’re kind of a pain in the ass, too.They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge souvenirs and pester you with smarmy,show-off questions.

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After a while, even the cheeriest castmember starts tolose patience, develop an automatic distaste for them.The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion hadbeen railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it,and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstandingmegafans. If I’d been there when it all started—instead of sleeping!—Imay’ve been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if itwas too late.Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into mycostume and went back onstage.

I joined the call-and-responseenthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join in,reluctantly or otherwise.By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of ad-hocswere ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to an offstagebreak-room.— • —Suneep didn’t deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me that itwould be another week before I could have even five production units.Though he didn’t say it, I got the sense that his guys were out of control, soexcited by the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild.Suneep himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn’t press it.Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were multiplying.

I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab from a terminal I’d hadinstalled in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues were fieldingmillions of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as envious fansaround the world logged in to watch their progress on the scaffolding.That was all according to plan. What wasn’t according to plan was thatthe new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitations totheir net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for active duty.The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Hergorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the middledistance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless missive aboutthe magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I said.

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“Have you got aminute to meet with me?”She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a brightsmile.“Hi, Julius!” she said. “Sure!”“Why don’t you change into civvies, we’ll take a walk through the Parkand talk?”Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I’d been quite firm abouther turning it in to the laundry every night instead of wearing it home.Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her cowl.We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued deep and thick for SnowWhite, Dumbo and Peter Pan.“How’re you liking it here?” I asked.Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it’s the best time of my life,really! A dream come true. I’m meeting so many interesting people, andI’m really feeling creative.

I can’t wait to try out the telepresence rigs, too.”“Well, I’m really pleased with what you and your friends are up to here.You’re working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs you’ve beenworking up, too.”She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of anynumber of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing in front ofme, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She looked serious.“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I’d rather we just talked about it,instead of making chitchat.”I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old are you, Kim?”“Nineteen,” she said. “What’s the problem?”Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. What’s my excuse, then?“It’s not a problem, Kim, it’s just something I wanted to discuss with you. The people you-all have been bringing down to work for me, they’reall really great castmembers.”“But?”“But we have limited resources around here.

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Not enough hours in theday for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab, everything. Not tomention that until we open the new Mansion, there’s a limited number ofextras we can use out front. I’m concerned that we’re going to put someoneon stage without proper training, or that we’re going to run out of uniforms;I’m also concerned about people coming all the way here and discoveringthat there aren’t any shifts for them to take.”She gave me a relieved look. “Is that all? Don’t worry about it. I’vebeen talking to Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she canpick up any people who can’t be used at the Mansion—we could even rotateback and forth!” She was clearly proud of her foresight.My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way.

Sheprobably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the first place.She’d take in the people who came down to work the Mansion, convincethem they’d been hard done by the Liberty Square crew, and rope them intoher little Whuffie ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the wholeof Walt Disney World.“Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that,” I said, carefully. “I’m sure we canfind a use for them all at the Mansion. More the merrier.”Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain broughtme back to reality, and I started planning costume production, trainingrosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would finish the robots!— • —“What do you mean, ’no’?” I said, hotly.Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It won’t fly. The group isalready upset that all the glory is going to the new people, they’ll never letus bring more in.

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They also won’t stop working on the rehab to train them,costume them, feed them and mother them. They’re losing Whuffie everyday that the Mansion’s shut up, and they don’t want any more delays.Dave’s already joined up with Debra, and I’m sure he’s not the last one.”Dave—the jerk who’d pissed all over the rehab in the meeting. Ofcourse he’d gone over. Lil and Dan stood side by side on the porch of thehouse where I’d lived. I’d driven out that night to convince Lil to sell thead-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn’t going according to plan.They wouldn’t even let me in the house.“So what do I tell Kim?”“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – del 6

manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your life.”It wasn’t going to get any better. Dan gave me an apologetic look. Lilglared a moment longer, then went into the house.“Debra’s doing real well,” he said. “The net’s all over her. Biggest thingever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance mixes with the DJ’sbackup being shoved in bursts into the dancers.”“God,” I said. “I fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.”He didn’t say anything, and that was the same as agreeing.Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She was aproblem I didn’t need, and maybe a problem I could solve. I pulled ascreeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to her place, a tiny condo ina crumbling complex that had once been a gated seniors’ village, pre-Bitchun.Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faintconversation audible through the screen door.

I jogged up the steps two at atime, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted through thescreen.Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I’d never really thoughtabout using streetmosphere players to liven up the queue area, but you’remaking a lot of sense. You people have just been doing the best work overat the Mansion—find me more like you and I’ll take them for the Hall anyday!”I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. Theanger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly light and cooland ready to do something terrible.I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout.— • —Some people never learn.

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I’m one of them, apparently.I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I slipped inthrough the cast entrance using the ID card I’d scored when my systemswent offline and I was no longer able to squirt my authorization at the door.I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a blackcowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through the shadowsalong the storefronts until I came to the moat around Cinderella’s castle.Keeping low, I stepped over the fence and duck-walked down theembankment, then slipped into the water and sloshed across to theAdventureland side.Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself indoorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the distance, untilI reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling I was inside the theater itself.Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar frommy cowl’s tabbed pocket and set to work.The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim overthe stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first generation tech.

Ireally worked up a sweat smashing them, but I kept at it until not a singlecomponent remained recognizable. The work was slow and loud in thesilent Park, but it lulled me into a sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless time. To be on the safe side, I grabbed thestorage units and slipped them into the cowl.Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of hanging outat the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the animatronics helped me.I methodically investigated every nook, cranny and storage area until Ilocated them, in what had been a break-room closet.

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By now, I had therhythm of the thing, and I made short work of them.I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might be aprototype for the next generation or notes that would help them reconstructthe units I’d smashed.I had no illusions about Debra’s preparedness—she’d have somethingoffsite that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn’t doinganything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two.I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and sloshedmy way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat.For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby.— • —Of course, I got caught.

I don’t really have the temperament forMachiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile wide, from the muddyfootprints in the Contemporary’s lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlesslyleft behind, with my cowl and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten onthe back seat of my runabout.I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim GrinningGhosts” as I made my way from Costuming, through the utilidor, out toLiberty Square, half an hour before the Park opened.Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my cowland wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units.I hadn’t put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion I feltwas unmuffled, loud and yammering.I ran.I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki Roomwhere I’d been killed, past the Adventureland gate where I’d waded through the moat, down Main Street.

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I ran and ran, elbowing early guests, tramplingflowers, knocking over an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade.I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I’d outrun Liland Debra and all my problems. I’d thought wrong. They were both there, astep behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my wrecking bar like aweapon, and she brandished it at me.“You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we’d beenalone, she would’ve swung it at me.“Can’t take it when someone else plays rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered.Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She’s right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc’s meeting in Adventureland. You’re coming.”“Why?” I asked, feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all myhard work?”“We’re going to talk about the future, Julius, what’s left of it for us.”“For God’s sake, Lil, can’t you see what’s going on? They killed me!They did it, and now we’re fighting each other instead of her!

Why can’tyou see how wrong that is?”“You’d better watch those accusations, Julius,” Debra said, quietly andintensely, almost hissing. “I don’t know who killed you or why, but you’rethe one who’s guilty here. You need help.”I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into the now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the threecostumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my Whuffiehemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your work is trite andunimaginative. You’re a fucking despoiler and you don’t even have the gutsto admit it.”“That’s enough, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely in check.“We’re going.”Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way throughthe crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to slip into a gapin the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I didn’t try.

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I wanted achance to tell the whole world what I’d done and why I’d done it.Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting room.Lil turned. “I don’t think you should be here, Debra,” she said in measuredtones.Debra shook her head. “You can’t keep me out, you know. And youshouldn’t want to. We’re on the same side.”I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come on, then,” shesaid.It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the entire ad- hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on the rehab,then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock. Even the restaurantcrews were there. Liberty Square must’ve been a ghost town. It gave themeeting a sense of urgency: the knowledge that there were guests in LibertySquare wandering aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out.

Ofcourse, Debra’s crew might’ve been around.The crowd’s faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mindthat I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked angry. Inearly started crying right then. Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, mypatsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to deathand hug him at the same time.Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “All right,then,” she said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right.“Thanks for coming out today. I’d like to get this done quickly. We allhave important work to get to. I’ll run down the facts: last night, a memberof this ad-hoc vandalized the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It’sestimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and running.“I don’t have to tell you that this isn’t acceptable. This has neverhappened before, and it will never happen again.

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We’re going to see to that.“I’d like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion untilthe Hall of Presidents is fully operational. I will be volunteering my serviceson the repairs.”There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn’t be the only one workingat the Hall that week. “Disney World isn’t a competition,” Lil said. “All thedifferent ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Park as good aswe can. We lose sight of that at our peril.”I nearly gagged on bile. “I’d like to say something,” I said, as calmly asI could manage.Lil shot me a look. “That’s fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc canspeak.”I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I didit, and I don’t have any excuse for having done it.

It may not have been thesmartest thing I’ve ever done, but I think you all should understand how Iwas driven to it.“We’re not supposed to be in competition with one another here, but weall know that that’s just a polite fiction. The truth is that there’s realcompetition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew thatrehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They stole the Hall from you! They did itwhile you were distracted, they used me to engineer the distraction, theymurdered me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn’t do anything about it.“Usually, the lie that we’re all on the same side is fine. It lets us worktogether in peace. But that changed the day they had me shot. If you keepon believing it, you’re going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, TomSawyer Island—all of it.

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All the history we have with this place—all thehistory that the billions who’ve visited it have—it’s going to be destroyedand replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that’s taken over the Hall.Once that happens, there’s nothing left that makes this place special.Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! Whathappens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will stay openonce the only people here are you?”Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished, then?” she asked,sweetly. “Fine. I know I’m not a member of this group, but since it was mywork that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to address Julius’sstatements, if you don’t mind. ” She paused, but no one spoke up.“First of all, I want you all to know that we don’t hold you responsiblefor what happened last night. We know who was responsible, and he needshelp.

I urge you to see to it that he gets it.“Next, I’d like to say that as far as I’m concerned, we are on the sameside—the side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn’t existwithout all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was terrible, and Isincerely hope that the person responsible is caught and brought to justice.But that person wasn’t me or any of the people in my ad-hoc.“Lil, I’d like to thank you for your generous offer of assistance, andwe’ll take you up on it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall,we’ll put you to work. We’ll be up and running in no time.“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once and for all:neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over the operations of theMansion. It is a terrific attraction, and it’s getting better with the workyou’re all doing. If you’ve been worrying about it, then you can stopworrying now. We’re all on the same side.“Thanks for hearing me out.

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I’ve got to go see my team now.”She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out.Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right, then, we’ve got workto do, too. I’d like to ask you all a favor, first. I’d like us to keep the detailsof last night’s incident to ourselves. Letting the guests and the world knowabout this ugly business isn’t good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?”There was a moment’s pause while the results were tabulated on theHUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile. “I knew you’d comethrough. Thanks, guys. Let’s get to work.” — • —I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my terminal.Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I wasn’t to show myface inside the Park until I’d “gotten help,” whatever that meant.By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact source,but it seemed to revolve around the new recruits.

One of them had told theirnet-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square, and mentioned my name.There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected more. Ineeded some kind of help, that was for sure.I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole business andleaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new life, Whuffie-poor andfancy-free.It wouldn’t be so bad. I’d been in poor repute before, not so long ago.That first time Dan and I had palled around, back at the U of T, I’d been thecenter of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a mancan be.I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled. It wascramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and I had plenty ofmaterial to entertain myself. While I couldn’t get a table in a restaurant, Iwas free to queue up at any of the makers around town and get myselfwhatever I wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it.

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Compared to99.99999 percent of all the people who’d ever lived, I had a life ofunparalleled luxury.Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a rarity. Thenumber of low-esteem individuals at large was significant, and they gotalong just fine, hanging out in parks, arguing, reading, staging plays,playing music.Of course, that wasn’t the life for me. I had Dan to pal around with, arare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing to fraternize with ashmuck like me. He’d stand me to meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts atthe SkyDome, and shoot down any snotty reputation-punk who sneered atmy Whuffie tally. Being with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluatingmy beliefs in the Bitchun Society, and I’d never had a more vibrant,thought-provoking time in all my life.I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world, startedover.

I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil and the wholemess.I didn’t.I called up the doc.

Chapter Chapter 8

Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the background, Iheard a chorus of crying children, the constant backdrop of the MagicKingdom infirmary.“Hi, doc,” I said.“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professionalmedical and castmember friendliness, I sensed irritation.Make it all good again. “I’m not really sure. I wanted to see if I couldtalk it over with you. I’m having some pretty big problems.”“I’m on-shift until five. Can it wait until then?”By then, I had no idea if I’d have the nerve to see him. “I don’t thinkso—I was hoping we could meet right away.”“If it’s an emergency, I can have an ambulance sent for you.”“It’s urgent, but not an emergency. I need to talk about it in person.Please?”He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius, I’ve gotimportant things to do here. Are you sure this can’t wait?”I bit back a sob. “I’m sure, doc.”“All right then.

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When can you be here?”Lil had made it clear that she didn’t want me in the Park. “Can you meetme? I can’t really come to you. I’m at the Contemporary, Tower B, room2334.”“I don’t really make house calls, son.”“I know, I know. ” I hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make anexception? I don’t know who else to turn to.”“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll have to get someone to cover for me.Let’s not make a habit of this, all right?” I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.”He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan.“Yes?” he said, cautiously.“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don’t know if he can help me—Idon’t know if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.”He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still myfriend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come over?”“That would be very nice,” I said, quietly.

“I’m at the hotel.”“Give me ten minutes,” he said, and rang off.— • —He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks ofSpace Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven SeasLagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile after manicuredmile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of happy laughter driftedwith the wind, and the flowers were in bloom. In Toronto, it would befreezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid transit (a monorail hissed by),and hard-faced anonymity. I missed it.Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We bothstared out at the view for a long while.“It’s something else, isn’t it?” I said, finally.“I suppose so,” he said. “I want to say something before the doc comesby, Julius.”“Go ahead.”“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first place,and I’m not proud of myself.

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If you two were breaking up, that’s none ofmy business, but I had no right to hurry it along.”“All right,” I said. I was too drained for emotion.“I’ve taken a room here, moved my things.”“How’s Lil taking it?”“Oh, she thinks I’m a total bastard. I suppose she’s right.”“I suppose she’s partly right,” I corrected him.He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.”We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived.He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and waitedexpectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on the bed.“I’m cracking up or something,” I said. “I’ve been acting erratically,sometimes violently. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. ” I’d rehearsedthe speech, but it still wasn’t easy to choke out.“We both know what’s wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “Youneed to be refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire this one.

We’ve had this talk.”“I can’t do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can’t—isn’t thereanother way?”The doc shook his head. “Julius, I’ve got limited resources to allocate.There’s a perfectly good cure for what’s ailing you, and if you won’t take it,there’s not much I can do for you.”“But what about meds?”“Your problem isn’t a chemical imbalance, it’s a mental defect. Yourbrain is broken, son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while youget worse. I can’t tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately. Now, Ifyou’re ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediately and get yourestored into a new one in 48 hours.”“Isn’t there another way? Please? You have to help me—I can’t lose allthis. ” I couldn’t admit my real reasons for being so attached to thissingularly miserable chapter in my life, not even to myself.The doctor rose to go.

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“Look, Julius, you haven’t got the Whuffie tomake it worth anyone’s time to research a solution to this problem, otherthan the one that we all know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, butthat’s not a permanent solution.”“Why not?”He boggled. “You can’t just take dope for the rest of your life, son.Eventually, something will happen to this body—I see from your file thatyou’re stroke-prone—and you’re going to get refreshed from your backup.The longer you wait, the more traumatic it’ll be. You’re robbing from yourfuture self for your selfish present.”It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every passingday made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake up friends withDan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake up to a Mansion theway I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I could find Lil bent overwith her head in a President’s guts of an afternoon.

To lie down and wakewithout disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend wouldbetray me, had betrayed me.I just couldn’t do it—not yet, anyway.Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself frommy old backup, I’d lose my last year with him. I’d lose his last year.“Let’s table that, doc. I hear what you’re saying, but there’recomplications. I guess I’ll take the mood-suppressants for now.”He gave me a cold look. “I’ll give you a scrip, then. I could’ve done thatwithout coming out here. Please don’t call me anymore.”I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn’t understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened.“Us old-timers, we’re used to thinking of doctors as highly trainedprofessionals—all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships,anatomy drills... Truth is, the average doc today gets more training inbedside manner than bioscience.

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‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD,not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledge you’relooking for is working as a historical researcher, not a doctor.“But that’s not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority onmedical matters, even though he’s only got one trick: restore from backup.You’re reminding Pete of that, and he’s not happy to have it happen.”— • —I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myselfon the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around theWorld, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island, andgenerally cooling out.

Dan came by in the evenings and it was like oldtimes, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life ingeneral, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, amuseum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the BitchunSociety. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in apackage I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, likethe turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at theAmerican Adventure.Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified toparticipate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficientlythan I once may’ve. I took it downstairs the next morning and drove to theMagic Kingdom’s castmember lot.At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary’sparking lot, my runabout was gone.

A quick check with the handheldrevealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had justgotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more popularuse of it than I could.With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my keythrough the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied bzzz and lit up, “Please seethe front desk. ” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end ofthe Whuffie stick.At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorailplatform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to me, andno one offered me an inch more personal space than was necessary. I hadhit bottom.

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— • —I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping myname tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of myfellow castmembers in the utilidors.I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I couldtell instantly that I was being humored.“Where are you?” I asked.“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.”In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged someWhuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she’d never comedown, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawingfrom guests by the millions, and from castmembers and from people who’dread the popular accounts of their struggle against the forces of pettyjealousy and sabotage—i.e., me.I felt light-headed.

I hurried along to costuming and changed into theheavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square.I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant,lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and pattedthe bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him to spillwhatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning—I could feel ithovering like storm clouds.He wouldn’t talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stoodand strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn’t rope-drop yet, and there weren’tany guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what was comingnext.“Have you taken a look at Debra’s Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally, aswe stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding.I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. “Don’tbother,” he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra’s gang is number onewith a bullet.

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Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall,they’ve been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules, andget away with it.”My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. “So,what is it they’ve done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer.Dan didn’t have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged fromthe Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtfulexpression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over.“Hey guys!” he said.“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said. “I haven’t told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don’tyou run it down?”“Well, it’s pretty radical, I have to admit.

We’ve learned some stufffrom the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted tocapture some of the historical character of the ghost story.”I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm.“Really?” he asked innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?”“Well, we’re keeping the telepresence robots—that’s a honey of an idea,Julius—but we’re giving each one an uplink so that it can flash-bake.We’ve got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together a series ofnarratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends,what they’ve done since, you know.“The way we’ve storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ridepretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and thengetting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here’s the big change:we slow it all down. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more ofa premium product.“So you’re a guest.

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From the queue to the unload zone, you’re beingchased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they’re reallyscary—I’ve got Suneep’s concept artists going back to the drawing board,hitting basic research on stuff that’ll just scare the guests silly. When aghost catches you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake! You get itswhole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the timeyou’ve left, you’ve had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the next time youcome back, it’s all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall’sdrawing ’em, we’re bound to be a hit. ” He put his hands behind his backand rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself.When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there’d been an uglydecade or so in ride design.

Imagineering found a winning formula forSpaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive toestablish thematic continuity, they’d turned the formula into a cookie-cutter,stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in theFuture Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there wasancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was theGreat Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knowswhat the future holds? We do! We’ll all have videophones and be living onthe ocean floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational, even—butsix times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering gotthemselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail.

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Evennow, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia.And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way throughthe Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said thatyou had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn’t be tryingto take it away from us. Didn’t you say that?”Tim rocked back as if I’d slapped him and the blood drained from hisface. “But we’re not taking it away!” he said. “You invited us to help.”I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said.“Sure,” he said.“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debrayesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab andsuggest any changes.

She was good enough to agree, and they’ve come upwith some great ideas. ” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited inhave gone over to the other side and we’re going to lose everything becauseof them. I felt like shit.“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim’s grin came back and heclapped his hands together. He really loves the Mansion, I thought. Hecould have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.— • —Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and spedtowards Suneep’s lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers. “Theydon’t have the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as we pedaled.“Says who?” Dan said.“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationarymembers right from the start. They weren’t even allowed into the designmeetings.”“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said.Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab.

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He had darkcircles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He seemed tobe holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger.“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed thatthis project wouldn’t change midway through. Now it has, and I’ve gotother commitments that I’m going to have to cancel because this is goingoff-schedule.”I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believeme, I’m just as upset about this as you are. We don’t like this one little bit.”He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do therehab for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I’ve beenholding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been? If they replan the rehab now, I’ll have to go along with them. I can’t just leave theMansion half-done—they’ll murder me.”The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don’t like the newrehab plan, and we’re going to stop it.

You can help. Just stonewallthem—tell them they’ll have to find other Imagineering support if they wantto go through with it, that you’re booked solid.”Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a minuteapproval. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That’ll help all right. Just tell ’em thatthey’re welcome to make any changes they want to the plan, if they can findsomeone else to execute them.”Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someone elseto do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my team’s done sofar. I just flush my time down the toilet.”“It won’t come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying nofor a couple days, we’ll do the rest.”Suneep looked doubtful.“I promise,” I said.Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair. “Allright,” he said, morosely.Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said.— • —It should have worked.

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It almost did.I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Danexhorted.“Look, you don’t have to roll over for Debra and her people! This isyour garden, and you’ve tended it responsibly for years. She’s got no rightto move in on you—you’ve got all the Whuffie you need to defend theplace, if you all work together.”No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch weretough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioning an hourbefore the meeting and closed up all the windows, so that the room was akiln for hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far aspossible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf, and I wascontent to let him do his thing.When Lil had arrived, she’d sized up the situation with a sourexpression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me.

She’d chosenthe middle, and to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my eyes away from thesweat glistening on her long, pale neck.Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. “They’re stealingyour future! They’re stealing your past! They claim they’ve got your support!”He lowered his tone. “I don’t think that’s true. ” He grabbed acastmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he said solow it was almost a whisper.“No,” the castmember said.He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is ittrue?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly.“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after thewhispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd.“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now.“No!” the crowd roared.“NO!” he shouted back.“You don’t have to roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry onwith the plan, send them packing.

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They’re only taking over because you’reletting them. Are you going to let them?”“NO!”— • —Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything,they’ve done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they’redisplacing doesn’t have a hope of fighting back.For the defenders, it’s a simple decision: step down gracefully andsalvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting back will surely burnaway even that meager reward.No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the thing everyone’sfighting over. For example:It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in notmaking trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut.

It was the earlydays of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept.Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students inthe Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, andthey knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of thetyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchungospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowedby their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by theUniversity.At least, that’s what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic atmy Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at ConvocationHall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary,coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when thewoman’s strident harangue burst over their heads. I saw it happen from the very start.

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The prof was down there on thestage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was ablur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed inUniversity poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and fiveof them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, theheavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek,unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel.“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home forme: this wasn’t on the lesson-plan.“Come on, heads up! This is not a drill. The University of TorontoDepartment of Sociology is under new management. If you’ll set yourhandhelds to ’receive,’ we’ll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily.If you’ve forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on.I’m going to run it down for you right now, anyway.“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you.

You’llprobably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It’sworth repeating. Here goes:“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department.We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel.Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc SociologyDepartment is in charge. We promise high-relevance curriculum with anemphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and thesocial theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, justdeadheading! This will be fun.”She taught the course like a pro—you could tell she’d been drilling herlecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered asthe prof made a break for it and was restrained.At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on herevery word.

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Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, the wholenineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, aroar of “Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our nextencounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing SocialDeviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, thesame comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wallof ad-hocs.Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with micsand peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said,“Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of Sociologytold a reporter that the ad-hocs’ courses would not be credited, that theywere a gang of thugs who were totally unqualified to teach.

A counterpointinterview from a spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of thenew lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the profsthey replaced for years, and that they’d also written most of their journalarticles.The profs brought University security out to help them regain theirlecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemadeuniforms. University security got the message—anyone could bereplaced—and stayed away.The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs’ classes wouldn’tcount towards their degrees. Fools like me alternated between the outdoorand indoor classes, not learning much of anything.No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for Whuffie,leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of lectures.

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The ad-hocsspent their time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart their coursework.At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the UniversitySenate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a distance-ed offeringfrom Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later, the fight was settled forever.Once you took backup-and-restore, the rest of the Bitchunry just followed, avalue-system settling over you.Those who didn’t take backup-and-restore may have objected, but, hey,they all died.— • —The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through theutilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion.

Dan, Lil and Iwere up front, careful not to brush against one another as we walkedquickly through the backstage door and started a bucket-brigade, passingout the materials that Debra’s people had stashed there, along a line thatsnaked back to the front porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they wereunceremoniously dumped.Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride, itsservice corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret passages,rounding up every scrap of Debra’s crap and passing it out the door.In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little friends,their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of transhuman kids made myguts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil and of my unmediated brain,and I had a sudden urge to shred them verbally. No.No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back whatwas ours, not punishing the interlopers.

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“Kim, I think you should leave,” Isaid, quietly.She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and made you boss?”she said. Her friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares.“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The longer you wait,the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You blew it, and you’re not apart of the Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra. Don’t stay here, anddon’t come back. Ever.”Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess over, thatyou worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control.They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh, they hadlots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages that would getthem Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum of the earth. Apopular view, those days.I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade, followed it tothe front of the Hall.

The Park had been open for an hour, and a herd ofguests watched the proceedings in confusion. The Liberty Square ad-hocspassed their loads around in clear embarrassment, knowing that they wereviolating every principle they cared about.As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembersslipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of Presidents,Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her things, a cheerful cadre ofher castmembers quickly moving it all offstage. I didn’t have to look at myhandheld to know what was happening to our Whuffie.— • —By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised theplacement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in minutedetail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her, double- and triple-checking it all.Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering dustin the parlor.“Congratulations, sir,” he said, and shook my hand.

“It was masterfullydone.”“Thanks, Suneep. I’m not sure how masterful it was, but we got the jobdone, and that’s what counts.”“Your partners, they’re happier than I’ve seen them since this wholebusiness started. I know how they feel!”

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My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I wondered.Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even though a part ofme said that Dan would never go back to her, not after all we’d beenthrough together.“I’m glad you’re glad. We couldn’t have done it without you, and itlooks like we’ll be open for business in a week.”“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party tonight?”Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting on.I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don’t think so,” I said,carefully. “I’ll probably work late here.”He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had nointention of being dragged to the party, he left off.And that’s how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m. the next morning,dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a commotion from theparlor.

Festive voices, happy and loud, and I assumed it was Liberty Squaread-hocs coming back from their party.I roused myself and entered the parlor.Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra’s gear. Igot ready to shout something horrible at them, and that’s when Debra camein. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth to speak, stopped.Behind Debra were Lil’s parents, frozen these long years in theircanopic jars in Kissimmee.

Chapter Chapter 9

Lil’s parents went into their jars with little ceremony. I saw them just beforethey went in, when they stopped in at Lil’s and my place to kiss hergoodbye and wish her well.Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother held anachingly chipper and polite farewell.“So,” I said to Tom. “Deadheading.”He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this morning.”Before coming to see their daughter, they’d taken their backups. Whenthey woke, this event—everything following the backup—would neverhave happened for them.God, they were bastards.“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on,carefully hiding away the disgust.“We’ll be sampling monthly, just getting a digest dumped to us. Whenthings look interesting enough, we’ll come on back. ” He waggled a fingerat me.

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“I’ll be keeping an eye on you and Lillian—you treat her right, youhear?”“We’re sure going to miss you two around here,” I said.He pishtoshed and said, “You won’t even notice we’re gone. This isyour world now—we’re just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run at it. We wouldn’t be going down if we didn’t have faith inyou two.”Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more affectionatethan I’d ever seen her, even to the point of tearing up a little. Here in thismoment of vanishing consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted,knowing that it wouldn’t matter the next time she awoke.“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them.

“You’ve got some wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the Park, you’re going tohave a tremendous experience, I just know it. ” She was infinitely sereneand compassionate, and I knew it didn’t count.Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get thelethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to lose their lastmoments with their darling daughter.— • —They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new bodieswere impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and kitted outin the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and her pals, they made asolid mass of irate adolescence.“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Rita asked, shoving mehard in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust, raising acloud.Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go away. Youractions are totally indefensible.

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Keep your mouth shut and go away.”I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth tospeak.“Don’t say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.”“Don’t stay here and don’t come back. Ever,” Kim said, an evil look onher face.“No,” I said. “No goddamn it no. You’re going to hear me out, and thenI’m going to get Lil and her people and they’re going to back me up. That’snot negotiable.”We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a twiddlingmotion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly crafted gloomwent away and it was just a dusty room with a fake fireplace.“Let him speak,” Debra said. Rita folded her arms and glared.“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keepingmy eyes on them. “I can’t excuse them, and I don’t ask you to forgive them.But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve put our hearts and souls into thisplace, and it’s not right to take it from us.

Can’t we have one constantcorner of the world, one bit frozen in time for the people who love it thatway? Why does your success mean our failure?“Can’t you see that we’re carrying on your work? That we’re tending alegacy you left us?”“Are you through?” Rita asked.I nodded.“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius, it’s a ride. If you don’tunderstand that, you’re in the wrong place. It’s not my goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf, and it doesn’t make itany less stupid. All you’ve done is confirm my worst fears.”Debra’s mask of impartiality slipped. “You stupid, deluded asshole,”she said, softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about your littlemurder, your little health problems—yes, I’ve heard—your little fixation onkeeping things the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius.

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Youneed to get away from here: Disney World isn’t good for you and you’resure as hell not any good for Disney World.”It would have hurt less if I hadn’t come to the same conclusion myself,somewhere along the way.— • —I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around a fireand singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged into the circleand hunted for Lil.She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles away.Lord, she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of her for a minuteand she stared right through me until I tapped her shoulder. She gave aninvoluntary squeak and then smiled at herself.“Lil,” I said, then stopped. Your parents are home, and they’ve joinedthe other side.For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled even. Shepatted the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of the fire on my face, herbody heat on my side.

God, how did I screw this up?Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. Ihugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo andsweat. “We did it,” she whispered fiercely. I held onto her. No, we didn’t.“Lil,” I said again, and pulled away.“What?” she said, her eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now.“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.”She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on.“They were with Debra.”She reeled back as if I’d slapped her.“I told them I’d bring the whole group back to talk it over.”She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put an armaround her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and laughing at thesame time. “I’ll have a ferry sent over,” she said.— • —I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused andangry ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word answers, and he gave up.

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We rode in silence, the trees on the edges of the Seven SeasLagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching storm.The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved throughthe quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral procession thatstopped the nighttime custodial staff in their tracks.As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights wereblazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra’s ad-hocs were moving fromthe Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of their work.Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil’s parents, sleevesrolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle. The group stopped inits tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on the wooden sidewalk.I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and daughterstalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track each other, maintaina constant, sizing distance.“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally.

She didn’t address hermother, which surprised me. It didn’t surprise Tom, though.He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet night. “We’reworking,” he said.“No, you’re not,” Lil said. “You’re destroying. Stop it.”Lil’s mother darted to her husband’s side, not saying anything, juststanding there.Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to theMansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load.“You’re not listening. The Mansion is ours. Stop. It.”Lil’s mother gently took Lil’s hand off Tom’s arm, held it in her own.“I’m glad you’re passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I’m proud of yourcommitment.”Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil’s choked sob, saw hercollapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked her. I feltlike a voyeur, but couldn’t bring myself to turn away.“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling ofthe leaves on the Liberty Tree.

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“Shhh. We don’t have to be on the sameside, you know.”They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then bent againand picked up her father’s box, carried it to the Mansion. One at a time, therest of her ad-hoc moved forward and joined them.— • —This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend’s hotel roomand you power up your handheld and it won’t log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you.You become a non-person.Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan’s room, when Iknocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a panicked banging.Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to me.“Jesus,” he said.I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands.“What?” I said, what happened, what happened to me?“You’re out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You’re out of Whuffie.

You’rebottomed-out,” he said.This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with thehissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the window, thehooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the distant howl of therecorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The world drops away from you,recedes until you’re nothing but a speck, a mote in blackness.I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my breath,put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed.“Take me to Lil,” I said.Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my face, Iremembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when I’d driven himto my—Lil’s—house, and how happy I’d been then, how secure.I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange times,” he said.It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightlydozing on a ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom’s lap, her feet on Rita’s. Allthree snored softly.

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They’d had a long night.Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes, lookedsleepily at me. The blood drained from her face.“Hello, Julius,” she said, coldly.Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up.“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just goingto kick me out and let me find out on my own?”“You were my next stop,” Lil said.“Then I’ve saved you some time. ” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me allabout it.”“There’s nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You’re out. You had to know itwas coming—for God’s sake, you were tearing Liberty Square apart!”“How would you know?” I asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You’vebeen asleep for ten years!”“We got updates,” Rita said. “That’s why we’re back—we couldn’t let itgo on the way it was. We owed it to Debra.” “And Lillian,” Tom said.“And Lillian,” Rita said, absently.Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You’re not being fair to him,” hesaid.

At least someone was on my side.“We’ve been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better thananyone, Dan. We’ve forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made everyallowance. He’s sick and he won’t take the cure. There’s nothing more wecan do for him.”“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back,and I slumped in my chair, tried to control my breathing, the panickedthumping of my heart.“You could try to understand, you could try to help him. You could stickwith him, the way he stuck with you. You don’t have to toss him out on hisass.”Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I’ll get him a room,”she said. “For a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I’ll pick up his networkaccess. Is that fair?”“It’s more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I’d beenthere for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might do it, all right.“I don’t think it’s warranted.

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If you want to take care of him, sir, you can.It’s none of my family’s business.”Lil’s eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?”Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, andstormed out of the room.“Why are you coming here for help?” Tom said, ever the voice ofreason. “You seem capable enough.”“I’m going to be taking a lethal injection at the end of the week,” Dansaid. “Three days. That’s personal, but you asked.”Tom shook his head. Some friends you’ve got yourself, I could see himthinking it.“That soon?” Lil asked, a throb in her voice.Dan nodded.In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor, outthrough the western castmember parking, and away.I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, eachflagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the Park acentury before.

The names whipped past me like epitaphs.The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beachbetween the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come hereoften, to watch the sunset from a hammock, arms around each other, the

Park spread out before us like a lighted toy village.Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I feltsuddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold.Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes, logging mypants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my mouth, on myeyes.I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs, chokingand warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now, and I inhaled again.The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was dark.— • —I woke on Doctor Pete’s cot in the Magic Kingdom, restraints aroundmy wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed my eyes, for a momentbelieving that I’d been restored from a backup, problems solved, memoriesbehind me.Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead bynow, my memories of him gone forever.Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically.

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The fact that Iremembered Dan meant that I hadn’t been refreshed from my backup, thatmy broken brain was still there, churning along in unmediated isolation.I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to myhead. Dan took my hand.“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” he said, smiling.“Sorry,” I choked.“You sure are,” he said. “Lucky for you they found you—anotherminute or two and I’d be burying you right now.”No, I thought, confused. They’d have restored me from backup. Then ithit me: I’d gone on record refusing restore from backup after having itrecommended by a medical professional. No one would have restored meafter that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver.“Easy,” Dan said. “Easy. It’s all right now.

Doctor says you’ve got acracked rib or two from the CPR, but there’s no brain damage.”“No additional brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming into view.He had on his professionally calm bedside face, and it reassured me despitemyself.He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room, heshone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and consideredme. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get you alethal injection if that’s what you want, but offing yourself in the SevenSeas Lagoon just isn’t good show. In the meantime, would you like to talkabout it?” Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I’d tried to talk about it and he’dtold me to go to hell, and now he changes his mind? But I did want to talk.“I didn’t want to die,” I said.“Oh no?” he said. “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.”“I wasn’t trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I wastrying to . . . abdicate.

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Take the refresh without choosing it, withoutshutting out the last year of my best friend’s life. Rescue myself from thestinking pit I’d sunk into without flushing Dan away along with it. That’sall, that’s all.“I wasn’t thinking—I was just acting. It was an episode or something.Does that mean I’m nuts?”“Oh, probably,” Doctor Pete said, offhandedly. “But let’s worry aboutone thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that’s your right. I’d ratheryou lived, if you want my opinion, and I doubt that I’m the only one,Whuffie be damned. If you’re going to live, I’d like to record you saying so,just in case. We have a backup of you on file—I’d hate to have to delete it.”“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’d like to be restored if there’s no other option. ” Itwas true. I didn’t want to die.“All right then,” Doctor Pete said. “It’s on file and I’m a happy man.Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little.

Nothing a little counseling and someR&R wouldn’t fix, if you want my opinion. I could find you somewhere ifyou want.”“Not yet,” I said. “I appreciate the offer, but there’s something else Ihave to do first.”— • —Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermalsoporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke, themoon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent.I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this placehad meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency,fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed andsee if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan wasdead—God, it was sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Capefor a launch.“What’s on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. Hewas in his boxers, thin and rangy and hairy.“Thinking about moving on,” I said.He chuckled.

“I’ve been thinking about doing the same,” he said.I smiled. “Not that way,” I said. “Just going somewhere else, startingover. Getting away from this.”

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“Going to take the refresh?” he asked.I looked away. “No,” I said. “I don’t believe I will.”“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus,Julius, what’re you afraid of?”“You don’t want to know,” I said.“I’ll be the judge of that.”“Let’s have a drink, first,” I said.Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All right, twoCoronas, coming up.”After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and pulledchairs out onto the porch.“You sure you want to know this?” I asked.He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin’,” he said.“I don’t want refresh because it would mean losing the last year,” I said.He nodded. “By which you mean ’my last year,’” he said. “Right?”I nodded and drank.“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but hard tofigure out you are not. I have something to say that might help you makethe decision. If you want to hear it, that is.”What could he have to say?

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. ” In my mind, I wason a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this.“I had you killed,” he said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. Youwere right all along.”The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun awayfrom it. I opened and shut my mouth.It was Dan’s turn to look away. “Debra proposed it. We were talkingabout the people I’d met when I was doing my missionary work, the stonecrazies who I’d have to chase away after they’d rejoined the BitchunSociety. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed medown here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that’s when she gotthe idea.“I’d get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give meWhuffie—piles of it, and her team would follow suit. I’d be months closerto my goal.

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That was all I could think about back then, you remember.”“I remember. ” The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage,and Dan plotting my death.“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup—nomemory of the event, just the Whuffie for me.”“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, haveyourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories that way?“Yes,” he agreed. “We did it, I’m ashamed to say. I can prove it, too—Ihave my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too. ” He drained his beer.“That’s my plan. Tomorrow. I’ll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people,the whole ad-hoc. A going-away present from a shitty friend.”My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You knew all along,” Isaid. “You could have proved it at any time.”He nodded. “That’s right.”“You let me . . .” I groped for the words.

“You let me turn into . . .”They wouldn’t come.“I did,” he said.All this time. Lil and he, standing on my porch, telling me I needed help.Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from backup, me saying no, no, no,not wanting to lose my last year with Dan.“I’ve done some pretty shitty things in my day,” he said. “This is theabsolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I’m sure glad I don’tbelieve in God—that’d make what I’m going to do even scarier.”Dan was going to kill himself in two days’ time. My friend and mymurderer. “Dan,” I croaked. I couldn’t make any sense of my mind. Dan,taking care of me, helping me, sticking up for me, carrying this horribleshame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go with a cleanconscience.“You’re forgiven,” I said. And it was true.He stood.“Where are you going” I asked.“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger.

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I’ll meet you at theHall of Presidents at nine a.m..”— • —I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a Guestwith barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water fountains and standin line. If I were lucky, a castmember might spare me a chocolate banana.Probably not, though.I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests checked myWhuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A year before, they’dhave been striking up conversations, asking me about my job here at theMagic Kingdom.I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short film withthe rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their seats under the blast ofthe flash-bake. A castmember picked up the stageside mic and thankedeveryone for coming; the doors swung open and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her eyes at me, then recognizing me,turned her back and went to show in the next group.No group came.

Instead, Dan and the girl I’d seen on the replay entered.“We’ve closed it down for the morning,” he said.I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the trigger on me,seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression. She was terrified of me.“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I’m Julius.”Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her pants.My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a seat. Don’t worry,it’ll all be fine. Really. No hard feelings. ” I stopped short of offering to gether a glass of water.Put her at her ease, said a snotty voice in my head. She’ll make a betterwitness. Or make her nervous, pathetic—that’ll work, too; make Debra lookeven worse.I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water.By the time I came back, the whole gang was there—Debra, Lil, herfolks, Tim. Debra’s gang and Lil’s gang, now one united team.

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Soon to bescattered.Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his voice.“Eleven months ago, I did an awful thing. I plotted with Debra to haveJulius murdered. I used a friend who was a little confused at the time, usedher to pull the trigger. It was Debra’s idea that having Julius killed wouldcause enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. Itwas.”There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she wassitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking an extrahelping of dessert. Lil’s parents, to either side of her, were less sanguine.Tom’s jaw was set and angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. HickoryJackson in the old Hall used to say, I will hang the first man I can lay handson from the first tree I can find.“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we planned it,” Danwent on, as though no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, butI didn’t.

I have a backup in my public directory—anyone can examine it.Right now, I’d like to bring Jeanine up, she’s got a few words she’d like tosay.”I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the ad-hocswere an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself, I was enjoyingit.“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. Iwondered if we could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn’t care much about Whuffie, one way or another.The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said, “Please!Can we have a little respect for our visitor? Please? People?”Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine.“Hello,” she said again, and flinched from the sound of her voice in theHall’s PA. “My name is Jeanine. I’m the one who killed Julius, a year ago.Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn’t ask why. I trusted—trust—him.

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Hetold me that Julius would make a backup a few minutes before I shot him,and that he could get me out of the Park without getting caught. I’m verysorry. ” There was something off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stanceand words that let you know she wasn’t all there. Growing up in a mountainmight do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were pressedtogether. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you, too.“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan said, taking back the mic. “You can have aseat now. I’ve said everything I need to say—Julius and I have had our owndiscussions in private. If there’s anyone else who’d like to speak—”The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted againin words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took her handand shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on the Pirates of theCarribean?”She shook her head.I stood up and pulled her to her feet.

“You’ll love it,” I said, and led herout of the Hall.

Chapter Chapter 10

I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a freshround of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus inhollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk.Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes likesaucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never avertingher attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyesjiggled. I chuckled.From where we sat, I could see the spot where I’d waded into the SevenSeas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella’sCastle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and thebusses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses ofguests from place to place.

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Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toastedhim back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction.Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway?When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toesdug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, andJeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lighted bargesputtered away through the night, we three sat in the hammock.I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was mylast night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, startafresh. That’s what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I’d gottenstuck. Dan had unstuck me.The talk turned to Dan’s impending death.“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowingcigarette. “Shoot,” I said.“I’m thinking—why take lethal injection?

I mean, I may be done herefor now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?”“Why did you want to before?” I asked.“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, Idon’t have to prove anything, right?”“Sure,” I said, magnanimously.“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I’m asking is, how long can Ideadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, tenthousand, right?”“So, you’re thinking, what, a million?” I joked.He laughed. “A million? You’re thinking too small, son. Try this on forsize: the heat death of the universe.”“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated.“Sure,” he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to thehundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it’s when all the black holeshave run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I’mthinking—why not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?”“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said.

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“Brrrr.”“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass enoughto feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the timecomes around. I’ll poke my head in every century or so, just to see what’swhat, but if nothing really stupendous crops up, I’ll take the long ride out.The final frontier.”“That’s pretty cool,” Jeanine said.“Thanks,” Dan said.“You’re not kidding, are you?” I asked.“Nope, I sure ain’t,” he said.— • —They didn’t invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left inWhuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was.Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, theythought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to killsomeone, I swear.

A house divided against itself can not stand, as Mr.Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbagand checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanineand Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he’d picked upwith my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played oldBeatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon.The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we’d been throughdecontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-pooras Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the bigbubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched theuniverse get colder for a while.There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs,and they weren’t half bad.Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked.

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She’d gone to spacewith her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haulgeneration ship. She’d abandoned it after a year or two and deadheadedback to Earth in a support-pod. She’d get used to life in space after a while.Or she wouldn’t.“Well,” Dan said.“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled.“It’s that time,” he said.Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine’s eyes, and I brushed themaway, setting them adrift in the bubble. I’d developed some real tender,brother-sister type feelings for her since I’d watched her saucer-eye her waythrough the Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! Butcamaraderie and a sense of responsibility.“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. Istarted after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.“He hates long good-byes,” she said.“I know,” I said, and watched him go.— • —The universe gets older. So do I.

So does my backup, sitting inredundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age orstupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my lifelonghand, a letter to the me that I’ll be when it’s restored into a clonesomewhere, somewhen. It’s important that whoever I am then knows aboutthis year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.In the meantime, I’m working on another symphony, one with a little bitof “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It’s a Small World After All,”and especially “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”Jeanine says it’s pretty good, but what does she know? She’s barelyfifty.We’ve both got a lot of living to do before we know what’s what.

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AcknowledgementsI could never have written this book without the personal support of myfriends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and NeilDoctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, JohnHenson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and MarkFrauenfelder.I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored andencouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, MarthaSoukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa NielsenHayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agentDonald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition.Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers whoinspired this book.Cory DoctorowSan FranciscoSeptember 2002 About the AuthorCory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic FrontierFoundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site atwww.craphound.com.

He is the co-editor of the popular weblog BoingBoing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. Hewon the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 HugoAwards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. Heenjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on thebeach.

Other Books by Cory DoctorowA Place So Foreign and Eight More- short story collection, forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall2003, with an introduction by Bruce SterlingEssential Blogging, O’Reilly and Associates, 2002- with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott andMena G. TrottThe Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, Alpha Books,2000- co-written with Karl Schroeder

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Machine-Readable Metadata(If you’re not a machine, don’t bother) <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><Work rdf:about="http://craphound.com/down"> <dc:title>Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom</dc:title> <dc:date>2003-1-9</dc:date> <dc:description>A novel by Cory Doctorow:Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end ofscarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of takingup residence in Disney World.Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long&#45;ago twentieth century. Now in the care ofa network of volunteer "ad&#45;hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have,enhanced with only the smallest high&#45;tech touches.Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack.

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A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidentsand is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct&#45;to&#45;brain interfacesthat give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack onthe artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsetshim. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, awar of ever&#45;shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes.Bursting with cutting&#45;edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom readslike Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a coming&#45;of&#45;age romantic comedy and akick&#45;butt cybernetic tour de force.</dc:description> <dc:creator><Agent> <dc:title>Cory Doctorow</dc:title> </Agent></dc:creator> <dc:rights><Agent> <dc:title>Cory Doctorow</dc:title> </Agent></dc:rights> <dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" /><license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0" /></Work><License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0"> <requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution" /> <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction" /> <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution" /> <prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse" /> <requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" /></License></rdf:RDF>

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