Prologue
I 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 realizemy boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to seethe death of the workplace and of work.
I never thought I’d live to see the day when Keep A-Movin’ Danwould decide 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 campusin Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. Wehooked up at the Grad Students’ union—the GSU, or Gazoo for thosewho knew—on a busy Friday night, spring-ish. I was fighting a coralslowbattle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer everytime the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surroundedby a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised asun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we’re going to haveto get a 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 realtimethat he 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 talkabout personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate atnon-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people,even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population.
“You’ve been jaunting?” I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him tohave missed an instant’s experience 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.”
The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
11I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I hadto resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display.
I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes andthen their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave itup and let a prideful 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 fringedwellerswho 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 communitiessurvive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper,we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don’t have such ahigh success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to aculture that’s already successfully resisted nearly a century’s worth ofpropaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all theWhuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshedfrom a backup after they aren’t heard from for a decade or so. I’dnever 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 arifle. Plenty of those, though.”
He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptanceof the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it insubtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses,then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowlyinching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn’t rememberwhy they hadn’t wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they weremostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimitedsupplies and deadheading 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 drawn12up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicideteeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors.
They just can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know theyexist. Off-world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough andhard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over hiswhiskers. “But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. Thelittle enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what ifwe’d taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we’d takendeadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn’twant to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, noWhuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.”
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,that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don’t remember what itwas like to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it feltlike to have them 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 forten thousand years! Tell me that’s not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almosteveryone I’d known in my eighty-some years were deadheading orjaunting or 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 comestime to reanimate. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a littlecrowded around here.”
I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like theworld was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free13Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or toocold. We fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. I’m gonnabe here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I’ll do it thelong way around.”
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 becrazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the stateof-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizablyhuman in a hundred centuries? Me, I’m not interested in being apost-person. I’m going to wake up one day, and I’m going to say, ‘Well, Iguess I’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”
I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying attentionwhile 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 tostop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There’llcome a day when I don’t have anything left to do, except stop.”
On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, because of his cowboyvibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take overevery conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie afew times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulatedmore esteem from the people he met.
I’d pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savingsfrom the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupidat the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I’d expendedall the respect 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 chumas exotic as Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, the legendary missionary who visitedthe only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can’t say for14sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice thathe’d liked my symphonies, and he’d read my Ergonomics thesis onapplying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, andliked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us having agood time needling each other.
I’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us,of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, ofthe unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He’d tell me that deadheadingwas a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspectionand creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no realvictory.
This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times withoutresolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essenceof money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, youwouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum couldbuy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money reallyrepresented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more 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 humansand one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousnesswas present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting.
They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Danin 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 thewalled city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoonof US Marines 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 andstacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one takingthe trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urinesample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I15stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot bankedaround the turbulence, and wondered when I’d see Dan next.
About Doctorow:
Cory Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and sciencefiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is infavor of liberalizing copyright laws, and a proponent of the CreativeCommons organisation, and uses some of their licenses for his books.
Some common themes of his work include digital rights management,file sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics. Source: Wikipedia2I 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,John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars andMark Frauenfelder.
I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouragedme: 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 tofruition.
Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers whoinspired this book.
Cory DoctorowSan FranciscoSeptember 20023A note about this book, February 12, 2004:
As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I releasedthis book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commonslicense that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text withoutneeding any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted myreaders in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book couldfind its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experimentworked out very 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'smost restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge.
I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinelyschooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing thatstands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in methat even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved"regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavisticfear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.
It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection (A Place SoForeign and Eight More and a second novel (Eastern Standard Tribe) inthis 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 Books).
I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commonslicense, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This isa license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" thisbook — you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio andfilm adaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes,you name it. A number of you assumed that you had my blessing to dothis in the first place, and I can't say that I've been at all put out by thedelightful and creative derivative works created from this book, but nowyou have my explicit blessing, and I hope you'll use it.
Here's the license in summary:
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10PrologueI 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 realizemy boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to seethe death of the workplace and of work.
I never thought I’d live to see the day when Keep A-Movin’ Danwould decide 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 campusin Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. Wehooked up at the Grad Students’ union—the GSU, or Gazoo for thosewho knew—on a busy Friday night, spring-ish. I was fighting a coralslowbattle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer everytime the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surroundedby a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised asun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we’re going to haveto get a 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 realtimethat he 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 talkabout personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate atnon-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people,even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population.
“You’ve been jaunting?” I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him tohave missed an instant’s experience 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.”
The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
11I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I hadto resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display.
I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes andthen their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave itup and let a prideful 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 fringedwellerswho 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 communitiessurvive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper,we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don’t have such ahigh success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to aculture that’s already successfully resisted nearly a century’s worth ofpropaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all theWhuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshedfrom a backup after they aren’t heard from for a decade or so. I’dnever 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 arifle. Plenty of those, though.”
He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptanceof the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it insubtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses,then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowlyinching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn’t rememberwhy they hadn’t wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they weremostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimitedsupplies and deadheading 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 drawn12up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicideteeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors.
They just can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know theyexist. Off-world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough andhard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over hiswhiskers. “But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. Thelittle enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what ifwe’d taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we’d takendeadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn’twant to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, noWhuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.”
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,that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don’t remember what itwas like to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it feltlike to have them 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 forten thousand years! Tell me that’s not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almosteveryone I’d known in my eighty-some years were deadheading orjaunting or 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 comestime to reanimate. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a littlecrowded around here.”
I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like theworld was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free13Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or toocold. We fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. I’m gonnabe here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I’ll do it thelong way around.”
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 becrazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the stateof-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizablyhuman in a hundred centuries? Me, I’m not interested in being apost-person. I’m going to wake up one day, and I’m going to say, ‘Well, Iguess I’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”
I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying attentionwhile 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 tostop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There’llcome a day when I don’t have anything left to do, except stop.”
On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, because of his cowboyvibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take overevery conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie afew times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulatedmore esteem from the people he met.
I’d pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savingsfrom the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupidat the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I’d expendedall the respect 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 chumas exotic as Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, the legendary missionary who visitedthe only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can’t say for14sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice thathe’d liked my symphonies, and he’d read my Ergonomics thesis onapplying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, andliked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us having agood time needling each other.
I’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us,of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, ofthe unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He’d tell me that deadheadingwas a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspectionand creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no realvictory.
This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times withoutresolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essenceof money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, youwouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum couldbuy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money reallyrepresented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more 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 humansand one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousnesswas present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting.
They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Danin 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 thewalled city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoonof US Marines 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 andstacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one takingthe trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urinesample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I15stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot bankedaround the turbulence, and wondered when I’d see Dan next.
Chapter 1
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 thattook over 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 the animatronicsthat were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in Kissimmee,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 togetherwhile the 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, breathingthe warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gaveme a butterfly 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. It was one of her favorite duties,exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after17the 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 thinkthe age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting itget to me.
“I think I’ll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion,if you just give me a moment to rest my bursitis.” I felt her smile againstmy shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghostsand dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try andstare down the marble busts in the library that followed your gaze asyou 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 softping inside 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,though it’d been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together.
I muted the subvocal and said, “Lil, I’ve got to take this. Do you mind?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” she sarcased at me. 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 asob.
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 thephone to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in thecricket-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 knewthe castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me.
“Ten minutes.”
18“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 fakeduptrophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmemberswere working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with theguests.
Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He hadraccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I approached,I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it haddropped to 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,” I subvocalized.
“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.
Love you.”
“Back atcha, kid,” I said.
19As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he openedhis eyes. “You’re a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried tothink of 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 onthe side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs besidethem. 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;but to the kids, it’s the world. Someone without any is automatically suspect.
I watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe herhand on her 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 couldtalk to someone … younger, too.”
She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the secondgencastmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair.
She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crackperiod before she was born, just after they made it decaf, and I alwaysfelt old when I saw her and her friends light up. Dan surprised me byholding out a hand to her and taking the pipe. He toked heavily, thenpassed 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 downto,” he said.
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I’d run out ofthings to do, things to see. I knew that I’d finish some day. You remember,we used to argue about it. I swore I’d be done, and that would be theend of it. And now I am. There isn’t a single place left on-world that isn’t20part of the Bitchun Society. There isn’t a single thing left that I want anypart 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 lasteight years in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities.
I did some followup studies, interviews. No one was interested.
Not even me. I smoked a lot of hash. It didn’t help. So, one morningI woke up and went to the bazaar and said good bye to the friendsI’d made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and had the man make me upa lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went back to my rooms.
I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I decided to sleep on it, and Igot up the next morning and did it all over again. I looked inside myself,and I saw that I didn’t have the guts. I just didn’t have the guts. I’vestared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knivespressed up against my throat, but I didn’t have the guts to press thatbutton.”
“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.
If you’d done it ten years earlier, you would’ve been going out on top—achampion, retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harderthan-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.
21“Well, don’t just sit there,” she said. “You know what you’ve got todo.”
“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. “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 asigh, 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 lookbeat.”
“Beat doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said.
“Good night, then,” I said.
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 gueststhey wouldn’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 betterjob.
It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne—agroup who’d worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had movedoff to other pursuits—some of them had gone to school, some of themhad made movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing tohelp start things up. A few had deadheaded for a couple decades.
They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the attractions.
The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives inthe 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 mightmake a successful go of it.
So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractionsof 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 DisneyImagineers.
I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with LincolnII, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything runningat speed, just in case. 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 ranchhousehad a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss,23something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front ofour porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking infrom his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personalcapital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring,pulling me into his over-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 tiedback in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling ofgirl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattresssomewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately,and she wriggled appreciatively. “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 thathad startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer’s Club. “What did hewant?”
“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. Her GreatMovie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the Star Wars sequencehad already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits.
She’d leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland adhocsto rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areaswere piled high with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits.
It was terrifying to walk through; the Pirates was the last rideWalt personally supervised, and we’d thought it was sacrosanct. ButDebra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXthcentury Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Parkfrom obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the bestaspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims that communicatedwith each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each timethey rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas;the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks onthe sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered aviolent, breath-taking storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaicanpepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean24accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates whoplied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack likecordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatusand dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.
“So, what’s she up to?”
Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter’s mechanical guts and madea comical moue of worry. “She’s rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incrediblejob. They’re ahead of schedule, they’ve got good net-buzz, thefocus groups are cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression,baring genuine worry.
She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger athim. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the softhum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrackkicked in low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combinedcould not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take adrink from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must beits author—and its finisher.” She mimed turning down the gain and hefell silent again.
“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at himagain, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn periodtopcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vestpocket.
I put my arm around her shoulders. “You’re doing all you can—andit’s good work,” I said. I’d fallen into the easy castmember mode ofspeaking, 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 squeezeand let her go.
She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It’ll be fine, ofcourse,” she said. “I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra willdo her job very, very well, and make things even better than they arenow. 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.
25Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I gotready to back 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’d lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, givingin completely to machine-generated reminders over consciouschoice.
“It’s Dan.” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behindhim—children’s laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the trompof thousands 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 headand my life flashed before my eyes.
Chapter 3
The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores frombackup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly.
Some people 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,you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn’t need toconvert its 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’t rememberthe 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—theblood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between itand my skin. The caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiledand twisted like intestines. Through each hole and around each corner,there was a hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobstersskittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish asbright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision maneuversas I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best thinking under water,and I’m often slipping off into dangerous reverie at depth. Normally,my diving buddies ensure that I don’t hurt myself, but this time I gotaway from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole.
Where I got stuck.
My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle withthe hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. Mybuddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottleand buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others exchangedhand signals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. Suddenly, I27was thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared into the cave, minusmy vest and bottle. I’d apparently attempted to cut through my vest’sstraps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling ajolt of sea water, I’d thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrouspatch of spindly fire-coral. I’d inhaled another lungful of water andkicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave’s ceiling, whence my buddies retrievedme shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy redwelts from the stinging coral.
In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the proceduretook 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 the completionof 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. In my mind, the rebirthwas figurative as well as literal—the missing time was enough that Ifound myself 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 acrazy lady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself atDisney World. When I told him that I was going to live there someday,he asked me if that would mean that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes,as I ran my fingers through Lil’s sweet red curls, I thought ofthat remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled thatmy friend Dan had been so prescient.
The next time I died, they’d improved the technology somewhat. I’dhad a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice inthe middle 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 theywoke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of themissing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I feltat home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself inDisney World, methodically flensing away the relationships I’d built andstarting afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and working the28heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my Chem thesisat U of T.
After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciatethe great leaps that restores had made in the intervening tenyears. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up tomy third death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footagefrom the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted fromDan’s own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. Iwoke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I feltthat way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that hadbeen put in place when I was restored.
Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil’s tired, smiling face was limnedwith hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand andkissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I wasseized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by peoplewho really loved me. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decidedto wing it, opened my mouth 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 ofmy ankles, 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. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newnessof it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feelingof newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporatingand a sense of urgency 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 inmy nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came intothe room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this sucks,” I said.
I’d gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quickcuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, andone at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland.
I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, andbegan to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous,29darting shuffle that I’d developed when I was doing field-work on mycrowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd towardthe long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminumcut and painted to look like long grass.
Fuzzy shots now, from Dan’s POV, of me moving closer to him,passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees,wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with EpcotCenter logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from theJungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan’s gaze flicks away,to the Tiki Room’s entrance, where there is a short queue of older men,then back, just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organicpistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually,grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lildoes with her finger when she’s uploading, and the pistol lunges forward.
Dan’s gaze flicks back to me. I’m pitching over, my lungs burstingout of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle andviscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, nowshrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When helooks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol islong 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 slowmotion.
I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the SwissFamily Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts tomove towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. The selfguidingsmart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near groundlevel, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below thespeed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into myspine, detonating once it’s entered my chest cavity.
The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, followingher as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weavingbetween 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.
30Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen herbefore. The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope.” The Seven Sisterswere a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girlwore 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 sixmonths: only three matched the girl’s apparent age; all three have alibis.
Chances are she stole it.”
“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind’s eye, I saw my lungs burstingout of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying likeshrapnel. I saw the girl’s smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled thetrigger 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—shetook equipment 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 dramaqueenabout it.
Dan’s eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things for reasonsthat seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the worldcouldn’t hope to understand. I’ve seen a few assassinations, and theynever made sense afterwards.” He stroked his chin. “Sometimes, it’s betterto look for temperament, rather than motivation: who could dosomething like this?”
Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who’dvisited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably.
I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four dayssince my murder. 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 waschurning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.
I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.
31“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, toothoroughly.
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—sympathy Whuffie—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 abackup?”
“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,but I couldn’t resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actuallyhelped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a personwho knew you better than you knew yourself. “So you’re saying that ifyou were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that youwouldn’t be you anymore?”
32“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is differentfrom not being destroyed at all, right?”
“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You’re being destroyedand recreated 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.
You got 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. … gave them all a fixed smile and tried toconcentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, howthey dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionallytaking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interferencefor me with the other castmembers.
He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies andwe walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, notingas I rounded the corner that there was something different about thequeue-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. “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 had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that helooked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood—Debrahad established a toehold in Liberty Square.
“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee anhour after you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net.
They’re promising not to touch the Mansion.”
“You didn’t mention this,” I said, hotly.
33“We thought you’d jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, butthere’s no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone’s gotan alibi; furthermore, they’ve all offered to submit their backups forproof.”
“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,when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It’s all a bigcoincidence.”
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, nota murderer.”
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 thisthing, 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. “All right, I’ve posited it.”
“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the realold-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Islandor even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant,suspicious move?”
“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 withoutpeople seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra’s coming off of a decadein Beijing, 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 walkedme out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticedwe weren’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 hungaround the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring34blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheatedFlorida air. I had my working notes on queue management forthe Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirroredmy HUD so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based onher long experience.
It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughputwithout harming the guest experience. But for every second I couldshave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty gueststhrough and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guestswho got to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra’speople would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked atmy notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequenceby swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descendedfrom the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I couldexpose the guests to all the scenes more 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 simulatean off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshowarea, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries andassorted boo-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 usa cold, considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey requests morebodies.”
As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrivedto give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, andsaw Debra’s elfin comrade looming over Lil’s shoulder. My smile diedon my lips.
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 wouldhave spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolvedto make this the best show I knew how.
It’s subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lilhad already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room numbertwo, the most recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, Itried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle35attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly remasteredsoundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at thecorners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the directionof the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snappedout, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting thatothers had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpsedropped 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 Buggyand an 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 chandelierand into the corridor where the portraits’ eyes watched us. Two years before,I’d accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to theDoom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourlythroughput cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led toall the other seconds I’d shaved away since. The violent pitching of theBuggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another,and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that itwas cold and sweaty.
He was nervous! He was nervous. What did he have to be nervousabout? I was the one who’d been murdered—maybe he was nervous becausehe 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 theBuggy behind us, with one of the Mansion’s regular castmembers. I ranghis cochlea and subvocalized: “Get ready to jump out on my signal.”
Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stopthe ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot ofexplaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra’scrony.
We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors,where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining againstthe hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought aboutit—if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the bestplace to do it? The attic staircase— the next sequence—seemed like agood bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in thegloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn36toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if Iwere staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was. Iswiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.
He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staringat him, 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 letout a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride systemshuddered to a stop.
“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. 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 eyesfixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I’dbeen running. The demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off threeseconds, I’d added 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. Myhead 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 itcost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted mybackup into my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departureat the backup terminal up until my death. I wasn’t one of those nuts whotook death seriously. It wasn’t like they’d done something permanent.
In the meantime, I had done something permanent: I’d dug Lil’s gravea little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion.
I’d acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger,and swallowed 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 facingthe elf.
37He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone runninga 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 inthe close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how muchlike a bark it sounded. Careful, I thought, no need to escalate the hostilities.
“It’s kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with thePirates.”
He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he’d just been givenhigh praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it’s prettygood—the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things,really clarify the vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was rushed,you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was anotherpack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra usedto send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep ourWhuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have theopportunity to refine the designs, 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.
Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to aseries of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It wasfaster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation forpursuing expedience.
“I’m starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure,” I said,and nodded 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 bothlooked 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.
They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted throughme. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil’s big, scarred hand in mineas soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She hadchanged out of her maid’s uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whosemicropore fabric breathed 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.”
38Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hardwork,” Dan said.
It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normallyan instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented.
I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respectgarnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expectedthat. What I didn’t expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the onethat lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was alsohigh—higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior evenmore. Respect from the elf—Tim, I had to remember to call himTim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp 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 had accordedhim a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he hadscraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbancein front 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, realizingthat the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I couldhave 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 disattentionto the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of goodnaturedcooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, lookingfor excuses to pounce 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 goodstuff, 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 belike having each President inside you, core-dumped in a few seconds.
Debra said we’re going to flash-bake the Presidents on your mind!” Hiseyes glittered in the twilight.
Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim’sdescription struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling39around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. Itmade the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed inalong with it 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 dignitycribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing withit would be 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. “You’ve got ashift at eight, and I’m running into town for groceries.” She was lying,but she was telling me that this wasn’t her idea of a smart move. But myfaith was 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 pastcaring—I was going to beard the lion in his den!
Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it’s settled! Let’sgo.”
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-40talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle inthe Mansion with Tim, win him over.
Debra’s people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronicpresidents 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 anall-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and acouple of days 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. Shewas at least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got thesense that she picked this age because it was one that afforded boundlessreserves of energy.
She didn’t deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorouslyat me. 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 bigdeal for her.
“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! Youknow Dan, 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 knewwhat he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and heworked like a mule, so they tolerated him. But it seemed like he’d violateda boundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction thathe was more a part of Debra’s ad-hoc than Lil’s was shattered by mypresence.
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 the animatronicsand cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose,41packed 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 scrimthat the projected portions of the show normally screened on wasground into the 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 laystrewn about 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. Tim pointed a fingerat the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln:
every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movementtics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I was Lincoln,for a moment, and then it passed. But I could still taste the lingeringcoppery flavor of cannon-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 the Presidentswas going to be a hit.
Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expressionshifted 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 Danwas getting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot.
There’s something wonderful about having memories implanted, likeyou’re really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all.”
Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It’s niceand soft, right?”
I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply whenDebra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, lesscomputer-y. He’s wrong, of course. We don’t want to simulate the experienceof watching 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.
42Empathy-driven. What’s the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry factson someone’s brain?”
Chapter 4
One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:
That Debra’s people had had me killed, and screw their alibis, That theywould kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for theHaunted Mansion, That our only hope for saving the Mansion was apreemptive strike against 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 cooperationborn of the adversity they’d faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team toteam, making suggestions with body language as much as with words,leaving bursts 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,call them what they were: an army.
Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finishedat about three in the morning, after intensive consultation withDebra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second timearound, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness.
The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck intoyour experience on each successive ride.
Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained prideas I 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, itcrashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first passthrough, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this wasgestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spillingover. It was panicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolnessseemed to threaten my own personality, and, just as it was about to44overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of endorphin and adrenalinethat made me want to jump.
“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, blindeyes; the thick, deaf ears.
Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from herthrone. “You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to thetheatre seat where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling inhis 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 worldfor two centuries and more—could never compete head to head withwhat they were 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 distributeit online and people could access it from their living rooms!
But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie—they’d make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc wherethree 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. Iturned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it hadbeen since my boyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers whoanticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.
I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. Hegrunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.
“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. Itmade what 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 tooneat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so45fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and theymoved in. Tell me that you think they just had these plans lying aroundand moved on them when they could.”
Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have beenstretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenancecrews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don’t. It’snot the first time 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 were showboating,announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other adhocsthat worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencersin the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. Asmooth run would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteedcontinued support while they finished up; a failed demo coulddoom them. There were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimentalattachment to the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra’speople came up with would have 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 thecase that you were working on your own—gone rogue.” I knew it wasn’tfair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated inmy dirty scheme, he’d have to start over again. I knew it wasn’t fair, butI didn’t care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It’sgood versus evil, Dan. You don’t want to be a post-person. You want tostay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through ourown experience. We’re physically inside of them, and they talk to usthrough our senses. What Debra’s people are building—it’s hive-mindshit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It’s not an experience, it’sbrainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with myselfas much as with him.
46I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads,lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Danwas looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto.
Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about it—I’d gottenthrough to him.
“Jules, this isn’t one of your better ideas.” My chest tightened, and hepatted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, evenwhen he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if Debra was behindyour assassination—and that’s not a certainty, we both know that. Evenif that’s the case, we’ve got better means at our disposal. Improving theMansion, competing with her head to head, that’s smart. Give it a littlewhile and we can come back at her, take over the Hall—even the Pirates,that’d really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination,we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going to do youany good. You’ve got 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, knowingthat my image was being archived, my presence logged. I’d picked thetiming of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking tomy traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I’dmade a point of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, andof dawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delaybetween my arrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansionwould 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 oldpneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kidswho grew up in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes,which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they’d once whisked at 60mph to the dump on the property’s outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid,the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediatedexperiences of the Park lost their luster.
47I 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, whichdidn’t occur 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 theHall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronicson the premises. I’d gotten the germ of the idea during Tim’s firstdemo, when I’d seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off,ready to be tinkered 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 only indicatorof 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 hishand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves intothe tube’s floor 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 consideran apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan didhis slow burn.
He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my palm—out ofmy pocket. “Now what?” he said.
“Can you pass it up?” I asked.
48Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcagemet my 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 ofthe destruction.
“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 thenit 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 damningbit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next servicehatch, near the parking lot, where I’d stashed an identical change ofclothes for both of us.
We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra’s adhocswere ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, acollection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the preshowarea to capacity.
Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behindthe crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and Ismiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was goingdown in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed intothe auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo andfresh electronics.
We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively,while Debra, dressed in Lincoln’s coat and stovepipe, delivered a shortspeech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stagenow, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongousburst.
Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause,and they started the demo.
49Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face asnothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in mypublic directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to makesome snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open,her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember wasin the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up adiagnostic 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 private conversations.
Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.
Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tellthat. Tears pricked her eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment’s staring intothe 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. I don’t think they’ve gotsoul, I don’t think they’ve got history, I don’t think they’ve got any kindof connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they visitthis place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.”
I’m offline, 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 moretime in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, howmuch work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in acouple weeks possibly be better that this thing we’ve been maintainingfor all these years?”
She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled.
“Sorry,” she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles lividover the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry—it’s just shocking. Maybe you’reright. And even if you’re not—hey, that’s the whole point of a50meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else getssupplanted.
“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 having improvedher 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 hercronies, pipe between her teeth.
She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincerecompliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied atorch to the bowl.
“Thanks,” she said, laconically. “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 thatthey weren’t floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a coppermesh—a Faraday cage. That’s why the HERF gun hadn’t done anything;that’s why they’d been so casual about working with the shielding offtheir computers. With my eye, I followed the copper shielding aroundthe entire stage and up the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling.
Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of Debra’s ad-hocs, howtheir trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of bushleaguejiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies 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 theystaged another one—and another, and another. Whatever they could getaway with.
Debra’s spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. Istopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty51Square and Fantasyland. “When was the last time you backed up?” Iasked her. If they could 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? We should really back up at nightand at lunchtime—with things the way they are, we can’t afford to losean afternoon’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 backup that 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 lot better.
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 somethingabout wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she’d had. I glaredat her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away fromme. I hadn’t told her that I was offline yet—it just seemed like insignificantpersonal bitching 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 couldvisit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy.
So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, Ihad to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get thetime. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of alltimepieces, anyway?
Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I triedto rouse 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 sat52up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I’d long agoprogrammed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except inemergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered intothe kitchen, 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 feltlike punching the wall.
“You wouldn’t get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general directionof a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.
“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shiftfor me—the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hitthe Imagineering 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, whenI was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What’s wrong, honey?” she said,going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besidesthe 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 youand your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with thebones. For God’s sake, Lil, don’t you ever get fucking angry about anything?
Don’t you have any goddamned passion?”
Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worstthing 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. She’d been just19—apparent and real—and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismissher, at first, as just 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 former53shareholders who’d been operating it as their private preserve. Rita wasapparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to thePark that threw her daughter’s superficiality into sharp relief.
They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. Ina world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, traveland access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficientto repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over andover.
The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals hadused a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemadecostumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers,the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by thethousand. The shareholders’ lackeys—who worked the Park for thechance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over themanagement decisions—put up a token resistance. Before the day wasout, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders, handingover security codes and pitching in.
“But we knew the shareholders wouldn’t give in as easy as that,” Lil’smother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park running 24/7 forthe next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight backwithout doing it in front of the guests. We’d prearranged with a coupleof airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests camepouring in.” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features inrepose were Lil’s almost identically. It was only when she was talkingthat her face changed, muscles tugging it into an expression decadesolder than the face that bore it.
“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota’soutside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties backand forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I sleptin a sleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others,in three hour shifts. That was when I met this asshole"—she chucked herhusband on the shoulder—"he’d gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistakeand wouldn’t budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled innext 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 orgrin and bear it. But you don’t get to dictate the topic of conversation.”
54Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shookher head 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 thatDisney World would be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society.
Maybe it was, but …” She trailed off and rubbed her palms on herthighs, a gesture I’d come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren’tenough challenges for them these days. They’re too cooperative.” Shelaughed and her husband 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 himselfolder, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, thebetter to present a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was atruism among the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers shouldwear themselves young, men old. “We’re just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists,I guess.”
Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they telling you whata pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don’tyou come over here and have a smoke?” I noticed that she and her cohortwere passing 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 thereby courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlandoevery year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. “They’re passionateabout maintaining the Park, that’s for sure. I made the mistake oflifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a veryearnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmemberwho couldn’t have been more than 18. I think that they don’thave the passion for creating Bitchunry that we have—they don’t needit—but they’ve got plenty of drive to maintain it.”
Lil’s mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn’t know whatto make of. 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 samething. We were talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his55wife, who nodded—"about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See ifthings changed much 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 thetime came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came—Iwas talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversationhad to 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 mylast living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousandyears. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gottenthe hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthoodand my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we’dspent the day bounding around the countryside on seven-league boots,sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fierycarpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune heknew where they still made cheese from cow’s milk and there’d been athousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I’dlong since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I’d remember forever.
And it wasn’t so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia,because whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakesand the crisp sunset the color of 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 toworry her. 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 andcuddled a little.
Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Ritawere invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to bewoken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material tomake it worth their 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 twitteringPolyannic castmembers.
56For 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,and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter;Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Squaread-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walkedout of the kitchen. She got in her runabout and went to the Park to takeher shift.
I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazyturns, and felt like shit.
Chapter 5
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 weird reversalof 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 onewith the wry looks and I was the pathetic seeker who’d burned all hisreputation capital. Out of habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a momentlater I stopped being startled by its low score and was instead shockedby the fact that I could 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 beatthe world—or at least Debra.
58“Let me take a shower, then let’s get to the Imagineering labs. I’ve gota pretty kickass idea.”
The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab ofthe Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I’dgotten what I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society wasto be more 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,” I explained,“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 theywent by. It didn’t last long, of course. The poor bastard kept gettingpunched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn’t too comfortablefor long shifts.”
Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but doneaway with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplentyand a life of leisure in your 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 ownjokes, and even though the animatronics aren’t so hot, it makes the showworth seeing.”
“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 theproperty. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-facedguests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We’ll let them interact withthe guests, talk with them, scare them … We’ll get rid of the existing animatronics,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 bebased on popular vote. In effect, we’ll be adding another ten thousand59guests to the Mansion’s throughput every day, only these guests will behonorary castmembers.”
“That’s pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AIand flash-baking, but you’ll have human interaction, courtesy of thebiggest Mansion-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 pitchthe idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. Mymood started 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. Thead-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and nowran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboardtypes who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool.
Not caring about Whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty onboth the left and right hands.
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 were collaboratingon their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middleof a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkesand gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisible screens.
Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab,leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted bywhat he 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. Anyone else wouldhave made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into thediscussion.
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 ofthe Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of the HitchhikingGhosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their60layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so thatplacing one in proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspiredbehaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota’s head incanted, thesinging busts sang. She’d worked up some formal attire based on thecastmember costume, cut in this year’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 roboticavatars of Mansion-nuts the world ’round, Mme. Leota’s gift cart piledhigh with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with theguests in the queue 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 politely pretendingnot to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.
“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that’s thepoint—what Debra does isn’t easy either. It’s risky, dangerous. It madeher and her ad-hoc better—it made them sharper.” Sharper than us,that’s for sure. “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute themjust as quickly. 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 ather own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.
“I understand what you’re saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—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 thegroup and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans,laying out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from someof them.”
61I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the LibertySquare ad-hoc moved, we’d be holding formal requirements reviewswhile Debra’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,just take the idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would ittake you 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 shiftsaround the clock.”
He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while mutteringunder 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. “Barring accidents, assuming off-theshelfparts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up aHUD and 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 workedwhen they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptualmockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review andrevisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc thatcommissioned their 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 be62halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approachthat makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it’s backto the drawing board … So I stay at the drawing board for a long time atthe start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focusgroups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of construction,check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven’t thought ofand 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 eightweeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do that one ineight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride thething?”
“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 organizationneeded to turn on a dime—that would be even more Bitchun.
“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her.
“We have to do this. It’s our only chance. We’ll recruit hundreds to cometo Florida and work on the rehab. We’ll give every Mansion nut on theplanet a shot at joining up, then we’ll recruit them again to work at it, torun the telepresence rigs. We’ll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommendersin the world, and we’ll build something better and faster thanany ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original Imagineers’ vision.
It will be unspeakably 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,but excited and scared and yes, passionate.
“It’s not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan andI exchanged 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 andforth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her headin a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. Thisplan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompaniedit, in short order, but by the time that happened, she’d have plenty ofWhuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.
63“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,I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious:
since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one hadever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version,Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minorbit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No onewanted 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 betold, it had never been my absolute favorite.
But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshlybored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I’d foundmyself crowd-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, eelinginto the only seat on a packed car, I’d been obsessed with Beating TheCrowd.
In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I’d known a blackjack player,a compulsive 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 withsoftware agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulouslywealthy: he’d never raised a cent of financing for his company,and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full ofmoney. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he’d pilgrimoff to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkeycardsand calculate the odds and Beat The House.
Long after his software company was sold, long after he’d made hisnut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grindingout hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating64The House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice everytime the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull offace cards.
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 ofleast resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging thetraffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precisionand grace and, 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 abarge over to the Main 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 shortestwait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosksand evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I’dhave been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less ameasure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examinedtheir queuing styles, 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 the unladencitizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupialpocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a surebet for 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,left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in afruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit’sfoot, a rosary, 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 one descriptionor another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-gradestrap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watchfor is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do theybalance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease ofaccess? Someone who’s given that much consideration to their gear islikely spending their time in line determining which bits and piecesthey’ll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them atready for fastest-possible processing.
65This 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.
These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and thatwhile pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.
I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, aqueue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticcednervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could’vechosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I wassauntering down 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 firstinklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone’s consciousness:
the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economythat had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. Mymemories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and asea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding inOmniMover 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 weekthere stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner.
Someday, I knew, 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 avisual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents inthe flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. Truthbe told, I probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would’vespent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got moreexercise.
The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: theSnow Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Squareen route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancingto the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movementsof the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square66was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansionfive times in a row, walking on every time.
The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion,but to tell the truth it was the other way around.
The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air conditioningand 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 illusionof a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through theballroom were ghosts, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic.
The ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard wereequally convincing, 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, the chandeliers,the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to “Grim GrinningGhosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether insinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or thespritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.
It’s a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, thistime noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious chillsthat blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presencefelt. By the time I debarked for the fifth time, I was whistling the tunewith jazzy improvisations 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 myselffor having so completely experienced a really fine hunk of art.
I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of theWhuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainmentshould notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.
“That’s really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountainsof 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. She compromisedbetween ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a67grin at me, thumped through a zombie’s curtsey, and moaned “Thankyou—we do try to 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 possiblyhave to say to each other across a century-wide gap.
While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, the reverseis 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 atotally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it.
Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-timecould be.
I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-andmindsaction with our core audience, but Lil turned it down.
She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politickingamong the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and shedidn’t want the appearance of impropriety that would come from havingoutsiders being brought 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 thinkthat I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker.
In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter thaneveryone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words formouth-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 from68Beating The Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemyof expedience.
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 joiningup, 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.
And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of theothers I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them andcouldn’t help but treat them as individuals.
In the years since, I’d lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around withLil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world.
The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesybut not much friendliness.
I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind,they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in thestarchy world of 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 Iwas using—my systems were back offline. They’d been sputtering upand down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor,but I’d never gotten ’round to it. Periodically, I’d get a jolt of urgencywhen I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but theMansion always took precedence.
“Huh?” he said.
I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collectionof animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part ofa 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 for69full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might’ve used a standard humankinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written hisown from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluiditythat was utterly 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. He’d submitted the designs aweek before my assassination.
“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a coupleideas on 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, asfast and as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She’sacquisitive, sure, but she’s cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents,and so 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 theHall of Presidents?”
Dan fumbled. “Not really. … 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’mthe 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 sofa70and 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 beingable to check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late atnight to call anyone and do anything about it. By the morning, I’d haveforgotten 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 readyto go. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep tellingme they’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? Rearrangingdeck chairs 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. “Youcan’t call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” She plantedher hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She’d gone pale and Icould count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, theswell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I’d given her on a day-tripto 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’ll call him right now.”
71“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. Too much todo, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far froma public terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came onlinea couple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lilgrew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, toprinting out her annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favoritechair—to living like the cavemen of the information age had, surroundedby dead trees and ticking clocks.
Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it—I obsessed.
I sat in front of the terminal I’d brought home all day, every day,crunching plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach mehad to haul 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 recruitthe ad-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, increasingthe number of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasingthroughput.
I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public chatterin 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.
72Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that theirsecret messaging had been discovered.
“Having fun, Lil?” I asked.
Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I’ll send yourstuff to the hotel.”
“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 closethe door 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 withLil.
He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. Itook the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom andpoured.
“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.
73“She’s pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell youit was 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’tbeen right, not for months. I don’t know what it is, but you should get toa doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbnessand left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need afriend who doesn’t fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.”
I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains onthe wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated.
If he’d stood 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 takeit up 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 tothink about it. I really liked the bastard. He might’ve been my bestfriend.
There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the peephole.
It was Lil.
She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. Asnide remark 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 downat the 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’tit, Lil?”
Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself.
“I’ll take 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.
74I guess I’ll take what I can get, too, I thought.
Chapter 6
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 Iwas living 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 tento the neg eight, it’s a blast. You don’t stagger, you bounce, and whenyou’re bouncing 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, andif you 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 variedfrom terrific 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 playingit. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interestinglines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn’t, playing aninstrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.
Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouseruns in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movementon a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to adawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it wasreally good. I’m a sucker for musicians.
We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously asspheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into76the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perpwho killed her partner.
I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble.
The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud.
She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed forthe hatch.
I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperateto reach 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!” shesaid, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoningchub-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 thatstretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand’sgrace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as Icould on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-geerim of the station, she was gone.
I didn’t find her again until the next movement was done and I wentto the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up whenshe passed 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 timeand I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rockto folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, Inoodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I manageda smidge of tuneful wit.
She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, reddowny fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter’s style, suited to theclimate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was datingLil, 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 a particularlykicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave77her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, Imaneuvered my way between her and the hatch.
When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but Isummoned 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 cornersand spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me,then, at length, 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 thatsaw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversibleknee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn’t prone toany of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lowerbackpain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.
I thought I lived for fun, but I didn’t have anything on Zed. She onlytalked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn’tdo, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whimthat crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bareskinnedand spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.
I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangleher twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days,floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior.
She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I waswatching. Or maybe she didn’t, and she was making faces for anyone’sbenefit.
But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless andher eyes full of the stars she’d seen and her metallic skin cool with thebreath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through thestation, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoidof rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and78shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupteda thousand acts of 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.
Halfway through, I’d lose track of carnal urges and return to a state ofchildlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the gigglyfeeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageouscorner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazypair that’s always zipping in and zipping away, like having your partycrashed 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 mynose and my willie and shouted, “YOU’LL DO!”
I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories undergroundin 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, hereyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silverhad been inscrutable.
We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphonyin low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, andshe came out and didn’t play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiledwith a smile 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. Ismiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed herand hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor’s office on the second79floor. She’d been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but it took methat long to 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 otherwords, I’d driven her nuts.
You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically tryingto talk 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 abackup 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 readit over 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.” Shehad a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.
Oh, shit. “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventoryof 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 hazeleyes. “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 funand mischief. 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 hiships. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano,and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn’t a shred of recognition inthem. She’d never met me.
80I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning toDisney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, anew career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil,who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazyexes.
If I was nuts, it wasn’t the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone.
It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotagingmy 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 stationin the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, brightand cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried tomake myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they keptturning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform tokeep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.
The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in Adventureland,just steps from where I’d been turned into a road-pizza by thestill-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-filledshafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums andthe spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-keyambient buzz from 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 filledthe room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking beforethe meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was toosmall for the de rigeur ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able tostand at a podium and 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.
81“Everybody knows why we’re here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecatingsmile. 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,’ doyou mean—”
I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We’re on an eight-week productionschedule, 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 acouple months, too. That’s why we’re not spending as much time planningas we usually do. It won’t take five years for the idea to prove out,so the risks are lower.”
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 itcomes to 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, selfimportantjerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blewhis spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “Ithink you’re really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, allof us, and so do the guests. It’s a piece of history, and we’re its custodians,not its masters. Changing it like this, well …” he shook his head.
“It’s not good stewardship. If the guests wanted to walk through a funhousewith guys jumping out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’
they’d go to one of the Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion’sbetter than that. I can’t be a part of this plan.”
82I 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 a responsiblecustodian 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. 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 themeeting was done, no matter what the provocation.
Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and itlooked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all night andall the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all atthe same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervoussmoothing of her hair over her ears.
Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collectedin secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group’s eyesunfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolledin. 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 visionwashed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. Itook two lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth to saysomething horrible, and what came out was “Waaagh.” My right sidewent numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to thefloor.
The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as Itried to 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 whiteand decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors’ whites with an83outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that remindedme to get a check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bringmy hands up to shield my eyes from the over bright light and the overcheerfulsignage, and discovered that I couldn’t move my arms. Furtherinvestigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, infull-on four-point restraint.
“Waaagh,” I said again.
Dan’s worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a seriouslookingdoctor, 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 head urgently.
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 outof 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. Thedoc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched mynose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nutsdidn’t start itching anytime soon.
Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that causedthe head 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 eight84weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can’t be sure, but my theory isthat the brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a materialdefect. It’s been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. Theshut-downs are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducingthe kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interfacesenses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnosticmode, attempts to fix 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 matterof time before it does some serious damage.”
“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, All right, but what’s wrong withmy mouth?
The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don’t try. The interface has lockedup, and it’s taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. Intime, it’ll probably shut down, but for now, there’s no point. That’s whywe’ve got you strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard whenthey brought you in, and we didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Probably shut down? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. 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, thatbackup is a few months old. If we’d caught it earlier, we may’ve beenable to salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you’ve displayedto date … 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. Myplans for the 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 who understoodhow it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the adhocswould surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave ithalf-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a softbelly for Debra to savage.
I wouldn’t be restoring from backup.
85I 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 newly rejuvenatedeyes. 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.
In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore’sbeen completed, we’ll retire this body for you and we’ll be all finishedup.”
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 whenit all started, well, we might’ve had other options. You’ve got no one toblame but 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 the restraintsand 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 knewhow old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It’s just the opposite:
we’re saving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. Theseizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don’twant that.”
I thought of Zed’s spectacular transformation into a crazy person. No,I sure don’t. “I don’t care about the interface. Chop it out. I can’t do itnow.” I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.”
86The 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 workas he 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 instantly recognized:
a HERF gun.
Oh, it wasn’t the same model I’d used on the Hall of Presidents. 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 of Presidents. But he didn’t know. That episode was locked inmy mind, invulnerable to backup.
“I know,” I said.
“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface’sshielding 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. Iwas pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had allbut obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery whenyou can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Somepeople swapped 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 had to 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 apronand helmet 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 onthe floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I haveno desire to find out I’m wrong.”
He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, densewith its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone.
87I 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 washis way 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 tooland pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitryin it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I was no moreadvanced than nature 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 catchingthe doc’s in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan’s old lineof work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged thedoc’s arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. Myold pal, the action hero.
Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physicalstate and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supportingme. I didn’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, the Contemporary,and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stoodawkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, asI collapsed into the bed that was mine now.
With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the housewe’d shared.
88I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, andadded a mood-equalizer that he’d recommended to control my“personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep.
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 aroundthe facade, 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, handlingmy calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings asthe Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being takendown for a full-blown rehab. We didn’t exchange any unnecessarywords, standing side by side without ever looking into one another’seyes. I couldn’t really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never letme, and besides we had our hands full directing disappointed guestsaway from the Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straightfor 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 onthe way 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,and put ’em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned toolsand get them to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime.
In time, Suneep and his gang would have a batch of telepresencerobots up and running, and we’d move to them, get them wandering thequeue area, interacting with curious guests. The new Mansion would be90open for business in 48 hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffoldingmade for a nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordesthat thronged Debra’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 thejob: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crewhad performed. If I’d had more time, I would’ve run a deep backgroundcheck on every one of the names on my list, but that would’ve takenmonths.
Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference tomy handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your post about theMansion’s rehab. You’re the first one to notice it, and we wondered ifyou’d be interested in coming by to find out a little more about ourplans.”
Dan winced. “She’s a screamer,” he whispered.
Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansionfans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I’d done that adozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn’t seemto get lathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even thehickey just visible under Dan’s collar. The transdermal mood-balanceron my bicep was 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 was apparent20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-controlcowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and doublekneed.
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. Shewasn’t wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfectionsto be the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide andslightly squashed.
I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low butwithout jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.”
91She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging fullbore,she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn’t brushagainst a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short andbounced a little. “Hi, I’m Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with the peculiarviolence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while sherepeated the 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,” Isaid.
“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 itall in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. Itwas disconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are you recording this?”
Kim blushed. “I hope that’s okay! I’m starting a new Mansion scrapbook.
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 thatthe new castmembers we brought in would want to record every littledetail and push it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector.
“I can switch it off,” Kim said. 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 anticipationof getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we’dstashed at costuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rottingmaid’s uniform with 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 newspot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe that we’d have to tearher away when the time came.
92We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.
By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new castmembersaround 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,and the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juicein my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shotthrough my mood. I needed to get offstage.
Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whisperedin my 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 prototypefor that afternoon. 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 thepublic eye.
Suneep’s lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packsrolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentativeknots in the corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying.
In the middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he wasbarely restraining an urge to shout Yippee! He was clearly in hiselement.
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 theair. “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 coming tremendously.
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.” He93unrolled an LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on thescreen, rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically consistentwith the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary, andtheir faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized that they’dcaricatured various 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 upand running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?”
Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans likeKim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than that.
Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don’t liketo stop my people when they have good ideas, but there’s a time and aplace. 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 forDan’s hand, 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,I imagined. 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 polishedglass that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been builtaround it—it was too big to take out in one piece. “They say it’ll be acouple days before they’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.
94“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 outfrom under 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. It was cool enough that I tooka surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of ridingthrough the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors.
As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving forreal weather, the kind of climate I’d grown up with in Toronto. It wasOctober, for chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it wasMay. I stopped 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 Hallof Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one thatstretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked airbetween my teeth: they had enough people for five or six full houseswaiting here—easily an hour’s wait. The Hall never drew crowds likethis. Debra was working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and shecaught my eye and 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. Asmall audience participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding.
“Well, at least that’s going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, exceptthat I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines,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 withsmarmy, show-off questions. After a while, even the cheeriest castmemberstarts to lose 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!—I95may’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-response enthusiastically,walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join in, reluctantlyor otherwise.
By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of adhocswere ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to anoffstage break-room.
Suneep didn’t deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told methat it would be another week before I could have even five productionunits. Though he didn’t say it, I got the sense that his guys were out ofcontrol, so excited by the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they wererunning wild. Suneep himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. Ididn’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 terminalI’d had installed in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues werefielding millions of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as enviousfans around the world logged in to watch their progress on thescaffolding.
That was all according to plan. What wasn’t according to plan was thatthe new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitationsto their net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas andguest-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 missiveabout the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I said. “Haveyou got a minute 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 thePark and 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.
96Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into hercowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked throughthe late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued deep andthick for Snow White, 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 tohere. You’re working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songsyou’ve been working 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 infront of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She lookedserious.
“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 withyou. The people you-all have been bringing down to work for me,they’re all really great castmembers.”
“But?”
“But we have limited resources around here. 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 numberof extras we can use out front. I’m concerned that we’re going to putsomeone on stage without proper training, or that we’re going to run outof uniforms; I’m also concerned about people coming all the way hereand discovering that 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 shecan pick up any people who can’t be used at the Mansion—we couldeven rotate back and forth!” She was clearly proud of her foresight.
97My 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 theminto her little Whuffie ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park,the whole of 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 neverlet us bring more in. They also won’t stop working on the rehab to trainthem, costume them, feed them and mother them. They’re losing Whuffieevery day that the Mansion’s shut up, and they don’t want any moredelays. Dave’s already joined up with Debra, and I’m sure he’s not thelast 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 toplan. 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—youmanage 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. Biggestthing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance mixes with theDJ’s backup 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 a98screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to her place, a tiny condoin a crumbling complex that had once been a gated seniors’ village, pre-Bitchun.
Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint conversationaudible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps two at a time,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, butyou’re making a lot of sense. You people have just been doing the bestwork over at the Mansion—find me more like you and I’ll take them forthe Hall any day!”
I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. Theanger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly light andcool and ready to do something terrible.
I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout.
Some people never learn. I’m one of them, apparently.
I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I slippedin through the cast entrance using the ID card I’d scored when my systemswent offline and I was no longer able to squirt my authorization atthe 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’scastle. Keeping low, I stepped over the fence and duck-walked down theembankment, then slipped into the water and sloshed across to the Adventurelandside.
Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself indoorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the distance,until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling I was inside thetheater itself.
Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking barfrom my 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 generationtech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I kept at it until nota single component remained recognizable. The work was slow and loud99in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a sleepy reverie, an autohypnoticswing-bang-swing-bang timeless time. To be on the safe side, I grabbedthe storage units and slipped them into the cowl.
Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of hangingout at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the animatronicshelped me. I methodically investigated every nook, cranny and storagearea until I located them, in what had been a break-room closet. By now,I had the rhythm 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, andsloshed my 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 for Machiavellianshenanigans, 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, forgottenon the 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 mycowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units.
I hadn’t put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion Ifelt was 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 wadedthrough the moat, down Main Street. I ran and ran, elbowing earlyguests, trampling flowers, knocking over an apple cart across from thePenny Arcade.
100I 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 boththere, a step behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my wrecking barlike a weapon, and she brandished it at me.
“You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we’dbeen alone, 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 adhoc’smeeting 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, butyou’re the one who’s guilty here. You need help.”
I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into thenow-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 triteand unimaginative. You’re a fucking despoiler and you don’t even havethe guts to admit it.”
“That’s enough, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely incheck. “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 agap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I didn’t try. Iwanted a chance to tell the whole world what I’d done and why I’d doneit.
Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meetingroom. Lil turned. “I don’t think you should be here, Debra,” she said inmeasured tones.
Debra shook her head. “You can’t keep me out, you know. And youshouldn’t want to. We’re on the same side.”
101I 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 adhoc,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 gavethe meeting a sense of urgency: the knowledge that there were guests inLiberty Square wandering aimlessly, looking for castmembers to helpthem out. Of course, 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,my patsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him todeath and 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’s estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up andrunning.
“I don’t have to tell you that this isn’t acceptable. This has neverhappened before, and it will never happen again. We’re going to see tothat.
“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 the different ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Parkas good as we 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. “Idid it, and I don’t have any excuse for having done it. It may not have102been the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but I think you all should understandhow I was driven to it.
“We’re not supposed to be in competition with one another here, butwe all 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 that rehabbedthe 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’tdo 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 youkeep on believing it, you’re going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle,Tom Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with this place—allthe history that the billions who’ve visited it have—it’s going to be destroyedand replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that’s taken overthe Hall. Once that happens, there’s nothing left that makes this placespecial. Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa!
What happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place willstay open once 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 wasmy work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to addressJulius’s statements, 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 heneeds help. 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 I sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught and brought tojustice. 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 ofthe Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and it’s getting better with thework you’re all doing. If you’ve been worrying about it, then you canstop worrying now. We’re all on the same side.
103“Thanks for hearing me out. 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 gotwork to do, too. I’d like to ask you all a favor, first. I’d like us to keep thedetails of last night’s incident to ourselves. Letting the guests and theworld know about this ugly business isn’t good for anyone. Can we allagree 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 showmy face 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 toldtheir net-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square, and mentionedmy name.
There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected more.
I needed some kind of help, that was for sure.
I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole businessand leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new life, Whuffiepoorand fancy-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 beenthe center of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as aman can 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 hadplenty of material to entertain myself. While I couldn’t get a table in arestaurant, I was free to queue up at any of the makers around town andget myself whatever I wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it.
Compared to 99.99999 percent of all the people who’d ever lived, I had alife of unparalleled 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.
104Of 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 concertsat the SkyDome, and shoot down any snotty reputation-punk whosneered at my Whuffie tally. Being with Dan was a process of constantlyreevaluating my beliefs in the Bitchun Society, and I’d never had a morevibrant, 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 thewhole mess.
I didn’t.
I called up the doc.

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 got importantthings to do here. Are you sure this can’t wait?”
I bit back a sob. “I’m sure, doc.”
“All right then. When can you be here?”
Lil had made it clear that she didn’t want me in the Park. “Can youmeet me? I can’t really come to you. I’m at the Contemporary, Tower B,room 2334.”
“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.”
106He 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 SevenSeas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile aftermanicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of happylaughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom. InToronto, it would be freezing 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 firstplace, and I’m not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up, that’snone of my 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.
107“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 andretire this one. We’ve had this talk.”
“I can’t do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can’t—isn’t there anotherway?”
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 takeit, 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, whileyou get worse. I can’t tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately.
Now, If you’re ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediatelyand get you restored 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 this singularlymiserable chapter in my life, not even to myself.
The doctor rose to go. “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,but that’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 yourbackup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic it’ll be. You’re robbingfrom your future self for your selfish present.”
It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Everypassing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake upfriends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake upto a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I couldfind Lil bent over with her head in a President’s guts of an afternoon. Tolie down and wake without disgrace, without knowing that my loverand my best friend would betray me, had betrayed me.
I just couldn’t do it—not yet, anyway.
108Dan—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’re complications.
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 donethat without coming out here. Please don’t call me anymore.”
I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn’t understand it until hewas 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. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD,not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledgeyou’re looking 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 frombackup. You’re reminding Pete of that, and he’s not happy to have ithappen.”
I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myselfon the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the WalkAround the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown DiscoveryIsland, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the eveningsand it was like old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffieand Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweatingpitcher of lemonade.
On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museumpiece 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 to participatein the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficiently thanI 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 handheld109revealed 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 endof the Whuffie stick.
At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform,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.
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. Icould tell 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 nevercome down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They weredrawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and frompeople who’d read the popular accounts of their struggle against theforces of petty jealousy 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 tospill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning—I couldfeel it hovering like storm clouds.
He wouldn’t talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then hestood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn’t rope-drop yet, andthere weren’t any guests in the Park, which was all for the better, givenwhat was coming next.
110“Have you taken a look at Debra’s Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally,as we 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. Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall,they’ve been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules,and get 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 emergedfrom the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had athoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin andcame 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 wantedto capture 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 anidea, Julius—but we’re giving each one an uplink so that it can flashbake.
We’ve got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together aseries of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragicends, 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 andthen getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here’s the bigchange: we slow it all down. We trade off throughput for intensity, makeit more of a premium product.
“So you’re a guest. 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 drawingboard, hitting basic research on stuff that’ll just scare the guests silly.
111When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake!
You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe.
By the time you’ve left, you’ve had ten or more ghost-contacts, and thenext time you come back, it’s all new ghosts with all new stories. Theway that the Hall’s drawing ’em, we’re bound to be a hit.” He put hishands behind his back and 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 driveto establish thematic continuity, they’d turned the formula into a cookiecutter,stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areasin the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, thenthere was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), thenthere was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age.
Who knows what the future holds? We do! We’ll all have videophonesand be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational,even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineeringgot themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemblea nail. Even now, 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 comeup with some great ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invitedin have gone over to the other side and we’re going to loseeverything because of them. I felt like shit.
“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim’s grin came back andhe clapped his hands together. He really loves the Mansion, I thought.
He could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.
112Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and spedtowards Suneep’s lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers.
“They don’t have the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as wepedaled.
“Says who?” Dan said.
“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationary membersright 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. He haddark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. Heseemed to be 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 littlebit.”
He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would dothe rehab 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? Ifthey replan the rehab now, I’ll have to go along with them. I can’t justleave the Mansion half-done—they’ll murder me.”
The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don’t like thenew rehab plan, and we’re going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewallthem—tell them they’ll have to find other Imagineering support if theywant to 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 canfind someone else to execute them.”
Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someoneelse to do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my team’sdone so far. I just flush my time down the toilet.”
113“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. 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 noright to move in on you—you’ve got all the Whuffie you need to defendthe place, if you all work together.”
No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunchwere tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioningan hour before the meeting and closed up all the windows, so that theroom was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in theback, as far as possible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf,and I was content to let him do his thing.
When Lil had arrived, she’d sized up the situation with a sour expression:
sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me. She’d chosen themiddle, 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 yoursupport!”
He lowered his tone. “I don’t think that’s true.” He grabbed a castmemberby 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 the whispers.
A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd.
114“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. They’re only taking over becauseyou’re letting 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 adhocthey’re displacing doesn’t have a hope of fighting back.
For the defenders, it’s a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvagesome 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 theearly days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on theconcept.
Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad studentsin the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution,and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, ousteringof the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which topreach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergradswho were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shitthey were being fed by the University.
At least, that’s what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the micat my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at ConvocationHall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd ofbleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry whenthe woman’s strident harangue burst over their heads.
I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on thestage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there wasa blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressedin University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, andfive of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the115heavyset 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 homefor me: this wasn’t on the lesson-plan.
“Come on, heads up! This is not a drill. The University of Toronto Departmentof 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 planslater 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. Effectiveimmediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Departmentis in charge. We promise high-relevance curriculum with anemphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, andthe social 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 shudderedas the 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. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, thewhole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to ourneighbors, a roar of “Can you believe it?” that followed us out the doorand to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.
It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing Social Deviance,and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, thesame comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a humanwall of ad-hocs.
Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us withmics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up andsaid, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.
The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from thenewscast 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. A116counterpoint interview from a spokesperson for the ad-hocs establishedthat all of the new lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecturenotes for the profs they replaced for years, and that they’d also writtenmost of their journal articles.
The profs brought University security out to help them regain theirlecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemade uniforms.
University security got the message—anyone could be replaced—and stayed away.
The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by gradeconsciousbrown-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. The adhocsspent their time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart theircoursework.
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 settledforever. Once you took backup-and-restore, the rest of the Bitchunry justfollowed, a value-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,passing out the materials that Debra’s people had stashed there, along aline that snaked back to the front porch of the Hall of Presidents, wherethey were unceremoniously 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 mademy guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil and of my unmediatedbrain, and I had a sudden urge to shred them verbally.
117No.
No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back whatwas ours, not punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think you should leave,”
I said, 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 withdouble-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’renot a part of the Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra. Don’t stayhere, and don’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 itto the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an hour, and a herdof guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The Liberty Square adhocspassed their loads around in clear embarrassment, knowing thatthey were violating 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 cheerfulcadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all offstage. I didn’t have tolook at my handheld to know what was happening to our Whuffie.
By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the placementof his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in minutedetail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her, double- andtriple-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.”
118“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!”
My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, Iwondered. Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, eventhough a part of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not afterall we’d been through 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 puttingon. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don’t think so,” Isaid, carefully. “I’ll probably work late here.”
He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no intentionof 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 LibertySquare ad-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.
I got ready to shout something horrible at them, and that’s when Debracame in. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth to speak,stopped.
Behind Debra were Lil’s parents, frozen these long years in their canopicjars in Kissimmee.
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 heldan achingly 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 faceon, 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. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you and Lillian—you treat her right,you hear?”
“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, lettingyou-all take a run at it. We wouldn’t be going down if we didn’t havefaith in you 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 inthis moment of vanishing consciousness, she could be whomever shewanted, knowing that it wouldn’t matter the next time she awoke.
“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them. “You’ve gotsome wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the Park, you’re120going to have a tremendous experience, I just know it.” She was infinitelyserene and 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 theirlast moments 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 kittedout in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and her pals, theymade a solid mass of irate adolescence.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Rita asked, shovingme hard in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust,raising a cloud.
Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go away. Your actionsare totally indefensible. 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, andthen I’m going to get Lil and her people and they’re going to back me up.
That’s not negotiable.”
We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a twiddlingmotion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly craftedgloom went 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 forgivethem. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve put our hearts andsouls into this place, and it’s not right to take it from us. Can’t we haveone constant corner of the world, one bit frozen in time for the peoplewho love it that way? 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.
121“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 faultthat you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf, and it doesn’tmake it any 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 yourlittle murder, your little health problems—yes, I’ve heard—your littlefixation on keeping things the way they are. You need some perspective,Julius. You need to get away from here: Disney World isn’t good for youand you’re sure 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 thecircle and 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 aminute and she stared right through me until I tapped her shoulder. Shegave an involuntary 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,her body 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, wedidn’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.”
122She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put anarm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and laughingat the same 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. We rode in silence, the trees on the edges of the SevenSeas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching storm.
The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and movedthrough the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral processionthat stopped 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 movingfrom the 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 stoppedin its 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’re working,” 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 ofyour commitment.”
Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil’s choked sob, saw her collapsein on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked her. I feltlike a voyeur, but couldn’t bring myself to turn away.
123“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling ofthe leaves on the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don’t have to be on the sameside, you know.”
They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then bentagain and picked up her father’s box, carried it to the Mansion. One at atime, the rest 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 callbuttonfor the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. Youtake the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle pastyou.
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 panickedbanging.
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 fromyou, 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 drivenhim to 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.
All three snored softly. They’d had a long night.
124Dan 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 knowit was 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 letit go 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 than anyone,Dan. We’ve forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every allowance.
He’s sick and he won’t take the cure. There’s nothing more we cando 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 couldstick with him, the way he stuck with you. You don’t have to toss himout on his ass.”
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’dbeen there for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might do it,all right. “I don’t think it’s warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir,you can. It’s none of my family’s business.”
125Lil’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 of reason.
“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 comehere often, 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 felt suddenlycold 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, onmy eyes.
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 inhaledagain. 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 deadby now, my memories of him gone forever.
126Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact that Iremembered Dan meant that I hadn’t been refreshed from my backup,that my broken brain was still there, churning along in unmediatedisolation.
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. Thenit hit me: I’d gone on record refusing restore from backup after having itrecommended by a medical professional. No one would have restoredme after that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started toshiver.
“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,he shone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and consideredme. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? Wecan get you a lethal injection if that’s what you want, but offing yourselfin the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn’t good show. In the meantime, wouldyou like to talk about 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 totalk.
“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. Take the refresh without choosing it, without shuttingout 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’s all, that’s all.
127“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’drather you lived, if you want my opinion, and I doubt that I’m the onlyone, Whuffie be damned. If you’re going to live, I’d like to record yousaying so, just in case. We have a backup of you on file—I’d hate to haveto 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 andsome R&R wouldn’t fix, if you want my opinion. I could find you somewhereif you 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 Zedand see if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Danwas dead—God, it was sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down tothe Cape for 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.”
“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.
128“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, two Coronas,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,” Isaid.
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 hardto figure out you are not. I have something to say that might help youmake the 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, thestone crazies who I’d have to chase away after they’d rejoined the BitchunSociety. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followedme down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that’s whenshe got the 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 monthscloser to my goal. That was all I could think about back then, youremember.”
“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.”
129“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, haveyourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How manytimes had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories thatway?
“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 hisbeer. “That’s my plan. Tomorrow. I’ll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and herpeople, 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,”
I said. “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 neededhelp. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from backup, me sayingno, 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. I’ll meet you at theHall of Presidents at nine a.m..”
I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, aGuest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water fountainsand stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might spare me a chocolatebanana. 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’d130have 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 blastof the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the stageside mic andthanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open and the Hall wasempty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her eyes at me, then recognizingme, turned her back and went to show in the next group.
No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I’d seen on the replayentered.
“We’ve closed it down for the morning,” he said.
I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the trigger onme, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression. She was terrifiedof me.
“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I’mJulius.”
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 toget her 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 Debralook even 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. 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,used her to pull the trigger. It was Debra’s idea that having Julius killedwould cause enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents.
It was.”
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.
131Hickory Jackson in the old Hall used to say, I will hang the first man Ican lay hands on 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,but I didn’t. I have a backup in my public directory—anyone can examineit. Right now, I’d like to bring Jeanine up, she’s got a few words she’dlike to say.”
I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the adhocswere an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself, I wasenjoying it.
“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. Iwondered if we could be friends when it was all over. She probablydidn’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 yearago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn’t ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me that Julius would make a backup a fewminutes before I shot him, and that he could get me out of the Parkwithout getting caught. I’m very sorry.” There was something off-kilterabout her, some stilt to her stance and words that let you know shewasn’t all there. Growing up in a mountain might do that to you. I snucka look at Lil, whose lips were pressed together. Growing up in a themepark 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 ourown discussions in private. If there’s anyone else who’d like to speak—”
The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd eruptedagain in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I tookher hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on the Pirates ofthe Carribean?”
She shook her head.
I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You’ll love it,” I said, and ledher out of the Hall.
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 eyes jiggled. I chuckled.
From where we sat, I could see the spot where I’d waded into theSeven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could seeCinderella’s Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and theferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttlingteeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with hispineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry and belched insatisfaction.
Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, halfnakedhula 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,and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lightedbarges puttered 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.
133“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 canI deadhead 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 the hundredyears or so. The Stelliferous Period—it’s when all the black holeshave run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. SoI’m thinking—why not leave a wake-up call for some time aroundthen?”
“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.”
“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, massenough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude whenthe time comes around. I’ll poke my head in every century or so, just tosee what’s what, but if nothing really stupendous crops up, I’ll take thelong 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 itwas. Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering,they thought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep wasready to kill someone, I swear. A house divided against itself cannotstand, as Mr. Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.
134I 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’dpicked up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle.
We played old Beatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to CapeCanaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon.
The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we’d beenthrough decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly asWhuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to ameal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste,and we watched the universe get colder for a while.
There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set oftubs, and they weren’t half bad.
Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. 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 awhile. 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 herway through 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 in redundantdistributed 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 knowsabout this year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.
135In the meantime, I’m working on another symphony, one with a littlebit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It’s a Small World AfterAll,” 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.

The End