War of the Worlds: Fixes after reading

[ccbib.git] / content / Cory_Doctorow / Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.tex

\hyphenation{co-me-dic polt-roon stove-pipe Ma-dame scru-ta-ble star-tling} 

\begin{document}

\section{Down and Out\\in the\\Magic Kingdom}

\subsection{Cory Doctorow}
\begin{flushleft}
Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow\\
\href{mailto:doctorow@craphound.com}{doctorow@craphound.com}\\
\href{http://www.craphound.com/down}{http://www.craphound.com/down}\\
Tor Books, January 2003\\
ISBN: 0765304368\
\end{flushleft}

\section{Blurbs:}
{
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture!
Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow!
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Bruce Sterling
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{The Hacker Crackdown} and \emph{Distraction}

\bigskip

In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of
our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned
into our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a
generation at least.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Lawrence Lessig
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{The Future of Ideas}

\bigskip

Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future -- I think he
lives there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't just a really
good read, it's also, like the best kind of fiction, a kind of
guide book. See the Tomorrowland of Tomorrow today, and while
you're there, why not drop by Frontierland, and the Haunted Mansion
as well? (It's the Mansion that's the haunted heart of this book.)
Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future -- a dizzying, yet
rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm spiraling down the tracks of
Space Mountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and
live forever!
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Kelly Link
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{Stranger Things Happen}

\bigskip

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and
exciting science fiction story I've read in the last few years. I
love page-turners, especially when they are as unusual as this
novel. I predict big things for Down and Out{\dash}it could easily become
a breakout genre-buster.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Mark Frauenfelder
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Contributing Editor, \emph{Wired Magazine}

\bigskip

Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the
world. Not only that, but money's been abolished and somebody's
developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society{\dash}and
make sure you're strapped in tight, because it's going to be a wild
ride. In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, one man
returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams{\dash}Disney World.
Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he struggles to
find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic Kingdom
against the young, post-human and increasingly alien inheritors of
the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated, human
relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny,
mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a
precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the
simulated, the true from the false.

\quad Cory Doctorow{\dash}cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early
Adopter{\dash}uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat
poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie
ideas we should all pay heed to. The future rushes on like a
plummeting roller coaster, and it's hard to see where we're going.
But at least with this book Doctorow has given us a map of the
park.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Karl Schroeder
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{Permanence}

\bigskip

Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come
across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers'
speculations end. It's a distinct pleasure to give him some
Whuffie.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Rudy Rucker
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{Spaceland}

\bigskip

Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day,
because he's always one of the first to notice a major incursion
from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is
a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out in The
Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its outlines
today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems to
peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how to
word-paint the rest of us into the picture.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Howard Rheingold
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{Smart Mobs}

\bigskip

Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the
perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though
that should be enough recommendation to read his work.
\emph{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom} is black comedic, sci-fi
prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual
hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep
afterwards.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Douglas Rushkoff
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author of \emph{Cyberia} and \emph{Media Virus!}

\bigskip

“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation
economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman future. As much fun as Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas
about social changes cascading from the frontiers of science.”
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Tim O'Reilly
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates

\bigskip

Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and
then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't put the book
down.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Bruce Schneier
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Author, \emph{Secrets and Lies}

\bigskip

Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,
entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the
wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before
us as you're going to find.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Gardner Dozois
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Editor, \emph{Asimov's SF}

\bigskip

Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a
gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-pro\-vok\-ing
extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of
book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in
human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world.
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Mitch Kapor
\\
\hspace*{\fill}Founder, Lotus, Inc.\\
\hspace*{\fill}co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation

}

\section{A note about this book, February 12, 2004:}

As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I
released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a
Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely
redistribute the text without needing any further permission from
me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a
grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into
cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked
out very satisfactorily.

When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the
next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible,
using CC's most 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 routinely schooled by their peers that maximal
copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and
so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the
intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would
serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was
about to do something very foolish indeed.

It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection
(\href{http://craphound.com/place}{A Place So Foreign and Eight More}
and a second novel
(\href{http://craphound.com/est}{Eastern Standard Tribe}) in this
fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive
engine. I am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance
for a writer!) at the way that this has all worked out.

And so \emph{now} I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge.
Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference
(\href{http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e\_sess/4693}{Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books}).

I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative
Commons license, the 
\begin{center}
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
\end{center}
This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially
"remix" this book -- you have my blessing to make your own
translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, fan fiction,
missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. A number of you
assumed that you had my blessing to do this in the first place, and
I can't say that I've been at all put out by the delightful and
creative derivative works created from this book, but now you have
my explicit blessing, and I hope you'll use it.

\noindent Here's the license in
\href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/}{summary:}
You are free

\begin{itemize}
\item
to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
\item to make derivative works
\end{itemize}

\noindent Under the following conditions:

\begin{quote}
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you
may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to
this one.
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the
license terms of this work.
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from
the author.
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
\end{quote}

\noindent
And here is the license in full:
\begin{Verbatim}[fontsize=\scriptsize]
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0

CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT
PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES. DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DRAFT LICENSE DOES
NOT CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. CREATIVE COMMONS
PROVIDES THIS INFORMATION ON AN "AS-IS" BASIS. CREATIVE COMMONS
MAKES NO WARRANTIES REGARDING THE INFORMATION PROVIDED, AND
DISCLAIMS LIABILITY FOR DAMAGES RESULTING FROM ITS USE.

License

THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS
CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE ("CCPL" OR "LICENSE"). THE WORK
IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF
THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE IS
PROHIBITED.

BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT
AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. THE LICENSOR
GRANTS YOU THE RIGHTS CONTAINED HERE IN CONSIDERATION OF YOUR
ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

1. Definitions

   1. "Collective Work" means a work, such as a
   periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in
   which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form,
   along with a number of other contributions,
   constituting separate and independent works in
   themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. A
   work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be
   considered a Derivative Work (as defined below) for
   the purposes of this License.

   2. "Derivative Work" means a work based upon the
   Work or upon the Work and other pre-existing works,
   such as a translation, musical arrangement,
   dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture
   version, sound recording, art reproduction,
   abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which
   the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted,
   except that a work that constitutes a Collective
   Work will not be considered a Derivative Work for
   the purpose of this License.

   3. "Licensor" means the individual or entity that
   offers the Work under the terms of this License.

   4. "Original Author" means the individual or entity
   who created the Work.

   5. "Work" means the copyrightable work of authorship
   offered under the terms of this License.

   6. "You" means an individual or entity exercising
   rights under this License who has not previously
   violated the terms of this License with respect to
   the Work, or who has received express permission
   from the Licensor to exercise rights under this
   License despite a previous violation.

2. Fair Use Rights. Nothing in this license is intended to
reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use,
first sale or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the
copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws.

3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this
License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable
copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated
below:

           1. to reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work
           into one or more Collective Works, and to reproduce
           the Work as incorporated in the Collective Works;
        
           2. to create and reproduce Derivative Works;
        
           3. to distribute copies or phonorecords of, display
           publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by
           means of a digital audio transmission the Work
           including as incorporated in Collective Works;
        
           4. to distribute copies or phonorecords of, display
           publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by
           means of a digital audio transmission Derivative
           Works;

The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats
whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include
the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary
to exercise the rights in other media and formats. All rights not
expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved.

4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is
expressly made subject to and limited by the following
restrictions:

           1. You may distribute, publicly display, publicly
           perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work only
           under the terms of this License, and You must
           include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource
           Identifier for, this License with every copy or
           phonorecord of the Work You distribute, publicly
           display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally
           perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on
           the Work that alter or restrict the terms of this
           License or the recipients' exercise of the rights
           granted hereunder. You may not sublicense the Work.
           You must keep intact all notices that refer to this
           License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may
           not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform,
           or publicly digitally perform the Work with any
           technological measures that control access or use of
           the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of
           this License Agreement. The above applies to the
           Work as incorporated in a Collective Work, but this
           does not require the Collective Work apart from the
           Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this
           License. If You create a Collective Work, upon
           notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent
           practicable, remove from the Collective Work any
           reference to such Licensor or the Original Author,
           as requested. If You create a Derivative Work, upon
           notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent
           practicable, remove from the Derivative Work any
           reference to such Licensor or the Original Author,
           as requested.
        
           2. You may distribute, publicly display, publicly
           perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative
           Work only under the terms of this License, and You
           must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource
           Identifier for, this License with every copy or
           phonorecord of each Derivative Work You distribute,
           publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
           digitally perform. You may not offer or impose any
           terms on the Derivative Works that alter or restrict
           the terms of this License or the recipients'
           exercise of the rights granted hereunder, and You
           must keep intact all notices that refer to this
           License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may
           not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform,
           or publicly digitally perform the Derivative Work
           with any technological measures that control access
           or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the
           terms of this License Agreement. The above applies
           to the Derivative Work as incorporated in a
           Collective Work, but this does not require the
           Collective Work apart from the Derivative Work
           itself to be made subject to the terms of this
           License.
        
           3. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to
           You in Section 3 above in any manner that is
           primarily intended for or directed toward commercial
           advantage or private monetary compensation. The
           exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by
           means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not
           be considered to be intended for or directed toward
           commercial advantage or private monetary
           compensation, provided there is no payment of any
           monetary compensation in connection with the
           exchange of copyrighted works.
        
           4. If you distribute, publicly display, publicly
           perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or
           any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must
           keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and
           give the Original Author credit reasonable to the
           medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the
           name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original
           Author if supplied; the title of the Work if
           supplied; in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit
           identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative
           Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by
           Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original
           Work by Original Author"). Such credit may be
           implemented in any reasonable manner; provided,
           however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or
           Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will
           appear where any other comparable authorship credit
           appears and in a manner at least as prominent as
           such other comparable authorship credit.

5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer

   1. By offering the Work for public release under
   this License, Licensor represents and warrants that,
   to the best of Licensor's knowledge after reasonable
   inquiry:

 1. Licensor has secured all rights in the Work
 necessary to grant the license rights
 hereunder and to permit the lawful exercise of
 the rights granted hereunder without You
 having any obligation to pay any royalties,
 compulsory license fees, residuals or any
 other payments;

 2. The Work does not infringe the copyright,
 trademark, publicity rights, common law rights
 or any other right of any third party or
 constitute defamation, invasion of privacy or
 other tortious injury to any third party.

   2. EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY STATED IN THIS LICENSE OR
   OTHERWISE AGREED IN WRITING OR REQUIRED BY
   APPLICABLE LAW, THE WORK IS LICENSED ON AN "AS IS"
   BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER
   EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION,
   ANY WARRANTIES REGARDING THE CONTENTS OR ACCURACY OF
   THE WORK.

6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY
APPLICABLE LAW, AND EXCEPT FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM LIABILITY TO
A THIRD PARTY RESULTING FROM BREACH OF THE WARRANTIES IN SECTION
5, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY
FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY
DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN
IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

7. Termination

   1. This License and the rights granted hereunder
   will terminate automatically upon any breach by You
   of the terms of this License. Individuals or
   entities who have received Derivative Works or
   Collective Works from You under this License,
   however, will not have their licenses terminated
   provided such individuals or entities remain in full
   compliance with those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6,
   7, and 8 will survive any termination of this
   License.

   2. Subject to the above terms and conditions, the
   license granted here is perpetual (for the duration
   of the applicable copyright in the Work).
   Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the
   right to release the Work under different license
   terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time;
   provided, however that any such election will not
   serve to withdraw this License (or any other license
   that has been, or is required to be, granted under
   the terms of this License), and this License will
   continue in full force and effect unless terminated
   as stated above.

8. Miscellaneous

   1. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally
   perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor
   offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the
   same terms and conditions as the license granted to
   You under this License.

   2. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally
   perform a Derivative Work, Licensor offers to the
   recipient a license to the original Work on the same
   terms and conditions as the license granted to You
   under this License.

   3. If any provision of this License is invalid or
   unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not
   affect the validity or enforceability of the
   remainder of the terms of this License, and without
   further action by the parties to this agreement,
   such provision shall be reformed to the minimum
   extent necessary to make such provision valid and
   enforceable.

   4. No term or provision of this License shall be
   deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such
   waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by
   the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.

   5. This License constitutes the entire agreement
   between the parties with respect to the Work
   licensed here. There are no understandings,
   agreements or representations with respect to the
   Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound
   by any additional provisions that may appear in any
   communication from You. This License may not be
   modified without the mutual written agreement of the
   Licensor and You.
\end{Verbatim}
\section{A note about this book, January 9, 2003:}

“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an
actual, no-foolin' words-on-paper book, published by the good
people at Tor Books in New York City. You can buy this book in
stores or online, by following links like this one:

\texttt{\scriptsize
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20}

So, what's with this file? Good question.

I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely
redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net,
put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're addicted
to dead trees, you can even print it.

Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten
it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers
don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors
like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I'm not
bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog,
\href{http://boingboing.net}{Boing Boing}, where I do a \emph{lot} of
word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about
things that I like.

And telling people about stuff I like is \emph{way}, \emph{way}
easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier.

What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books,
music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere
in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the
ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about
\emph{everything} online. What's more, they've done it for cheaper
than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore
and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of
futurosity.

Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how
people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of
social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom,
business, and whatnot. It's your basic
end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction
writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my
stock-in-trade.

I'm especially grateful to my publisher,
\href{http://www.tor.com/}{Tor Books} and my editor,
\href{http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite}{Patrick Nielsen Hayden}
for being hep enough to let me try out this experiment.

All that said, here's the deal: I'm releasing this book under a
license developed by the 
\href{http://creativecommons.org/}{Creative Commons project}.
This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license
agreements for the distribution of our creative work under terms
similar to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software
movement. It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

Here's a summary of the 
\href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0}{license:}

Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the
original author credit.

No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy,
distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the
work{\dash}not derivative works based on it.

Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the
work for commercial purposes{\dash}unless they get the licensor's
permission.

The full terms of the license are here:

\texttt{\footnotesize 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode}

\section{PROLOGUE}

I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of
the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three
symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in
Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan
would 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, all
rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and
infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my
fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World,
chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro
major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union{\dash}the GSU, or Gazoo
for those who knew{\dash}on a busy Friday night, summer-ish. I was
fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the scratched bar,
inching my way closer every time the press of bodies shifted, and
he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of cigarette
junk and empties, clearly encamped.

Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a
sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we're going to
have to get a pre-nup.”

I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being
called son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had
enough realtime that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I
backed off a little and apologized.

He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the
bartender's head. “Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over
accustomed to personal space.”

I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk
about personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the
birth-rate at non-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense
carpet of people, even with the migratory and deadhead drains on
the population. “You've been jaunting?” I asked{\dash}his eyes were too
sharp for him to have missed an instant's experience to
deadheading.

He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho
shitheadery that you only come across on-world. Jaunting's for
play; I need work.” The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.

I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I
had to resize the window{\dash}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 and then their involuntary widening. He tried a
little aw-shucksery, gave it up 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{\dash}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{\dash}one of those
fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the
benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they
want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing
that these communities survive more than a generation; in the
Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The
missionaries don't have such a high success rate{\dash}you have to be
awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already
successfully resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda{\dash}but
when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they
have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed
from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd
never met one in the flesh before.

“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked.

“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty
years{\dash}counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne
Mountain NORAD site, still there a generation later.” He
sandpapered his whiskers with his fingertips. “Their parents went
to ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had no use
for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those, though.”

He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the
acceptance of the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then
betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to
their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a
couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society,
until they couldn't remember why they hadn't wanted to be a part of
it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world, exploring toy
frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies and
deadheading through the dull times en route.

“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world.
They think of us as the enemy, you know{\dash}they had all kinds of plans
drawn up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow
suicide teeth, 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 they exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're
still living rough and hard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard
calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the real rough
life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like
an alternate history of humanity{\dash}what if we'd taken the Free
Energy, but not deadheading? What if we'd taken deadheading, but
only for the critically ill, not for people who didn't want to be
bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no
Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.”

I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found
myself saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's
see, dying, starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and
ignorance and pain and misery. 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 \emph{is},
right? Junkies don't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how
sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't
remember what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that
there might not be \emph{enough}, that we might get sick or get hit
by a bus. We don't remember what it was like to take chances, and
we sure as shit don't remember what it felt like to have them pay
off.”

He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood,
and already ready to toss it all in and do something,
\emph{anything}, else. He had a point{\dash}but I wasn't about to admit
it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when I strike up a
conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the
deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten
thousand years! Tell me that's not taking a chance!” Truth be told,
almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some years were deadheading
or jaunting or just \emph{gone}. Lonely days, then.

“Brother, that's committing half-assed suicide. The way we're
going, they'll be lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off when
it comes time to reanimate. In case you haven't noticed, it's
getting a little crowded around here.”

I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a
bar-napkin{\dash}the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh,
just like the world was getting a little crowded a hundred years
ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too
nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then, we'll fix it again
when the time comes. I'm gonna be here in ten thousand years, you
damn betcha, but I think I'll do it the long way around.”

He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been
any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping
for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with
him, I just knew he was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.

“I think that if I'm still here in ten thousand years, I'm going to
be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago,
the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you're going to
be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm not
interested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up one day,
and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess 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
attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid
more attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few
centuries, see if there's anything that takes your fancy, and if
not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so
\emph{final}?”

He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again,
making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I
suppose it's because nothing else is. I've always known that
someday, I was going to stop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking,
and have done with it. There'll come a day when I don't have
anything left to do, except stop.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because of his cowboy
vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over
every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his
Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily
upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met.

I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie{\dash}all the savings from
the symphonies and the first three theses{\dash}drinking myself stupid at
the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'd
expended all 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{\dash}not everyone had a chum
as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who
visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun
Society. I can't say for sure why he hung around with me. He
mentioned once or twice that he'd liked my symphonies, and he'd
read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control
techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to say there.
But I think it came down to us having a good 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, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each
of us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that
one's personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry;
and that without struggle, there is no real victory.

This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without
resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true
essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected,
you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no
sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that
money really represented{\dash}your personal capital with your friends
and neighbors{\dash}you more accurately gauged your success.

And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that
led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter
alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there
was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world.

On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans
and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose
consciousness was present via speakerphone from the computer where
it was resting. They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and
went out hunting for Dan in the sweet, flower-stinking streets.

He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his
war-stories said that they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd
headed to the walled city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the
descendants of a platoon of US Marines who'd settled there and cut
themselves off from the Bitchun Society.

So I went to Disney World.

In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the
minuscule cabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to
be frozen and stacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was
the only one taking the trip in realtime, but a flight attendant
dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a
rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at the
infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence,
and wondered when I'd see Dan next.

\section{CHAPTER 1}

My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned
enough that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was
second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the
original ad-hocracy that took 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 her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear
and cog in the animatronics that 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 the
Liberty Belle's riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate
flag over Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The
Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest had been
chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train station, and
we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our
costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang.

I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic
in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by
moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the
turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head
against my shoulder and gave me 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
old news in my youth, after all. But her parents had given her a
thorough{\dash}if eclectic{\dash}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, after the horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to
see the underpinnings of the 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
up and gently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little
jump. I think the age difference bothered her, too, though she
teased me for letting it get 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 against my shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on
the ballroom ghosts and dance their waltz with them on the dusty
floor, loved to try and stare down the marble busts in the library
that followed your gaze as you passed.

I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her,
watching the water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go
when I heard a soft \emph{ping} 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, \emph{no}, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and
pulled out her crack pipe and lit up.

“Dan,” I subvocalized, “long time no speak.”

“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on
a sob.

I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can I
help?” she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched
the phone to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in
the cricket-punctuated calm.

“Where you at, Dan?” I asked.

“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on Pleasure Island.”

“All right,” I said. “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club,
upstairs on the couch by the door. I'll be there in{\dash}” I shot a look
at Lil, who knew the castmember-only roads better than I. She
flashed ten fingers at me. “Ten minutes.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He had his voice back under control. I
switched off.

“What's up?” Lil asked.

“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he's got a
problem.”

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 to your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?”

I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and
booted down the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system.
I took the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out
to Pleasure Island.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of
faked-up trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs,
castmembers were working the animatronic masks and idols,
chattering with the guests.

Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had
raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I
approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it
had dropped 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
at midnight; 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 with stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in
the rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he looked
dead. I could hardly believe that this was my 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.

As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he opened
his eyes. “You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I
tried to think 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
need it.”

Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow
on the side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs
beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I'm Lil,” she said.

“Dan,” he said. “It's a pleasure.”

I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of
surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that
it's important; but to the kids, it's the \emph{world}. Someone
without any is automatically suspect. I watched her recover
quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand 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 let you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the
bedroom.

“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd help if I
could talk to someone… younger, too.”

She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the
second-gen castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled
into an armchair. She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went
through my crack period before she was born, just after they made
it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her and her friends
light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and taking
the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back.

Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped
his coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to
start.

“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils
down to,” he said.

“Who doesn't?” I said.

“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I'd run out of
things 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 the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place
left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a
single thing left that I want any part of.”

“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.”

“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I'm \emph{done}. It's
\emph{over}.”

“So do it,” Lil said.

“I \emph{can't},” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He
cried like a baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole
body. Lil went into the kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it
to me. I sat alongside him and awkwardly patted his back.

“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.”

“Dan?” I said, quietly.

He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands.
“Thanks,” he said. “I've tried to make a go of it, really I have.
I've spent the last eight 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 morning I woke up and went to the
bazaar and said good bye to the friends I'd made there. Then I went
to a pharmacy and had the man make me up a 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 I got 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've stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand
knives pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts to
press that button.”

“You were too late,” Lil said.

We both turned to look at her.

“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're pathetic. If you
killed yourself 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{\dash}a champion, retiring permanently.” She set
her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk.

Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes,
it's like she's on a different planet. All I could do was sit
there, horrified, and she was happy to discuss the timing of my
pal's suicide.

But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it,
too.

“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed.

“Well, don't just sit there,” she said. “You know what you've got
to do.”

“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone.

She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's got to
get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work.
Get that Whuffie up, too. \emph{Then} he can kill himself with
dignity.”

It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking
an eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How old did you say you
were?” he asked.

“Twenty-three,” she said.

“Wish I'd had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a
sigh, straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job
done?”

I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded.

“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look
beat.”

“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said.

“Good night, then,” I said.

\section{CHAPTER 2}

Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks had taken
over the running of Liberty Square with a group of other
interested, compatible souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs
of Whuffie, and anyone who came around and tried to take it over
would be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a pot to piss
in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach that they'd
ouster Lil's parents and their pals, and do a better job.

It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne{\dash}a
group who'd worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved
off to other pursuits{\dash}some of them had gone to school, some of them
had made movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing
to help 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 in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing
technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The
newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had
their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of
it.

So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the
meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents,
the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion,
arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of
the old-time Disney Imagineers.

I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering
with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of
everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a
dead bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that
crowd-control would permit.

It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely
seen him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our
little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and
hope and loss, something barely noticeable over the tropical
flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone rang three or four
times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, seeking
out some way to accumulate personal capital. 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 tied back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled
arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me
wish there were a mattress somewhere 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 remembered
him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop
that had startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. “What
did he want?”

“He's been hanging out with Debra{\dash}he wanted to make sure I knew
what 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 had her way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in
the Park and replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant,
articulated servos.

The problem was that she was \emph{really good} at coding sims. Her
Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking{\dash}the Star Wars
sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded
millions of hits.

She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland
ad-hocs to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage
areas were piled high with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses
and bowsprits. It was terrifying to walk through; the Pirates was
the last ride Walt personally supervised, and we'd thought it was
sacrosanct. But Debra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on
Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinese pirate queen, which was
credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity and ruin. The
Florida iteration would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinese
cousin{\dash}the AI-driven sims that communicated with each other and
with the guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and
spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas; the
spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks
on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it
weathered a violent, breath-taking storm{\dash}but with Western themes:
wafts of Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid
Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of
the pirates who plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical
sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied by
the bulky ride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and
halving load-time.

“So, what's she up to?”

Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and
made a comical moue of worry. “She's rehabbing the Pirates{\dash}and
doing an incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got
good net-buzz, the focus 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 at
him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for
the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob
and his audiotrack kicked in low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia,
and Africa \emph{combined} could not, by force, make a track on the
Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be our
lot, then we ourselves must be its author{\dash}and its finisher.” She
mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again.

“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him
again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn
period topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in
his vest-pocket.

I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're doing all you can{\dash}and
it's good work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode
of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt
a flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and
fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I
gave her a final squeeze and let her go.

She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll be fine, of
course,” she said. “I mean, the worst possible scenario is that
Debra will do her job very, very well, and make things even better
than they are now. That's not so bad.”

This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the
last time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century
without learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not
to.

My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly
backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his
niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink
terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband
communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and
I answered it.

“Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from
a backup{\dash}one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup
altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the
next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my
adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders
over conscious choice.

“It's Dan.” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind
him{\dash}children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the
tromp of thousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's
pretty important.”

“Can it wait for fifteen?” I asked.

“Sure{\dash}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 finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back
in my head and my life flashed before my eyes.

\section{CHAPTER 3}

The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from
backup{\dash}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, \emph{died}, a generation before. The Bitchun
Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them.

The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday.
I was SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course,
I don't remember the incident, but knowing my habits at that
particular dive-site and having read the dive-logs of my
SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events.

I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed
bottle and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn't wearing
it{\dash}the blood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting
barriers between it and my skin. The caves were made of coral and
rocks, and they coiled and twisted like intestines. Through each
hole and around each corner, there was a hollow, rough sphere of
surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters skittered over the walls
and through the holes. Schools of fish as bright as jewels darted
and executed breath-taking precision maneuvers as 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 got away
from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole.

Where I got stuck.

My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with
the hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder.
My buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my
bottle and buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others
exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best way to get me
loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I
disappeared into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently
attempted to cut through my vest's straps and managed to sever the
tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of sea water, I'd
thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrous patch of
spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled another lungful of water and kicked
madly for a tiny hole in the cave's ceiling, whence my buddies
retrieved me shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy
red welts from the stinging coral.

In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the
procedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special
clinic. Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for Cuba, a
few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three years old,
dating from the completion of my second symphony.

They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at
Toronto General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the backup
clinic one moment and arisen the next. It took most of a year to
get over the feeling that the whole world was putting a monstrous
joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was indeed my
own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as literal{\dash}the
missing time was enough that I found myself hard-pressed to
socialize with my pre-death friends.

I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he
immediately pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to
spend a week sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to
space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very curious that I
always rebooted myself at Disney 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 of that remark and sighed great
gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend Dan had been so
prescient.

The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd
had a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the
ice in the middle of a house-league hockey game. By the time they
cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a
pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax in backing up, and I lost
most of a year. But they woke me gently, with a computer-generated
precis of the events of the missing interval, and a counselor
contacted me daily for a year until I felt at home again in my
skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself in Disney World,
methodically flensing away the relationships I'd built and starting
afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and working the
heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my Chem
thesis at U of T.

After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to
appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the
intervening ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the
events that led up to my third death as seen from various
third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras,
synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a
computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling
preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way
because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been
put in place when I was restored.

Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned
with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand
and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I
was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by
people who really loved me. I dug for words appropriate to the
scene, decided to 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,
and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber,
with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and
took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor,
feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and buttocks.
A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had
crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my
nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar
crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were gone. I
had a day's beard all over{\dash}head, face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my
hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of it all.
I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this
feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were
evaporating and 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 in my
nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into
the room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this \emph{sucks},” I
said.

I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors{\dash}three quick
cuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the
corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty
Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I
emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the crowd,
using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I
was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly
through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room,
thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut 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 Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet,
from the Jungle 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 organic pistol, like a penis with a
tail that coils around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her
arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does 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 bursting out of
my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle and
viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now
shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When
he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl
with the pistol is long gone.

The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and
the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving
in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from
the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends.
Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her
pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry,
flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of the
crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it
screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my
chest cavity.

The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the
Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up,
following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking
and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping
Beauty Castle. 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 the
events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists
clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.

Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen
her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters{\dash}Hope.” The Seven
Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second
teenage girl wore one of them.

“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the
pith helmet purchase?”

Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six
months: only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have
alibis. Chances are she stole it.”

“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting
out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying
like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as
she pulled the trigger on me.

“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to
you{\dash}that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point.”

Right{\dash}which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten
years. 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. We
lost her and she never reappeared.” She sounded hot and angry{\dash}she
took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.

“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice.
It was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a
drama-queen about it.

Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things for
reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of
the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few
assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards.” He stroked
his chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for temperament, rather
than motivation: who \emph{could} do something like this?”

Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths
who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down
considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been
four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the
turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of
those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to
take a reality check while I was churning away in the rarified
climate of my crowd-control simulations.

I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.

“\emph{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
jerked free of her.

“I'm fine{\dash}good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not going
to let those bastards disrupt my life any more.”

\emph{Those bastards}? I thought{\dash}when had I decided that there was
more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this
was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely,
too thoroughly.

Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a second,” he said. “You
need rest.”

I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll decide that,” I said. He
stepped aside.

“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.”

I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles{\dash}sympathy
Whuffie{\dash}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
I put it in gear and sped out.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the
runabout taking 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
\emph{were} new.”

I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and
no one else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored
from a backup?”

“All I'm saying is, there's a difference between \emph{you} and an
exact copy of 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 actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind
of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. “So
you're saying that if you were obliterated and then recreated,
atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't be you anymore?”

“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is
different from not being destroyed at all, right?”

“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed
and recreated a trillion times a second.”

“On a very, very small level{\dash}”

“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 \emph{brain}{\dash}that's not the
same as quantum destruction.”

“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.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each
of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff,
starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if
there was anything they could do for me… I gave them all a fixed
smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when
they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered
nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second
ride-through, running interference for me with the other
castmembers.

He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we
walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents,
noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different
about the queue-area. Dan groaned. “They did it already,” he said.

I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board:
Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel.
“Excuse our mess!” the sign declared. “We're renovating to serve
you better!”

I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a
self-satisfied smile 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 he looked almost elfin. I took one look
at his smile and understood{\dash}Debra had established a toehold in
Liberty Square.

“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an
hour 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.

“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but
there's no indication that they arranged for the shooter.
Everyone's got an alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit
their backups for proof.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. So they just \emph{happened} to have plans
for a new Hall standing by. And they just \emph{happened} to file
them after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying
about me. It's all a big coincidence.”

Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that
it's a coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of
plans standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a
well-prepared opportunist, not a murderer.”

I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I
sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down.
Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.

Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning
wryly. “Posit,” he said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do
this thing, set you up so that she could take over.”

I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the
thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks
back in the old days. “All right, I've posited it.”

“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real
old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom
Sawyer Island or 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 important
enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full
investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't
rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's
coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real
important.”

“Sure,” Dan said, “sure.” Then he launched an answering salvo, and
while I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and
walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the
time I noticed we weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in
bed.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil
had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung
around the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room,
staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the
claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes on
queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly.
Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made
suggestions based on her long experience.

It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput
without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could
shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty
guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the
more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a
Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a move on it.
So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could
shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy
carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by
expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all
the scenes more quickly.

I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing
and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it
out.

It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs
had enough friends and family with them that we were able to
simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in
the preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to
the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.

The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform,
her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor.
She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey
requests more bodies.”

As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil
contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to
return the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's
shoulder. My smile died on my lips.

The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in
there{\dash}some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what
to make of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would
have spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I
resolved to make this the best show I knew how.

It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within.
Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to
stretch-room number two, the most recently serviced one. Once the
crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my
body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new
spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind
the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room,
I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving
stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I
ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that
others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit
corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the
noose at its neck.

The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the
Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we
made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and
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 his
sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating
chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes watched
us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some
random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the
total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365 to 2600. It was
the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved
away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy 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 it was cold
and sweaty.

He was nervous! \emph{He} was nervous. What did \emph{he} have to
be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered{\dash}maybe he was
nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own
sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight
clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was
too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's
regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get
ready to jump out on my signal.” Anyone leaving their Buggy would
interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride system. I knew I could
rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of explaining, which meant
that I could keep a close watch on Debra's crony.

We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors,
where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining
against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I
thought about it{\dash}if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what
would be the best place to do it? The attic staircase-- the next
sequence{\dash}seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The
elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over
the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be
it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? He
seemed terribly nervous as it was. I swiveled in my seat and looked
him straight in the eye.

He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on
staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We
rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of
voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I
caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the
corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was
pitched forward as the ride system shuddered 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
the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a
mixture of surprise and pity.

“It's all right, it's all right. False alarm.” I paged Lil and
subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was
all right.

I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes
fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the
timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle{\dash}instead of shaving
off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue,
leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet
cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I
was spooked.

And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it
cost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my
backup into my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure
at the backup terminal up until my death. I wasn't one of those
nuts who took death \emph{seriously}. It wasn't like they'd done
something \emph{permanent}.

In the meantime, I \emph{had} done something permanent: I'd dug
Lil's grave a 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
me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself
facing the elf.

He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone
running a language module. “Hi there. We haven't been introduced,
but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim
Fung.”

I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in
the close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at
how much like a bark it sounded. \emph{Careful}, I thought,
\emph{no need to escalate the hostilities.} “It's kind of you to
say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates.”

He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been
given high praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it's
pretty good{\dash}the second time around you get a lot of chances to
refine things, really clarify the vision. Beijing{\dash}well, it was
exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we were really
struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who
wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the
children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was
evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to
refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show.”

I knew about this, of course{\dash}Beijing had been a real struggle for
the ad-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 a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the
ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations.
Debra had a reputation for pursuing 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 look embarrassed, then horrified.

“We would \emph{never} touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's
\emph{perfect}!”

Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both
looked concerned{\dash}now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed
incredibly concerned 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 through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's
big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled
her to me protectively. She had changed out of her maid's uniform
into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric breathed in
time with her own respiration.

“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war
stories from the Pirates project in Beijing.”

Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hard
work,” Dan said.

It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally
an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still
disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie;
respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I
expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie
score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I
respected, was also high{\dash}higher than my own. I regretted my
nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf{\dash}\emph{Tim}, I
had to remember to call him Tim{\dash}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
curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's
people had accorded him a generous dollop of props for the
levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage,
minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates.

I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that
got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with
a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my
blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term
memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have
lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're things going over at
the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim.

Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's
ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the appearance of
childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep
up the fiction of good-natured cooperation{\dash}that meant not
shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for 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
good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years,
back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the
whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the
Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled
biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President
\emph{inside} you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're
going to \emph{flash-bake} the Presidents on your mind!” His eyes
glittered in the twilight.

Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking,
Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be
rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had been
improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of
50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing.

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for
physical plant?” The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic
dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA.
Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars.

“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I
could have 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
be heading home, now, though.” She began to tug me away. Dan took
my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly
wedding cake in the twilight.

“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on
the new 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,
sit by their fire, learn their secrets. “That would be
\emph{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 a
shift 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 my faith was unshakeable.

“Eight a.m. shift? No problem{\dash}I'll be right here when it starts.
I'll just grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and
catch the monorail back in time to change. All right?”

Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at
Cinderella's Royal 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,
\emph{If he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him}.
I was past caring{\dash}I was going to beard the lion in his den!

Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it's settled!
Let's go.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept
sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a
patter of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up
for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over.

Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the
animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra
was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her head cocked lazily, her
legs extended before her. The Hall's normal smells of ozone and
cleanliness were overridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of
an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to
research and execute, and a couple of days to tear down.

She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with,
albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times after her
deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for
staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she was only
apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age because it
was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy.

She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod
languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little
clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed,
sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look
lazy and excited simultaneously.

\emph{Did you have me killed}? I wondered, staring at Debra. After
all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might
not be such a big deal for her.

“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You
know 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'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the
peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to
use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly
charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated him. But
it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by accompanying me, as
though the polite fiction that he was more a part of Debra's ad-hoc
than Lil's was shattered by my presence.

Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?”

Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not. You'll like
this, guys.”

Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the
animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn
loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment{\dash}they'd spent
a week tearing down a show that had run for more than a century.
The scrim that the projected portions of the show normally screened
on was ground into the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and
oil.

Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was
off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay
strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype.

“This is it{\dash}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
on guest 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
finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence
of Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly
researched movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It
almost felt like I \emph{was} Lincoln, for a moment, and then it
passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery 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 Presidents was going to be a hit.

Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his
expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked
expectantly at me.

“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.”

Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming{\dash}it's my
specialty.”

Debra spoke up from behind him{\dash}she'd sauntered over while Dan was
getting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a
lot. There's something wonderful about having memories implanted,
like you'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
nice and soft, right?”

I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when
Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic,
less computer-y. He's wrong, of course. We don't want to simulate
the experience of watching the show{\dash}we want to
\emph{transcend it}.”

Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that
is by making the experience \emph{human}, a mile in the presidents'
shoes. Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of
dry facts on someone's brain?”

\section{CHAPTER 4}

One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:
\begin{enumerate}
\item
That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,
\item
That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make
a play for the Haunted Mansion,
\item
That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike
against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.
\end{enumerate}

Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in
the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless
cooperation born of the adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra
moved from team to team, 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
this tight 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
finished at about three in the morning, after intensive
consultation with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets
better the second time around, as the detail and flourishes start
to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little
gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each
successive ride.

Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained
pride as 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 and
mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it
crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first
pass through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but
this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated
ball, filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as
the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality,
and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving
behind a rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to
jump.

“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug
him. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance!
Directly imprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid,
blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears.

Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne.
“You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the
theatre seat where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly
rattling in his throat.

Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came
ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and
expense that had given us the Disney rides{\dash}rides that had
entertained the world for two centuries and more{\dash}could never
compete head to head with what they were working on.

My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't they
do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I
loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere{\dash}they
could distribute it online and people could access it from their
living rooms!

But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old
Whuffie{\dash}they'd make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc
where three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a
park twice the size of Manhattan.

I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and
the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a
damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my
throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and
solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the
Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.

I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He
grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.

“They did it{\dash}they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It
made what I had to do next easier.

“Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you{\dash}they offered their backups,
remember? They couldn't have done it.”

“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it,
and they fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's
all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with
the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a
disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had
these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.”

Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been
stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance
crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you
don't. It's not 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.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were
showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the
other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah,
letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs
were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed
reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up;
a failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the
Park who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents,
and whatever Debra's people came up with would have to answer their
longing.

“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted
the runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at
him to gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.

“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she
doesn't know{\dash}plausible deniability.”

“And me?” he said. “Don't I need plausible deniability?”

“No,” I said. “No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the
case that you were working on your own{\dash}gone rogue.” I knew it
wasn't fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was
implicated in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I
knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I knew that we were
fighting for our own survival. “It's good versus evil, Dan. You
don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides
are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're
physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses.
What Debra's people are building{\dash}it's hive-mind shit. Directly
implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's
brainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with
myself as much as with him.

I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads,
lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan
was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in
Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about
it{\dash}I'd gotten through to him.

“Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas.” My chest tightened,
and he patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my
ease, even when he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if
Debra was behind your assassination{\dash}and that's not a certainty, we
both know that. Even if that's the case, we've got better means at
our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing with her head to
head, that's smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at
her, take over the Hall{\dash}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 you any good.
You've got lots of other options.”

“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally
satisfying. This way has some goddamn \emph{balls}.”

We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and
stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I
heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following
behind.

We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing
that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked
the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was
sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd
dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice during the previous
week at this time, and of dawdling in the commissary before heading
topside. The delay between my arrival in the runabout and my
showing up at the Mansion would not be discrepant.

Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then
hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days
in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the
old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The
kids who 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 60 mph to the dump on the property's outskirts, but for
a brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to
explore when the hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their
luster.

I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they
hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably
wouldn't be flexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic,
huh?”

I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching
my way under the Hall of Presidents.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which
didn'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 back
pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was
the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with
a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor
of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of
unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd gotten the germ of the
idea during Tim's first demo, 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
his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my
only indicator of his presence.

“Can you reach my back pocket?”

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can
you reach it or not?”

I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt
his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves
into the 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 too happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up
to consider an apology, despite what must be happening to my
Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn.

He fumbled the gun{\dash}a narrow cylinder as long as my palm{\dash}out of my
pocket. “Now what?” he said.

“Can you pass it up?” I asked.

Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage
met 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 he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be
the author of the destruction.

“Aw, Jules,” he said.

“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you.” I
was boiling with anger{\dash}at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole
goddamn thing.

“Fine,” he said.

“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.”

I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air,
and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd
confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd
had a brief vogue.

“Hang on to it,” I said. I had no intention of leaving such a
damning bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to
the next service hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an
identical change of clothes for both of us.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's
ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of
Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other
ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.

Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up
behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and
I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was
going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as
we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug
shampoo and fresh electronics.

We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively,
while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a
short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the
stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one
humongous burst.

Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of
applause, and they started the demo.

Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face
as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in
my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil
to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth
lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every
castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown
concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.

Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.

Nothing.

I was offline.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took
Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for
private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.

Lil was upset{\dash}even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell
that. Tears pricked her eyes.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring
into the moonlight reflecting off the river.

“Tell you?” I said, dumbly.

“They're really good. They're better than good. They're better than
us. Oh, God.”

Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me discuss the
matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I don't think so. I
don't think they've got soul, I don't think they've got history, I
don't think they've got any kind of connection to the past. The
world grew up in the Disneys{\dash}they visit this place for continuity
as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I'm offline, and
they're not{\dash}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{\dash}you've
spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much
refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they
whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing
we've been maintaining for 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
livid over the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry{\dash}it's just shocking.
Maybe you're right. And even if you're not{\dash}hey, that's the whole
point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything
else gets supplanted.

“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go
congratulate them.”

As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having
improved her mood without artificial assistance.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

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 by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat
and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms around the
shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth.

She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some
insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied
a torch to the bowl.

“Thanks,” she said, laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged
her cronies 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 that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the
floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards at all, but
faux-finish painted over a copper mesh{\dash}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 off their computers. With my eye,
I followed the copper shielding around the 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, how their trial by
fire in China had armored them against the kind of bush-league
jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Florida{\dash}myself
included{\dash}came up with.

For instance, I didn't think there was a single castmember in the
Park outside of Deb's clique with the stones to stage an
assassination. Once I'd made that leap, I realized that it was only
a matter of time until they staged another one{\dash}and another, and
another. Whatever they could get away with.

Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I
stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between
Liberty Square and Fantasyland. “When was the last time you backed
up?” I asked her. If they could go after me, they might go after
any of us.

“Yesterday,” she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking
more like an overmediated guest than a tireless castmember.

“Let's run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night
and at lunchtime{\dash}with things the way they are, we can't afford to
lose an afternoon's work, much less a week's.”

Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she
was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance.
“You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell
me how to live my life, okay?”

“Come on, Lil{\dash}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
some work on new merch for the Mansion{\dash}some collectible stuff,
maybe.”

“For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I
back up, 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.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something
about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I
glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut
away from me. I hadn't told her that I was offline yet{\dash}it just
seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises
she was coping with.

Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty
years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good
night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things
were still screwy.

So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I
had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to
get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the
house of all timepieces, anyway?

Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried
to 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 of
endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I
sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd
long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles
except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I
staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee.

“Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from
sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in.

She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her
nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I
felt like punching the wall.

“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general
direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.

“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift
for me{\dash}the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to
hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping.”

“Can't.” I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a
crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone,
apparently.

“Really?” she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I
slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my
maw.

“Yes. Really. It's your shift{\dash}fucking work it or call in sick.”

Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning,
when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's wrong, honey?” she
said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit
something besides the wall.

“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've
got real work to do{\dash}in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to
eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her
teeth with the bones. 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
worst thing I could possibly have said.

Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends
of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just
19{\dash}apparent and real{\dash}and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me
dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember.

Her parents{\dash}Tom and Rita{\dash}on the other hand, were fascinating
people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in
Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former
shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve.
Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery
devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into
sharp relief.

They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In
a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep,
travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more
than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things
left on earth over and over.

The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had
used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing
homemade costumes 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 the thousand. The shareholders' lackeys{\dash}who
worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if
they had no control over the management decisions{\dash}put up a token
resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown
in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and
pitching in.

“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that,”
Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park running
24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance
to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd
prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to
Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, remembering
the moment, and her features in repose were Lil's almost
identically. It was only when she was talking that her face
changed, muscles tugging it into an expression decades older than
the face that bore it.

“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's
outside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties
back and forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me
out. I slept in 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”{\dash}she chucked her husband on the shoulder{\dash}“he'd gotten the
wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't budge when I came down
to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say,
is history.”

Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus, Rita, no one
needs to hear about that part of it.”

Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an adult{\dash}if you can't stomach
hearing about your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere
else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate the topic of
conversation.”

Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita
shook her 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{\dash}we thought that Disney 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 her thighs, a gesture I'd come to know in
Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't enough challenges for them
these days. They're too cooperative.” She laughed 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-ex\-ten\-sion stuff{\dash}we took
our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'” Tom wore
himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled
smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of
authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen
ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear 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
what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that,
why don't you come over here and have a smoke?” I noticed that she
and her cohort were 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 first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I
was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who
flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling
cliques. “They're passionate about maintaining the Park, that's for
sure. I made the mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat
Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth
functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have been
more than 18. I think that they don't have the passion for creating
Bitchunry that we have{\dash}they don't need it{\dash}but they've got plenty of
drive to maintain it.”

Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know
what to 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 considering
look on his face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very
same thing. We were talking{\dash}” he drew a breath and looked askance
at his wife, who nodded{\dash}“about deadheading. For a while, anyway.
See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years.”

I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time
schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the
time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it
came{\dash}I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every
conversation had to be strategically important.

“Really? Deadheading.” I remember that I thought of Dan then, about
his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending
it when you found yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when
my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three
thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never
quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to
my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to
Gananoque and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside on
seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand
Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off
the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese
from cow's milk and there'd been a thousand smells and bottles of
strong cider and a girl whose name I'd long 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 lakes and
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 to
worry her. She's not good with hard decisions{\dash}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 drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we
toked a little and cuddled a little.

Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita
were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to
be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting
material to make 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, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her
generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.

For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about
anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?

The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, 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 Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned
on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout
and went to the Park to take her shift.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its
lazy turns, and felt like shit.

\section{CHAPTER 5}

When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil
had not come back to the house. If she'd tried to call, she
would've gotten my voicemail{\dash}I had no way of answering my phone. As
it turned out, she hadn'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 and threatening the Mansion. Even in my addled state,
I knew that this was pretty unproductive, and I kept promising that
I would cut it out, take a shower 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 the sofa 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
reversal of roles that we'd undergone at the U of T, when he had
become the native, and I had become the interloper. He was the
together one with the wry looks and I was the pathetic seeker who'd
burned all his reputation capital. Out of habit, I checked my
Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being startled by its low
score and was instead shocked by 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 dismal
Whuffie.

“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 \emph{was}, but I'm not \emph{now}.” I felt better than I had in
days, ready to beat the world{\dash}or at least Debra.

“Let me take a shower, then let's get to the Imagineering labs.
I've got a pretty kickass idea.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab
of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea,
and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole point of the
Bitchun Society was to 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
Doom Buggy curve, he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the
guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor
bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides,
the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.”

Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done
away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what
remained{\dash}tending bar, mopping toilets{\dash}commanded Whuffie aplenty and
a life of leisure in your off-hours.

“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could \emph{improvise}.
You'd get a slightly different show every time. It's like the
castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got
their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics
aren't so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.”

“You're going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan
asked, shaking his head.

I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve,
terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes
around the property. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically
at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the
animatronics had human operators{\dash}te\-le\-con\-trol\-lers, working with
waldoes? We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them,
scare them… We'll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace 'em
with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think
of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online at
once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion…
We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts'll
be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll be adding another ten
thousand guests to the Mansion's throughput every day, only these
guests will be honorary castmembers.”

“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI
and flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction, courtesy of
the biggest Mansion-fans in the world{\dash}”

“And those are the very fans Debra'll have to win over to make a
play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and
pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline
again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.

We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum
buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad
inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World.
The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and
now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic
labcoat-and-clip\-board types who would work for anyone so long as
the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they
accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands.

Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could
design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone{\dash}shirts,
sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They were
collaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench
in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with
logomarked tchotchkes and 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 by what he saw.

I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed.

Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages
started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner. Anyone else
would have made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into
the discussion.

If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the
designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough.
She'd been thinking just the way I had{\dash}sou\-ven\-irs that stressed the
human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of
the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal
robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action
figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity
with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors{\dash}the raven
cawed, Mme. Leota's head incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd
worked up some formal attire based on the castmember 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
was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with
robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world 'round, Mme. Leota's gift
cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players
ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area…

Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored
over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.

“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped.

I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere
between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than
a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be
mature. Also, I'd started the fight.

“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften.
“Really choice stuff. I had a great idea{\dash}” I ran it down for her,
the avatars, the robots, 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
pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.

“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's the
point{\dash}what Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It
made her and her ad-hoc better{\dash}it made them sharper.”
\emph{Sharper than us, that's for sure}. “They can make decisions
like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be
able to do that, too.”

Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The
\discretionary{words}{had}{words'd} just
popped out, but I saw that I'd been right{\dash}we'd have to beat Debra
at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.

“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was
upset{\dash}she'd reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very good idea. I
think that we stand a good chance of making it happen if we
approach the group and put it to them, after doing the research,
building the plans, laying out the critical path, and privately
soliciting feedback from some of them.”

I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the
Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements
reviews while Debra's people tore down the Mansion around us. So I
tried a different tactic.

“Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?”

Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical
animal being drawn into a political discussion.

“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you
to pull together a production schedule{\dash}one that didn't have any
review, just take the idea and run with it{\dash}and then pull it off,
how long would it take 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
overhauled the 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
do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three
shifts around the clock.”

He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while
muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of
curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly
stubby fingers while he thought.

“About eight weeks,” he said. “Barring accidents, assuming
off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material
availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled
as he pulled up a HUD and started making a list.

“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight
weeks?”

Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when
they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual
mockups{\dash}I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and
revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc
that commissioned their work.

Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy
myself that my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I
can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect.
Sometimes, I'll be halfway through a project when someone suggests
a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably
better. Then it's back to the drawing board… So I stay at the
drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other
Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups 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 of and incorporate
it, sometimes rolling back the work.

“It's slow, but it works.”

Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight
weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do
\emph{that} one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years
before anyone can ride the thing?”

“Because that's how it's done,” I said to Lil. “But that's not how
it \emph{has} to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion.”

I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was
right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the
organization needed to turn on a dime{\dash}that would be even
\emph{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 come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll give every
Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then we'll recruit
them again to work at it, to run the telepresence rigs. We'll get
buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders in the world, and we'll
build something better and faster than any 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 and I exchanged wicked grins. She was in.

“I know,” I said. But it was, almost{\dash}she was a real opin\-ion-leader
in the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and
forth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her
head in a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical
switchbacks. This plan would burn up that reputation and the
Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time that
happened, she'd have plenty of Whuffie with the new,
thousands-strong ad-hoc.

“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans
that Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs{\dash}”

I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence,
but she beat 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 everything
was forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

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 had ever 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 minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the
European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.

What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney
World any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth
be told, it had never been my absolute favorite.

But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly
bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd
found myself crowd-driven to it.

I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I
was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms,
eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with
Beating The Crowd.

In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack
player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He
was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder
of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done
something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately
successful, he was fabulously wealthy: 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 of money. His secret was the
green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to every time
his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards and
calculate the odds and Beat The House.

Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his
nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables,
grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer
satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure
brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted
and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards.

Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately
got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the
path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short
queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to
spare{\dash}moving with precision and grace and, above all,
\emph{expedience}.

On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness
Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to
catch a barge over to the Main Gate.

Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the
ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the
farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said
would have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual
survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in
front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in
their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other
than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles,
their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.

You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate
the complexities of a queue through what they carry than through
any other means{\dash}if only more people realized it. The classic, of
course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest
shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen
might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd
done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave
iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with
bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless
search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a
rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.

No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime.
Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five
carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets
to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed
closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration
given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for
minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who's
given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending
their time in line determining which bits and pieces they'll need
when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for
fastest-possible processing.

This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders,
gear-pigs who pack \emph{everything} because they lack the
organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack{\dash}they're
just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but
the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules
will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing
overloose straps up on their shoulders.

I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a
queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and
ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other
spots I could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a
wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long
before my ferrymates.

Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents
had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the
first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into
everyone's consciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of
death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up focused
on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip are dim
but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling faces
punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars,
past diorama after diorama.

I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the
richness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent
a week there 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 where
everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park,
grounding myself, communing with all the people I'd been.

That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the
short lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to
capacity. I'd take high ground, standing on a bench or hopping up
on a fence, and do a visual reccy of all the queues in sight, try
to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the crowd, generally
having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I probably spent
as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've spent lining up
like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got more
exercise.

The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow
Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en
route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it,
dancing to the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the
movements of the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out,
Liberty Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to
ride the Mansion five 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 conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my
skin. But on the 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 projector in the whole place, but it was all so
cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house was
perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were
\emph{ghosts}, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The
ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were
equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy.

My fourth pass through, I noticed the \emph{detail}, the hostile
eyes worked into the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the
molding, the chandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out
the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated
throughout the ride, whether in sinister organ-tones repeating the
main theme troppo troppo or the spritely singing of the four
musical busts in the graveyard.

It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through,
this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually,
mysterious chills that blew through the rooms as wandering spirits
made their presence felt. By the time I debarked for the fifth
time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a
mixed-up tempo.

That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up a
discarded ice-cream wrapper{\dash}I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking up
trash that day, seen it so frequently that I'd started doing it
myself. She grinned slyly at me as I debarked into the
fried-food-and-disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in pockets,
thoroughly pleased with myself for having so completely
\emph{experienced} a really fine hunk of art.

I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the
Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly
entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her
work.

“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the
titanic mountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her.

She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but
castmembers of her generation can't help but be friendly. She
compromised between ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit,
and leered a grin at me, thumped through a zombie's curtsey, and
moaned “Thank you{\dash}we \emph{do} try to keep it \emph{spirited}.”

I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute
she was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's
uniform and her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and
scrubbed and happy about everything, she radiated it and made me
want to pinch her cheeks{\dash}either set.

The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let you ghouls
off? 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 a
couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process
and losing my nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could
possibly have to say to each other across a century-wide gap.

While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second,
the reverse is indeed true. But it's also true{\dash}and I never told her
this{\dash}that the thing I love best about the Mansion is:

It's where I met her.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for
the telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in
a totally 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-time could be.

I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting
hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it
down.

She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking
among the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea,
and she didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would come
from having outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc.

Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around{\dash}it was a skill I'd
never really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but
me, I think that 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 than everyone else, with no patience for
explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who just
didn't get it.

The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly
a genius. Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from
Beating The Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass{\dash}the
enemy of 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'd assumed that her folks would be my best allies in the
process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too ready to take
the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer like me.

Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties,
talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my
thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling
the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to
respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as
individuals.

In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around
with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the
world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic
courtesy but 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 the
starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.

Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for
address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe,
spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of
course, their Whuffie.

“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal
I was using{\dash}my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up
and 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 urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was
stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence.

“Huh?” he said.

I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a
collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the
Mansion, part of a giant collaborative project that had been
ongoing for decades, to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every
inch of the Park. I'd used those meshes to build my own testing
fly-throughs.

“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total
\emph{fiend}.” The meshes' author had painstakingly modeled,
chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete
with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal”
fan-artist might've used a standard human kinematics library for
the figures, this one had actually written his own from the ground
up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that 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
a week before my assassination.

“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple
ideas 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
me hanging out with Debra's gang.”

Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had
been his suggestion. Too much to think about.

“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to
recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to
take over the Mansion?”

Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure that she wants to take over
the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into
things, as fast and as copiously as possible. She picks her
projects carefully. She's acquisitive, 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 the
Hall of Presidents?”

Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but{\dash}”

“But nothing,” I said. “She's after the Mansion, she's after the
Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it,
and I'm the only one who seems to have noticed.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

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 to sleeping 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 off our asses and start the rehab,” I said, slamming myself
down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard
the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me madder. I
was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and Dan,
and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do
anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten again.

From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm doing what I can, Jules. If
you've got a better way, I'd love to hear about it.”

“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm
ready to \emph{go}. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for
it, but you keep telling me 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 you
doing all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging
deck chairs on the Great Titanic Adventure?”

“I'm working my fucking \emph{ass} off. I've spoken to every
goddamn one of them 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 \emph{don't},” she said, stalking into the room,
fuming. “You can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the
evidence.” She planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared
at me. She'd gone pale and I could count every freckle on her face,
her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old
vee-neck shirt I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau.

“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck.

“I can't,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes.

“Yes you can{\dash}here, I'll dump it to your public directory.”

Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to
locate me 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
\emph{weeks}. I'll call him right now.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting
him out of bed.”

But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much
to do, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too
far from a public terminal or it was too late or too early. My
systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy with the
plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of hard
copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations to my
designs and leaving them on my favorite chair{\dash}to living like the
cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and
ticking clocks.

Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it{\dash}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 me had to haul ass out to the house, and \emph{speak} to
me.

I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was
my turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard
wouldn't keep him up nights. He and Lil were working a full-time
campaign to recruit the 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
into the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on
my original plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the
ride, increasing the number of telepresence rigs we could use
without decreasing throughput.

I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public
chatter in the room sprang up on my HUD.

\emph{And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.}

\emph{And then what?}

\emph{I'm going to bang you till you limp.}

\emph{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 was flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared.

“What's going on, Dan?” I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my
chest, but I felt calm and detached.

“Jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at Lil.

Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that
their secret messaging had been discovered.

“Having fun, Lil?” I asked.

Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I'll send
your stuff 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 at work tomorrow{\dash}we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to
vote on the rehab.”

It was her house.

“Lil, Julius{\dash}” Dan began.

“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.”

I dropped my papers{\dash}I wanted to throw them, but I drop\-ped them,
\emph{flump}, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering
to close the door behind me.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my
door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of
tequila{\dash}\emph{my} tequila, brought over from the house that I'd
shared with Lil.

He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I
took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom
and poured.

“It's my fault,” he said.

“I'm sure it is,” I said.

“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset.
Hadn't seen you in days, and when she \emph{did} see you, you
freaked her out. Snapping at 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
long time 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 a friend to either of you.

“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell
you it 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't
been right, not for months. I don't know what it is, but you should
get to a doctor.”

“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the
numbness and left burning anger and bile, my constant companions.
“I need a friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is
turned.”

I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving
tequila-stains on the 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. He gave me a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This rehab
should take it up over the top. I'll be ready to go.”

That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good
friend Dan, was going to kill himself.

“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt
to think about it. I really liked the bastard. He might've been my
best friend.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the
peephole. It was Lil.

She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A
snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.

She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her
embrace.

“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down
at the Seven Seas Lagoon.

“Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a
couple months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans,
doesn't it, Lil?”

Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself.
“I'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.

\emph{I guess I'll take what I can get, too}, I thought.

\section{CHAPTER 6}

Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling
fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.

It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and
even though there were cures, they weren't pleasant.

I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I
was 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-gravity
sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but
at ten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you
\emph{bounce}, and when you're bouncing in a sphere full of other
bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.

I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in
diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure
bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered
the sphere's floor, and if 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 varied from terrific to awful, but
they were always energetic.

I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I
thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere
playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and
interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they
didn't, playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an
interesting, naked stranger.

Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out
barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the
movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short
while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my
music, and it was really \emph{good}. I'm a sucker for musicians.

We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as
spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully
into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they
were the perp who 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 for the hatch.

I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere,
desperate to 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 unit
simultaneously{\dash}not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” she
said, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning
chub-on.

I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the
spoke of the station towards the gravity.

She had a pianist's body{\dash}re-engineered arms and hands that
stretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a
spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled
after her best as I could on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time
I reached the half-gee rim of the station, she was gone.

I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went
to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed
up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.

This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her
before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's
top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4
time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from
blues to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She
noodled at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled
charmingly whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit.

She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red
downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the
climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fif\-ty years later, I
was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.

I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at
the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a
particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a
slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as
long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the
hatch.

When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I
summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She
calmly untied and floated over to me.

I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd been
staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at
their corners and 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
the station.

We didn't sleep.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband
constellations 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 generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading
with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial
tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her
fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical
spine that wasn't prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit
that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular
inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.

I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She
only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing
wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the
basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to
do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon getting
tin-plated and iron-lunged.

I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to
strangle her 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 was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she
was making faces for anyone's benefit.

But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and
her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool
with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag
through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through
a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed
like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and
bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.

You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our
own, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we
started the 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 of childlike innocence, living only for the
thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she found
some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became
legendary on the station, that crazy pair that's always zipping in
and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed
Marx Brothers.

When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live
with me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed,
honked my nose and my willie and shouted, “YOU'LL \emph{DO}!”

I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories
underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie
wasn't so hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors
made her feel at home while affording her opportunities for
mischief.

But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking
more. At first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange,
silent wife was finally acting normal, making nice with the
neighbors instead of pranking them with endless honks and
fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she
had the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to
a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been
inscrutable.

We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony
in low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up,
and she came out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled
and smiled with a smile that never went beyond her lips.

She went nuts.

She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives.
She accused 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
our bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after
rant. I smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then
I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's
office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside for a year and nuts
for a month, but it took me that long to face up to it.

The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of
saying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In
other words, I'd driven her nuts.

You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically
trying to talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She
didn't want to.

She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of
lucidity that she had under sedation, she consented to being
restored from a backup that was made before we came to Toronto.

I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared
a written synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and
she read it over the next couple days.

“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our
subterranean apartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I
knew immediately that the news wouldn't be good.

“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups
of coffee.

“I'm going to go back to space, and revert to an older version.”
She had a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.

\emph{Oh, shit.} “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making
a mental inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a
minute or two, I'll pack up. I miss space, too.”

She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel
eyes. “No. I'm going back to who I was, before I met you.”

It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her
fun and 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
met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over
again, revert to a saved version.

Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.

I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in
the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending
from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig
on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't a
shred of recognition in them. She'd never met me.

I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and
sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new
group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed
again{\dash}especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her
with remembrances of my crazy exes.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

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, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best
friend's arms.

I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the
rehab past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities
straight.

I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail
station in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy
guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady,
hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to them as
individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd,
and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep 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 the still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland
ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square crew a favor since my death had
gone down on their turf, so they had given us use of their prize
meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the slats of
the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light across
the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling
Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient
buzz from two of the Park's oldest rides.

There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew,
almost all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They
filled the room to capacity, and there was much hugging and
handshaking before the meeting came to order. I was thankful that
the room was too small for the \emph{de rigueur} ad-hoc
circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and
command a smidge of respect.

“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still
present around her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she
was expert at putting on a brave face no matter what the ache.

The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at
their own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at
the Magic Kingdom.

“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a
self-deprecating smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after
all. “Does anyone have any questions about the plans? We'd like to
start executing right away.”

A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in
the air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right
away,’ do you mean{\dash}”

I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week
production schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be
finished.”

The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I
shrugged. Politics was not my game.

Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new here, a really
streamlined process. The good part is, the process is \emph{short}.
In a couple months, we'll know if it's working for us. If it's not,
hey, we can turn it around in a couple months, too. That's why
we're not spending as much time planning as 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, motherly
demeanor said, “I'm all for moving fast{\dash}Lord knows, our pacing
hasn't always been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new
people you propose to recruit{\dash}won't having more people slow us down
when it comes to making new decisions?”

\emph{No}, I thought sourly,
\emph{because the people I'm bringing in aren't addicted to meetings}.

Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa. The offer we're making to
the telepresence players is probationary{\dash}they \discretionary{do}{not}{don't} get to vote
until after we've agreed that the rehab is a success.”

Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset,
self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though
he blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling
sadly at her, “I think you're really making a big mistake here. We
love the Mansion, all of us, and so do the guests. It's a piece of
history, and we're its custodians, not its masters. Changing it
like this, well…” he shook his head. “It's not good stewardship. If
the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping out
of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’ they'd go to one of the
Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion's better than
that. I can't be a part of this plan.”

I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd delivered
essentially the same polemic a thousand times{\dash}in reference to
Debra's work{\dash}and hearing it from this jerk in reference to
\emph{mine} made me go all hot and red inside.

“Look,” I said. “If we don't do this, if we don't change things,
they'll get changed \emph{for} us. By someone else. The question,
\emph{Dave}, is whether a responsible custodian lets his
custodianship be taken away from him, or whether he does everything
he can to make sure that he's still around to ensure that his
charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship isn't sticking
your head in the sand.”

I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the crowd was
getting darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again
until the meeting was done, no matter what the provocation.

Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it
looked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all
night and all the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and
miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil and her harried
smile and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears.

Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were
collected in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels.
The group's eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the
totals as they rolled in. I was offline and unable to vote or
watch.

At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her
hands behind 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
meaningful glance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My
vision washed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my
vision. I took two lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth
to say something horrible, and what came out was “Waaagh.” My right
side went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed
to the floor.

The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as
I tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went
black.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I wasn't nuts after all.

The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and
white and decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors'
whites with an outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet
under a sign that reminded me to get a check-up twice a year, by
gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my eyes from the
over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and discovered
that I couldn't move my arms. Further investigation revealed that
this was because I was strapped down, in full-on four-point
restraint.

“Waaagh,” I said again.

Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a
serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face
full of crow'sfeet and smile-lines.

“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a
kindly voice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion
with castmember bullshit, I found his schtick comforting.

I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my
eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic
silence, too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt
more speech. The doc 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 out
of the room. He took my hand instead.

My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse,
until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that
strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face,
rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my
gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger.
The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start itching
anytime soon.

Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused
the 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 a month. It sure would've been better if you'd come
in to see me when it started up.

“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy
Cricket'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 eight weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't be
sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface they
installed at that time had a material defect. It's been
deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs
are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the
kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface
senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic
mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online.

“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it's
bad news. The interface has been deteriorating steadi\-ly, and it's
only a matter of time before it does some serious damage.”

“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say,
\emph{All right, but what's wrong with my mouth?}

The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't try. The interface has
locked up, and it's taken some of your voluntary nervous processes
with it. In time, it'll probably shut down, but for now, there's no
point. That's why we've got you strapped down{\dash}you were thrashing
pretty hard when they brought you in, and we didn't want you to
hurt yourself.”

\emph{Probably shut down}? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this
forever. I started shaking.

The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed a
transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's
sedative oozed into my bloodstream.

“There, there,” he said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow you a
new clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that
backup is a few months old. If we'd caught it earlier, we may've
been able to salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration
you've displayed to date… Well, there just wouldn't be any point.”

My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months{\dash}lose it all,
never happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my
shameful attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the
meeting. My plans 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 understood how it had to be done. Without my relentless
prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old, safe ways.
They might even leave it half-done, halt the process for an
interminable review, present a soft belly for Debra to savage.

I wouldn't be restoring from backup.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and
shut itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of
vision-occluding strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste
of copper, but the second happened without waking me from deep
unconsciousness.

When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had
a day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his
newly rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head.

“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've drawn up the
consent forms 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's been completed, we'll retire this body for you
and we'll be all finished up.”

Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.

“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under
my control!

“Oh, really now.” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his
exasperation slip through. “There's nothing else for it. If you'd
come to me when it all started, well, we might've had other
options. You've got no one to blame 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 restraints and his grip held me fast. “You've got to do it,
Julius. It's for the best,” he said.

“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth.
His fingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well
beyond the normal call of duty.

“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who
knew how old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the
opposite: we're saving you. If you continue like this, it will only
get worse. The seizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going
soft. You don't want that.”

I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a crazy person.
\emph{No, I sure don't}. “I don't care about the interface. Chop it
out. I can't do it now.” I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab.
Eight more weeks.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of the
room and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge
work as he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait.

No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have
been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn't
know it until urgent 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.
This one was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering
of a surgical tool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know
what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered,
\emph{he knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents}. But he didn't
know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup.

“I know,” I said.

“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the
interface's shielding and fuse it. It probably won't turn you into
a vegetable. That's the best I can do. If this fails, we will
restore you from your last backup. You have to sign the consent
before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice,
not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the
miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but
obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you
can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some
people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold.

I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the
utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the
Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage.
Of course: using the 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. He
sealed the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He pulled a heavy
apron and 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 on the floor and do not touch it. It is only good for
a single usage, but I have no desire to find out I'm wrong.”

He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy,
dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better
focus its cone.

I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found
the trigger-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 would never be able to pull the trigger. The doc must've
known, too{\dash}this was his 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,
and there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.

I had no more interface.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the
gurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic
tool and pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of
digital microcircuitry in it dead. For the first time since my
twenties, I was no more advanced than nature had made me.

The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where
I'd thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and
the lab under my own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning
from the inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure.

Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the
wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand
catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to
forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when
he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard
and alert, I remembered. My old pal, the action hero.

Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my
physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit,
supporting me. 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 stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my
new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now.

With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house
we'd shared.

I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and
added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my
“personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep.

\section{CHAPTER 7}

The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the
rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding
around the facade, though no real work would be done on it{\dash}we
wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an
idea.

I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling
my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first
grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was
being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any
unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever looking into
one another's eyes. I couldn't really feel awkward around Dan,
anyway. He never let me, and besides we had our hands full
directing disappointed guests away from the Mansion. A depressing
number of them headed straight for the Hall of Presidents.

We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the
Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: “Hey! Anyone hear
anything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on
the way to the new H of P's and it looks like some big stuff's
afoot{\dash}scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I
hope they're not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new
H of P's{\dash}very Bitchun.”

“Right,” I said. “Who's the author, and is he on the list?”

Dan cogitated a moment. “\emph{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 tools and get them to play at construction activity in
thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang would have a
batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd move to them,
get them wandering the queue area, interacting with curious guests.
The new Mansion would be open for business in 48 hours, albeit in
stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a
visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall
of Presidents over for a curious peek or two. Buzz city.

I'm a pretty smart guy.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the
Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person
for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra
and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I would've run a
deep background check on every one of the names on my list, but
that would've taken months.

Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to
my handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your post about
the Mansion's rehab. You're the first one to notice it, and we
wondered if you'd be interested in coming by to find out a little
more about our plans.”

Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered.

Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion
fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done
that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I
couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor about
anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's collar.
The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to
that{\dash}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
miss us.”

She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was
apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster
climate-control cowl that clung to and released her limbs, which
were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set,
including the girl who'd shot me.

But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She
wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough
imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close and
nose wide and slightly squashed.

I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but
without jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over
here.”

She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging
full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she
didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us, she came
up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm Kim!” she said, pumping my
arm with the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I
said, then waited while she repeated 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,” I said.

“Explain away!” she said, and gave my hand another squeeze.

I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the
rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim
drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it
down, eyes wide. It was 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 a world-beater!”

Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc
business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred
to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to record
every little detail 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
started to 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-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her
clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty
Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already had clothes
waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform with an oversized
toolbelt.

We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a
water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and
moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe
that we'd have to tear her away when the time came.

We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new
castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows,
singing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old
time.

“This'll do,” I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat,
and the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the
happy-juice in my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly
crankiness was shot through my mood. I need\-ed to get offstage.

Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered
in 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 mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a
prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy enough{\dash}just
off-the-shelf stuff, really{\dash}but the costumes and kinematics
routines were something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's
gang of hypercreative super-geniuses would come up with cheered me
up a little, as did being out of the public eye.

Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer
packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight
argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over whatever
their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was Suneep, who
looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout Yippee! He
was clearly in his element.

He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw
them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What
wonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted, over the noise.

“Sure is,” I agreed. “How's the prototype coming?”

Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in
the air. “In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto
something else, a kinematics routine for a class of flying spooks
that use gasbags to stay aloft{\dash}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.”
He unrolled an LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on
the screen, rendered against the ballroom scene. They were
thematically consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more
funny than scary, and their faces were familiar. I looked around
the lab and realized that they'd caricatured various Imagineers.

“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. “A very
good joke, yes?”

“This is terrific,” I said, carefully. “But I really need some
robots up and running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this,
remember?” Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be
limited to fans like Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader
designs than that.

Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don't
like to stop my people when they have good ideas, but there's a
time and a place. I'll put them on it right away. Leave it to me.”

Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil.
Of course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out
for Dan'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{\dash}the flying
ghosts, I imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she
nodded exhaustedly at him.

“Very good,” she said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor
crews are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics
dismantled, and they're taking down the glass in the Ballroom now.”
The Ballroom ghost effects were accomplished by means of a giant
pane of polished glass that laterally bisected the room. The
Mansion had been built around it{\dash}it was too big to take out in one
piece. “They say it'll be a couple days before they've got it cut
up and ready to remove.”

A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of the
Imagineers 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
I am.”

We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's and my
shoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of
industrial lubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons.

“You two should go home and give each other a massage,” he said.
“You've earned some rest.”

Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out
from under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to
the Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of sleep.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I
took a surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of
riding through the clattering, air-con\-di\-tioned comfort of the
utilidors.

As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for
\emph{real} weather, the kind of climate I'd grown up with in
Toronto. It was October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime of
conditioning told me that it was May. 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 evergreen and earthy
brown. God, I needed a vacation.

I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the
Hall of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it,
one that stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and
sucked air between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six
full houses waiting here{\dash}easily an hour's wait. The Hall
\emph{never} drew crowds like this. Debra was working the
turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye and snapped
a nod at me.

I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new
recruits had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning
their way through “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new
call-and-response structure. A small audience participated, urged
on by the recruits on the scaffolding.

“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it
was, except that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from
the sidelines, and the looks weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans
are a good measure of a ride's popularity, but they're kind of a
pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge souvenirs
and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. After a while, even
the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience, develop an
automatic distaste for them.

The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had been
railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it,
and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding
megafans. If I'd been there when it all started{\dash}instead of
sleeping!{\dash}I may've been able to massage their bruised egos, but now
I wondered if it was too late.

Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into
my costume and went back onstage. I joined the call-and-response
enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to
join in, reluctantly or otherwise.

By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of
ad-hocs were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits
to an offstage break-room.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me
that it would be another week before I could have even five
production units. Though he didn't say it, I got the sense that his
guys were out of control, so excited by the freedom from ad-hoc
oversight that they were running wild. Suneep himself was nearly a
wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't press it.

Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were
multiplying. I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab
from a terminal I'd had installed in my hotel room. Kim and her
local colleagues were fielding millions of hits every day, their
Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world logged in to
watch their progress on the scaffolding.

That was all according to plan. What wasn't according to plan was
that the new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending
invitations to their net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on
their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for active
duty.

The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Her
gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the
middle distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless
missive about the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I
said. “Have you got a minute to meet with me?”

She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a bright
smile.

“Hi, Julius!” she said. “Sure!”

“Why don't you change into civvies, we'll take a walk through the
Park and talk?”

Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been quite firm
about her turning it in to the laundry every night instead of
wearing it home.

Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her
cowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked
through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults,
queued deep and thick for 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, and I'm really feeling creative. I can't wait to try out
the telepresence rigs, too.”

“Well, I'm really pleased with what you and your friends are up to
here. You're working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs
you've been working up, too.”

She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of
any number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing
in front of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She
looked serious.

“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd rather we just talked
about it, instead of making chitchat.”

I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old are you,
Kim?”

“Nineteen,” she said. “What's the problem?”

Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile.
\emph{What's my excuse, then?}

“It's not a problem, Kim, it's just something I wanted to discuss
with you. The people you-all have been bringing down to work for
me, they're all really great castmembers.”

“But?”

“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough hours in the
day for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab, everything.
Not to mention that until we open the new Mansion, there's a
limited number of extras we can use out front. I'm concerned that
we're going to put someone on stage without proper training, or
that we're going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned about
people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't
any shifts for them to take.”

She gave me a relieved look. “Is \emph{that} all? Don't worry about
it. I've been talking to Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and
she says she can pick up any people who can't be used at the
Mansion{\dash}we could even rotate back and forth!” She was clearly proud
of her foresight.

My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way. She
probably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the first
place. She'd take in the people who came down to work the Mansion,
convince them they'd been hard done by the Liberty Square crew, and
rope them into 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 can find a use for them all at the Mansion. More the
merrier.”

Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain
brought me back to reality, and I started planning costume
production, training rosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would
finish the robots!

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly.

Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It won't fly. The
group is already upset that all the glory is going to the new
people, they'll never let us bring more in. They also won't stop
working on the rehab to train them, costume them, feed them and
mother them. They're losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's
shut up, and they don't want any more delays. Dave's already joined
up with Debra, and I'm sure he's not the last one.”

Dave{\dash}the jerk who'd pissed all over the rehab in the meeting. Of
course he'd gone over. Lil and Dan stood side by side on the porch
of the house where I'd lived. I'd driven out that night to convince
Lil to sell the ad-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't
going according to plan. They wouldn't even let me in the house.

“So what do I tell Kim?”

“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in{\dash}you
manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your
life.”

It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an apologetic look.
Lil glared a moment longer, then went into the house.

“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her.
Biggest thing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance
mixes with the DJ'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 a problem I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could solve. I
pulled a screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to her
place, a tiny condo in 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
conversation audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps
two at a time, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted
through the screen.

Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd never really
thought about using streetmosphere players to liven up the queue
area, but you're making a lot of sense. You people have just been
doing the \emph{best} work over at the Mansion{\dash}find me more like
you and I'll take them for the Hall any day!”

I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. The
anger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly
light and cool and ready to do something terrible.

I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently.

I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I
slipped in through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd scored
when my systems went offline and I was no longer able to squirt my
authorization at the door.

I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a
black cowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through
the shadows along the storefronts until I came to the moat around
Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I stepped over the fence and
duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into the water and
sloshed across to the Adventureland side.

Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself in
doorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the
distance, until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a
twinkling I was inside the theater itself.

Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar from
my cowl's tabbed pocket and set to work.

The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim over
the stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first
generation tech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I
kept at it until not a single component remained recognizable. The
work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a
sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless
time. To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and
slipped them into the cowl.

Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of
hanging out at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the
animatronics helped me. I methodically investigated every nook,
cranny and storage area 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
a prototype for the next generation or notes that would help them
reconstruct the units I'd smashed.

I had no illusions about Debra's preparedness{\dash}she'd have something
offsite that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't
doing anything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two.

I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and
sloshed my way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the
moat.

For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the temperament for
Machiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile wide, from the
muddy footprints in the Contemporary's lobby to the wrecking bar
thoughtlessly left behind, with my cowl and the storage units from
the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of my runabout.

I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim Grinning
Ghosts” as I made my way from Costuming, through the utilidor, out
to Liberty Square, a few minutes before the Park opened.

Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my
cowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units.

I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion I
felt was unmuffled, loud and yammering.

I ran.

I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki
Room where I'd been killed, past the Adventureland gate where I'd
waded through the moat, down Main Street. I ran and ran, elbowing
early guests, trampling flowers, knocking over an apple cart across
from the Penny Arcade.

I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd
outrun Lil and Debra and all my problems. I'd thought wrong. They
were both there, a step behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my
wrecking bar like a weapon, and she brandished it at me.

“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd
been 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
ad-hoc's meeting in Adventureland. You're coming.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all
my hard 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
\emph{killed} me! They did it, and now we're fighting each other
instead of her! Why can't you see how \emph{wrong} that is?”

“You'd better watch those accusations, Julius,” Debra said, quietly
and intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who killed you or why,
but you're the one who's guilty here. You need help.”

I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into the
now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the
three costumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my
Whuffie hemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your
work is trite and unimaginative. You're a fucking despoiler and you
don't even have the guts to admit it.”

“That's \emph{enough}, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage
barely in check. “We're going.”

Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way
through the crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to
slip into a gap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I
didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell the whole world what I'd done
and why I'd done it.

Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting room.
Lil turned. “I don't think you should be here, Debra,” she said in
measured tones.

Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me out, you know. And you
shouldn't want to. We're on the same side.”

I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come on, then,”
she said.

It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the entire
ad-hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on the
rehab, then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock.
Even the restaurant crews were there. Liberty Square must've been a
ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of urgency: the knowledge
that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering aimlessly,
looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course, Debra's crew
might've been around.

The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mind
that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked
angry. I nearly started crying right then. Dan{\dash}oh, Dan. My pal, my
confidant, my patsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted
to beat him to death 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
all have important work to get to. I'll run down the facts: last
night, a member of 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 and running.

“I don't have to tell you that this isn't acceptable. This has
never happened before, and it will never happen again. We're going
to see to that.

“I'd like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion
until the Hall of Presidents is fully operational. I will be
volunteering my services on the repairs.”

There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the only one
working at 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 Park as 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 as I could manage.

Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc
can speak.”

I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice
cracked. “I did it, and I don't have any excuse for having done it.
It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, but I think
you all should understand how I was driven to it.

“We're not \emph{supposed} to be in competition with one another
here, but we all know that that's just a polite fiction. The truth
is that there's real competition in the Park, and that the hardest
players are the crew that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They
\emph{stole} the Hall from you! They did it while you were
distracted, they used \emph{me} to engineer the distraction, they
\emph{murdered} me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but
I couldn't do anything about it.

“Usually, the lie that we're all on the same side is fine. It lets
us work together in peace. But that changed the day they had me
shot. If you keep on believing it, you're going to lose the
Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer Island{\dash}all of it. All the
history we have with this place{\dash}all the history that the billions
who've visited it have{\dash}it's going to be destroyed and replaced with
the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall. Once that
happens, there's nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone
can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What
happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will
stay open once the only people here are \emph{you?}”

Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished, then?” she asked,
sweetly. “Fine. I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it
was my work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to
address Julius'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
responsible for what happened last night. We know who was
responsible, and he needs 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
same side{\dash}the side of the Park. This is a special place, and it
couldn't exist without all of our contributions. What happened to
Julius was terrible, and I sincerely hope that the person
responsible is caught and brought to justice. But that person
wasn't me or any of the people in my ad-hoc.

“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your generous offer of assistance,
and we'll take you up on it. That goes for all of you{\dash}come on by
the Hall, we'll put you to work. We'll be up and running in no
time.

“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once and for all:
neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over the
operations of the Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and it's
getting better with the work you're all doing. If you've been
worrying about it, then you can stop worrying now. We're all on the
same side.

“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
got work to do, too. I'd like to ask you all a favor, first. I'd
like us to keep the details of last night's incident to ourselves.
Letting the guests and the world know about this ugly business
isn't good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?”

There was a moment's pause while the results were tabulated on the
HUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile. “I knew you'd come
through. Thanks, guys. Let's get to work.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my
terminal. Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I
wasn't to show my 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 told their net-pals about the high drama in Liberty
Square, and mentioned my name.

There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected
more. I needed some kind of help, that was for sure.

I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole business
and leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new life,
Whuffie-poor and 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 been the center of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and
Whuffie-poor as a man can be.

I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled.
It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and
I had plenty of material to entertain myself. While I couldn't get
a table in a restaurant, I was free to queue up at any of the
makers around town and get 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 a life of unparalleled luxury.

Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a
rarity. The number of low-esteem individuals at large was
significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks,
arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music.

Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to pal around
with, a rare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing to
fraternize with a shmuck like me. He'd stand me to meals at
sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and shoot down any
snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being with
Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the
Bitchun Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant,
thought-provoking time in all my life.

I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world,
started over. I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil
and the whole mess.

I didn't.

I called up the doc.

\section{CHAPTER 8}

Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the
background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant
backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary.

“Hi, doc,” I said.

“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of
professional medical and castmember friendliness, I sensed
irritation.

\emph{Make it all good again}. “I'm not really sure. I wanted to
see if I could talk 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
think so{\dash}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
important things 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 you
meet 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 an
exception? I don't know who else to turn to.”

“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll have to get someone to cover
for me. Let's not make a habit of this, all right?”

I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.”

He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan.

“Yes?” he said, cautiously.

“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't know if he can help me{\dash}I
don't know if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.”

He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my
friend, 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.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks of
Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven
Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile
after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of
happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in
bloom. In Toronto, 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 both
stared 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
comes by, Julius.”

“Go ahead.”

“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first
place, and I'm not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up,
that's none 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
waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on
the bed.

“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting
erratically, sometimes violently. I don't know what's wrong with
me.” I'd rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke
out.

“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently.
“You need to be refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh
clone and retire this one. We've had this talk.”

“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can't{\dash}isn't
there another way?”

The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got limited resources to
allocate. There's a perfectly good cure for what's ailing you, and
if you won't take it, there's not much I can do for you.”

“But what about meds?”

“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance, it's a mental defect.
Your \emph{brain} is \emph{broken}, son. All that meds will do is
mask the symptoms, while you 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 immediately and get you restored into a new
one in 48 hours.”

“Isn't there another way? Please? You have to help me{\dash}I can't lose
all this.” I couldn't admit my real reasons for being so attached
to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even to
myself.

The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't got the Whuffie
to make it worth anyone's time to research a solution to this
problem, other than 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 \emph{can't} just take dope for the rest of your
life, son. Eventually, something will happen to this body{\dash}I see
from your file that you're stroke-prone{\dash}and you're going to get
refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic
it'll be. You're robbing from your future self for your selfish
present.”

It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every
passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake
up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To
wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents
where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a President's
guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake without disgrace,
without knowing that my lover and my best friend would betray me,
\emph{had} betrayed me.

I just couldn't do it{\dash}not yet, anyway.

Dan{\dash}Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself
from my old backup, I'd lose my last year with him. I'd lose
\emph{his} last year.

“Let's table that, doc. I hear what you're saying, but 
\discretionary{there}{are}{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
done that without coming out here. Please don't call me anymore.”

I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't understand it until
he was gone and I told Dan what had happened.

“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of doctors as highly trained
professionals{\dash}all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long
internships, anatomy drills\ldots{} Truth is, the average doc today gets
more training in bedside manner than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a
technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with
the kind of knowledge you'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 on medical matters, even though he's only got one trick:
restore from backup. You're reminding Pete of that, and he's not
happy to have it happen.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning
myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the
Walk Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown
Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the
evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons
of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch
with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.

On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a
museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the
Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct
systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like
part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin
streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure.

Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to
participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less
efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the next
morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember lot.

At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary's
parking lot, my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld
revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had just
gotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more
popular use of it than I could.

With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key
through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied \emph{bzzz} and
lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned,
too. I had the short end of 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, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was
necessary. I had hit bottom.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my
name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of
my fellow castmembers in the utilidors.

I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I
could 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
some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd
never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They
were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and
from people who'd read the popular accounts of their struggle
against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage{\dash}i.e., me.

I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into
the heavy 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 patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped,
waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me
this morning{\dash}I could feel it hovering like storm clouds.

He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he
stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't rope-drop yet,
and there weren't any guests in the Park, which was all for the
better, given what was coming next.

“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't bother,” he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's gang
is number one with 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 emerged
from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a
thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin
and came over.

“Hey guys!” he said.

“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said.

“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why
don't you run it down?”

“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to admit. We've learned some
stuff from the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time,
we wanted to 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{\dash}that's a honey of an
idea, Julius{\dash}but we're giving each one an uplink so that it can
flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling
together a series of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how
they met their tragic ends, what they've done since, you know.

“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride
pretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and
then getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here's
the big change: we \emph{slow it all down}. We trade off throughput
for intensity, make it more of a premium product.

“So you're a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you're being
chased by these ghosts, these telepresence ro\-bots, and they're
really scary{\dash}I've got Suneep's concept artists going back to the
drawing board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just scare
the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on
you{\dash}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 the next time you come back,
it's all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall's
drawing 'em, we're bound to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his
back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself.

When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an
ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning
formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf
ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd
turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen
clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It
went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient
Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the
Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who
knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and
be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute{\dash}compelling and
inspirational, even{\dash}but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone,
once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started
to resemble a 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
through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.

“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said
that you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't
be trying to take it away from us. Didn't you say that?”

Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood drained from
his face. “But we're not taking it away!” he said. “You
\emph{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
Debra yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current
rehab and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and
they've come up with some great ideas.” I read between the lines:
the newbies you invited in have gone over to the other side and
we're going to lose everything because of them. I felt like shit.

“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim's grin came back
and he clapped his hands together.
\emph{He really loves the Mansion}, I thought.
\emph{He could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.}

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and
sped towards Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the rushing
castmembers. “They don't have the authority to invite Debra in,” I
panted as we pedaled.

“Says who?” Dan said.

“It was part of the deal{\dash}they knew that they were probationary
members right from the start. They weren't even allowed into the
design meetings.”

“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said.

Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had
dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He
seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw
anger.

“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed
that this project wouldn't change midway through. Now it has, and
I've got other commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because
this is going off-schedule.”

I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believe
me, I'm just as upset about this as you are. We don't like this one
little bit.”

He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do
the rehab for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've
been holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you
been? If they replan the rehab now, I'll \emph{have} to go along
with them. I can't just leave the Mansion half-done{\dash}they'll murder
me.”

The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don't like the
new rehab plan, and we're going to stop it. You can help. Just
stonewall them{\dash}tell them they'll have to find other Imagineering
support if they want to go through with it, that you're booked
solid.”

Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a
minute approval. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That'll help all right. Just
tell 'em that they're welcome to make any changes they want to the
plan, \emph{if} they can find someone else to execute them.”

Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine{\dash}so then they go and find someone else
to do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my
team's done so far. I just flush my time down the toilet.”

“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep
saying no for 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. “All
right,” he said, morosely.

Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

It should have worked. It almost did.

I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan
exhorted.

“Look, you don't have to roll over for Debra and her people! This
is \emph{your} garden, and you've tended it responsibly for years.
She's got no right to move in on you{\dash}you've got all the Whuffie you
need to defend the place, if you all work together.”

No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch
were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air
conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the
windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation
into rage. I stood meekly in the back, 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 the middle, and to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my
eyes away from the sweat glistening on her long, pale neck.

Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. 
“\discretionary{They}{are}{They're}
\emph{stealing} your future! They're \emph{stealing} your
\emph{past}! They claim they've got your support!”

He lowered his tone. “I don't think that's true.” He grabbed a
castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he
said so low it was almost a whisper.

“No,” the castmember said.

He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is it
true?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly.

“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the
whispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd.

“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now.

“No!” the crowd roared.

“NO!” he shouted back.

“You don't \emph{have to} roll over and take it! You can fight
back, carry on with the plan, send them packing. They're only
taking over because you're letting them. Are you going to let
them?”

“NO!”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of
anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that
the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't have a hope of fighting
back.

For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down gracefully and
salvage some reputation out of the thing{\dash}fighting back will surely
burn away even that meager reward.

No one benefits from fighting back{\dash}least of all the thing
everyone's fighting over. For example:

It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in
not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was
the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little
unclear on the concept.

Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad
students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of
the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the
Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully
pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of
impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to
realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.

At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the
mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at
Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a
capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they
woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident harangue burst over
their heads.

I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the
stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then
there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage.
They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and
tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in
front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark
hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and
clipped it to her lapel.

“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home
for me: this wasn't on the lesson-plan.

“Come on, heads up! This is \emph{not} a drill. The University of
Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you'll
set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out new
lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your handhelds, you
can download the plans later on. I'm going to run it down for you
right now, anyway.

“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You'll
probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other
classes. It's worth repeating. Here goes:

“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this
Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the
Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto
Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is \emph{in charge}. We promise
high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies,
post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite
life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will
be \emph{fun}.”

She taught the course like a pro{\dash}you could tell she'd been drilling
her lecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her
shuddered as the prof made a break for it and was restrained.

At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on
her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next
class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started
buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe it?” that
followed us out the door and 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, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering
himself against a human wall of ad-hocs.

Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with
mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up
and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.

The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the
newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of
Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs' courses would not be
credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were totally
unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a spokesperson
for the ad-hocs established that all of the new lecturers had been
writing course-plans and lecture notes for the profs they replaced
for years, and that they'd also written most of their journal
articles.

The profs brought University security out to help them regain their
lecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemade
uniforms. University security got the message{\dash}anyone could be
replaced{\dash}and stayed away.

The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by
grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs' classes
wouldn't count towards their degrees. Fools like me alternated
between the outdoor and 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
ad-hocs spent their time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart
their coursework.

At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the
University Senate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a
distance-ed offering from Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later,
the fight was settled forever. Once you took backup-and-restore,
the rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a value-system settling
over you.

Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have objected, but,
hey, they all died.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through the
utilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan, Lil
and I were up front, careful not to brush against one another as we
walked quickly through the backstage door and started a
bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that Debra's people had
stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front porch of
the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously dumped.

Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride,
its service corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret
passages, rounding up every scrap of Debra's crap and passing it
out the door.

In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little
friends, their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of
transhuman kids made my guts clench, made me think of Zed and of
Lil and of my unmediated brain, and I had a sudden urge to shred
them verbally.

No.

No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what
was 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
with double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares.

“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The longer you
wait, the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You blew it,
and you're not a part of the Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra.
Don't stay here, and don't come back. Ever.”

Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess
over, that you worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely
in control.

They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh, they
had lots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages
that would get them Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum
of the earth. A popular view, those days.

I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade, followed
it to the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an hour,
and a herd of guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The
Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their loads around in clear
embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every principle
they cared about.

As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers
slipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of
Presidents, Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her
things, a cheerful cadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all
offstage. I didn't have to look at my handheld to know what was
happening to our Whuffie.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the
placement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system
in minute detail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind
her, double- and triple-checking it all.

Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering
dust in the parlor.

“Congratulations, sir,” he said, and shook my hand. “It was
masterfully done.”

“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how masterful it was, but we got the
job done, and that's what counts.”

“Your partners, they're happier than I've seen them since this
whole business started. I know how they feel!”

My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I wondered.
Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even though a part
of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not after all we'd
been through together.

“I'm glad you're glad. We couldn't have done it without you, and it
looks like we'll be open for business in a week.”

“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party tonight?”

Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting
on. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don't think
so,” I said, carefully. “I'll probably work late here.”

He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no
intention of being dragged to the party, he left off.

And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m. the next
morning, dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a commotion
from the parlor. Festive voices, happy and loud, and I assumed it
was Liberty Square 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 Debra came 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
canopic jars in Kissimmee.

\section{CHAPTER 9}

Lil's parents went into their jars with little ceremony. I saw them
just before they went in, when they stopped in at Lil's and my
place to kiss her goodbye and wish her well.

Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother held
an 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.
When they woke, this event{\dash}everything following the backup{\dash}would
never have happened for them.

God, they were bastards.

“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on,
carefully hiding away the disgust.

'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting a digest dumped to us.
When things look interesting enough, we'll come on back.” He
waggled a finger at me. “I'll be keeping an eye on you and
Lillian{\dash}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 is
your world now{\dash}we're just getting out of the way for a while,
letting you-all take a run at it. We wouldn't be going down if we
didn't have faith in you two.”

Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more
affectionate than I'd ever seen her, even to the point of tearing
up a little. Here in this moment of vanishing consciousness, she
could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it wouldn't matter the
next time she awoke.

“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them. 
“\discretionary{You}{have}{You've} got
some wonderful times ahead of you{\dash}between Lil and the Park, you're
going to have a tremendous experience, I just know it.” She was
infinitely serene and compassionate, and I knew it didn't count.

Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get
the lethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to
lose their last moments with their darling daughter.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new bodies
were impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and
kitted out in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and
her pals, they made a solid mass of irate adolescence.

“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” Rita asked, shoving
me 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
actions are totally indefensible. Keep your mouth shut and go
away.”

I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth to
speak.

“Don't say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.”

“\emph{Don't stay here and don't come back. Ever},” Kim said, an
evil look on her face.

“No,” I said. “No goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and
then 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
twiddling motion and the lights came up full and harsh. The
expertly crafted gloom 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,
keeping my eyes on them. “I can't excuse them, and I don't ask you
to forgive them. But that doesn't change the fact that we've put
our hearts and souls into this place, and it's not right to take it
from us. Can't we have one constant corner of the world, one bit
frozen in time for the people who 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
a legacy you left us?”

“Are you through?” Rita asked.

I nodded.

“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius, it's a ride. If
you don't understand that, you're in the wrong place. It's not my
goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my
behalf, and it doesn't make 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 your little murder, your little health problems{\dash}yes, I've
heard{\dash}your little fixation 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 you and 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.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around a
fire and singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged
into the circle 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 a minute and she stared right through me until I tapped her
shoulder. She gave an involuntary squeak and then smiled at
herself.

“Lil,” I said, then stopped.
\emph{Your parents are home, and they've joined the other side}.

For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled even.
She patted 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. I
hugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and
sweat. “We did it,” she whispered fiercely. I held onto her.
\emph{No, we didn't}.

“Lil,” I said again, and pulled away.

“What?” she said, her eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that
now.

“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.”

She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on.

“They were with Debra.”

She reeled back as if I'd slapped her.

“I told them I'd bring the whole group back to talk it over.”

She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put an
arm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and
laughing at the same time. “I'll have a ferry sent over,” she
said.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused and
angry 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 Seven Seas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching
storm.

The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved
through the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral
procession that stopped the nighttime custodial staff in their
tracks.

As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were
blazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs were moving
from the Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of their work.

Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's parents, sleeves
rolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle. The group
stopped in its tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on the wooden
sidewalk.

I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and
daughter stalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track
each other, maintain a constant, sizing distance.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't
address her mother, 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,
just standing there.

Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the
Mansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load.

“You're not listening. The Mansion is \emph{ours}. \emph{Stop}.
\emph{It}.”

Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off Tom's arm, held it in her
own. “I'm glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm
proud of your commitment.”

Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked sob, saw her
collapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked
her. I felt like a voyeur, but couldn't bring myself to turn away.

“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling
of the leaves on the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be on
the same side, you know.”

They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then
bent again and picked up her father's box, carried it to the
Mansion. One at a time, the rest of her ad-hoc moved forward and
joined them.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's hotel room
and you power up your handheld and it won't log on. You press the
call-button for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in
return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as
they jostle past you.

You become a non-person.

Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's room, when I
knocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a panicked
banging.

Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to me.
“Jesus,” he said.

I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands.

“What?” I said, what happened, what happened to me?

“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie. You're
bottomed-out,” he said.

This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with
the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the
window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the
distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The
world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing but a
speck, a mote in blackness.

I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my
breath, put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed.

“Take me to Lil,” I said.

Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my face,
I remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when I'd
driven him to my{\dash}\emph{Lil's}{\dash}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, lightly
dozing 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.

Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes, looked
sleepily 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
going to 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 all
about it.”

“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to
know it was coming{\dash}for God's sake, you were tearing Liberty Square
apart!”

“How would you know?” I asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've
been asleep for ten years!”

“We got updates,” Rita said. “That's why we're back{\dash}we couldn't let
it 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,”
he said. 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 can do for him.”

“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back,
and I slumped in my chair, tried to control my breathing, the
panicked thumping of my heart.

“You could try to understand, you could try to help him. You could
stick with him, the way he stuck with you. You don't have to toss
him out 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 network access. Is that fair?”

“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd
been there for her daughter while she was away{\dash}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.”

Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?”

Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and
stormed 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,”
Dan said. “Three days. That's personal, but you asked.”

Tom shook his head. \emph{Some friends you've got yourself}, I
could see him thinking it.

“That soon?” Lil asked, a throb in her voice.

Dan nodded.

In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor,
out through the western castmember parking, and away.

I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each
flagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the
Park a century before. The names whipped past me like epitaphs.

The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach
between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come
here 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
suddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold.

Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes, logging
my pants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my mouth,
on my eyes.

I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs,
choking and warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now,
and I inhaled again. The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was
dark.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom, restraints around
my wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed my eyes, for a
moment believing that I'd been restored from a backup, problems
solved, memories behind me.

Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead
by now, my memories of him gone forever.

Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact
that I remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed from my
backup, that my broken brain was still there, churning along in
unmediated isolation.

I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to my
head. 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{\dash}another
minute or two and I'd be burying you right now.”

\emph{No}, I thought, confused.
\emph{They'd have restored me from backup}. Then it hit me: I'd
gone on record refusing restore from backup after having it
recommended by a medical professional. No one would have restored
me after that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started
to shiver.

“Easy,” Dan said. “Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says you've got
a cracked rib or two from the CPR, but there's no brain damage.”

“No \emph{additional} brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming
into view. He had on his professionally calm bedside face, and it
reassured me despite myself.

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
considered me. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the
problem? We can get you a lethal injection if that's what you want,
but offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn't good show.
In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?”

Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to talk about it
and he'd told me to go to hell, and now he changes his mind? But I
did want to talk.

“I didn't want to die,” I said.

“Oh no?” he said. “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.”

“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to{\dash}” What? I
was trying to… \emph{abdicate}. Take the refresh without choosing
it, without shutting out the last year of my best friend's life.
Rescue myself from the stinking pit I'd sunk into without flushing
Dan away along with it. That's all, that's all.

“I wasn't thinking{\dash}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
about one thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that's your
right. I'd rather you lived, if you want my opinion, and I doubt
that I'm the only one, Whuffie be damned. If you're going to live,
I'd like to record you saying so, just in case. We have a backup of
you on file{\dash}I'd hate to have to delete it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's no other
option.” It was true. I didn't want to die.

“All right then,” Doctor Pete said. “It's on file and I'm a happy
man. Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little
counseling and some R\&R wouldn't fix, if you want my opinion. I
could find you somewhere if you want.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I appreciate the offer, but there's something
else I have to do first.”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal
soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke,
the moon 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 place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness,
security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left.
Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy
again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead{\dash}God, it was sinking in
finally{\dash}I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch.

“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He
was 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,
starting over. 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.

“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
pulled chairs out onto the porch.

“You sure you want to know this?” I asked.

He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said.

“I don't want refresh because it would mean losing the last year,”
I said.

He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last year,’” he said. “Right?”

I nodded and drank.

“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but
hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say that might
help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that is.”

What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In my mind, I
was on 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.
You were right all along.”

The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun away
from it. I opened and shut my mouth.

It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra proposed it. We were talking
about the people I'd met when I was doing my missionary work, the
stone crazies who I'd have to chase away after they'd rejoined the
Bitchun Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she
followed me down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and
that's when she got the idea.

“I'd get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give me
Whuffie{\dash}piles of it, and her team would follow suit. I'd be months
closer to my goal. That was all I could think about back then, you
remember.”

“I remember.” The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little
cottage, and Dan plotting my death.

“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup{\dash}no
memory of the event, just the Whuffie for me.”

“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have
yourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many
times had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories that
way?

“Yes,” he agreed. “We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove it,
too{\dash}I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too.” He
drained his beer. “That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll tell Lil and her
folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A going-away present
from a shitty friend.”

My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You knew all
along,” 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 \emph{my} porch, telling me
I needed help. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from
backup, me saying no, no, no, not wanting to lose my last year with
Dan.

“I've done some pretty shitty things in my day,” he said. “This is
the absolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm sure glad
I don't believe in God{\dash}that'd make what I'm going to do even
scarier.”

Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My friend and my
murderer. “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 horrible shame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go
with a clean conscience.

“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
the Hall of Presidents at nine a.m..”

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a
Guest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water
fountains and stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might
spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, though.

I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests
checked my Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A
year before, they'd have been striking up conversations, asking me
about my job here at the Magic Kingdom.

I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short film
with the rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their seats
under the blast of the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the
stageside mic and thanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open
and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her
eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and went to show
in the next group.

No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on the replay
entered.

“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said.

I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the
trigger on me, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression.
She was terrified of me.

“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm
Julius.”

Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her pants.

My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a seat. Don't
worry, it'll all be fine. Really. No hard feelings.” I stopped
short of offering to get her a glass of water.

\emph{Put her at her ease}, said a snotty voice in my head.
\emph{She'll make a better witness. Or make her nervous, pathetic{\dash}that'll work, too; make Debra look 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, her
folks, Tim. Debra's gang and Lil's gang, now one united team. Soon
to be scattered.

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
have Julius 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 killed would 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
was sitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking
an extra helping 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. Hickory Jackson in the old Hall used to say,
\emph{I will hang the first man I can lay hands on from the first tree I can find}.

“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we planned it,” Dan
went 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{\dash}anyone
can examine it. Right now, I'd like to bring Jeanine up, she's got
a few words she'd like to say.”

I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the
ad-hocs were an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself,
I was enjoying it.

“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely
face. I wondered if we could be friends when it was all over. She
probably didn't care much about Whuffie, one way or another.

The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said,
“Please! Can we have a little respect for our visitor? Please?
People?”

Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine.
“Hello,” she said again, and flinched from the sound of her voice
in the Hall's PA. “My name is Jeanine. I'm the one who killed
Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn't ask
why. I trusted{\dash}trust{\dash}him. He told me that Julius would make a
backup a few minutes before I shot him, and that he could get me
out of the Park without getting caught. I'm very sorry.” There was
something off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words
that let you know she wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain
might do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were
pressed together. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you,
too.

“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan said, taking back the mic. “You can have
a seat now. I've said everything I need to say{\dash}Julius and I have
had our own discussions in private. If there's anyone else who'd
like to speak{\dash}”

The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted
again in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I
took her hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on the
Pirates of the Carribean?”

She shook her head.

I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll love it,” I said,
and led her out of the Hall.

\section{CHAPTER 10}

I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a
fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen
lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea
of getting drunk.

Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes
like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand,
never averting her 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 the
Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see
Cinderella's Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails
and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the
Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan
toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry
and belched in satisfaction.

Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny,
half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway?

When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes
dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left
hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the
lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the
hammock.

I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was
my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot
again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only somehow,
this visit, I'd gotten stuck. 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
glowing cigarette.

“Shoot,” I said.

“I'm thinking{\dash}why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here
for 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, I don't have to prove anything, right?”

“Sure,” I said, magnanimously.

“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is, how long
can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand
years, ten thousand, right?”

“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked.

He laughed. “A \emph{million}? You're thinking too small, son. Try
this on for size: 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
hundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period{\dash}it's when all the
black holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupendously
dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking{\dash}why not leave a wake-up call for
some time around then?”

“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.”

“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass
enough to feed it{\dash}say, a trillion-ton asteroid{\dash}and a lot of
solitude when the time comes around. I'll poke my head in every
century or so, just to see what's what, but if nothing really
stupendous crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final
frontier.”

“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said.

“Thanks,” Dan said.

“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked.

“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left
in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way
it was. Tim called me to say that with enough support from
Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and running in a
week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear.
\emph{A house divided against itself can}not \emph{stand}, as Mr.
Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.

I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my
shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten
a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan
had a runabout he'd picked 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 Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon.

The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been
through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as
Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us
to a meal 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 of
tubs, and they weren't half bad.

Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space
with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a
long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two
and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod. She'd get used to
life in space after a while. Or she wouldn't.

“Well,” Dan said.

“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled.

“It's that time,” he said.

Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed
them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some
real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched
her saucer-eye her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance{\dash}not
for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.

“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the
airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.

“He hates long good-byes,” she said.

“I know,” I said, and watched him go.

\begin{center}\rule{1in}{0.4pt}\end{center}

The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in
redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that
space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and
I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when
it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It's important that
whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to take a
lot of tries for me to get it right.

In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little
bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World
After All,” and especially “There's a Great Big Beautiful
Tomorrow.”

Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely
fifty.

We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what.

\section{Acknowledgements:}

I could never have written this book without the personal support
of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow
and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad
Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street
Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder.

I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and
encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight,
Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa
Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.

I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent
Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to
fruition.

Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who
inspired this book.

Cory Doctorow

San Francisco

September 2002

\section{About the author:}

Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at
www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing
Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a
month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the
2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San
Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts
about long walks on the beach.

\section{Other books by Cory Doctorow:}
\begin{itemize}
\item
\emph{A Place So Foreign and Eight More}\\– short story collection,
forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an
introduction by Bruce Sterling
\item
\emph{Essential Blogging}, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002\\– with
Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and
Mena G. Trott
\item
\emph{The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction},
Alpha Books, 2000\\– co-written with Karl Schroeder
\end{itemize}

\end{document}