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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

by Cory Doctorow · English · Gutenberg #8086 · 305,125 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Author: Cory Doctorow


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8086]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2023

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM ***














Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Cory Doctorow

Copyright 2003 Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

http://www.craphound.com/down

Tor Books, January 2003

ISBN: 0765304368

--

======= Blurbs: =======

He sparkles!  He fizzes!  He does backflips and breaks the furniture!
Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow!

Bruce Sterling Author, The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction

#

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.

Lawrence Lessig Author, The Future of Ideas

#

Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future - I think he lives
there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't just a really good read,
it's also, like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the
Tomorrowland 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!

Kelly Link Author, Stranger Things Happen

#

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 -- it could easily become a breakout genre-
buster.

Mark Frauenfelder Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine

#

Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world.
Not only that, but money's been abolished and somebody's developed the
Cure for Death.  Welcome to the Bitchun Society--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--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.

Cory Doctorow--cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early Adopter
--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.

Karl Schroeder Author, Permanence

#

Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in
years.Ê He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations
end.Ê It's a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie.

Rudy Rucker Author, Spaceland

#

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.

Howard Rheingold Author, Smart Mobs

#

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. *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.

Douglas Rushkoff Author of Cyberia and Media Virus!

#

"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."

Tim O'Reilly Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates

#

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.

Bruce Schneier Author, Secrets and Lies

#

Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,
entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired
world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're
going to find.

Gardner Dozois Editor, Asimov's SF

#

Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" tells a gripping,
fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation 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.

Mitch Kapor Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier
Foundation

--

======================= A note about this book: =======================

"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:

http://www.craphound.com/down/buy.php

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, Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net), where I do a
*lot* of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers
about things that I like.

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

What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music
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 *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, Tor Books (http://www.tor.com)
and my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
(http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite) 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 Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/).
This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license
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--

======== 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 -- the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew -- on a
busy Friday night, spring-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 -- 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 -- 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 -- I'll tell you about it, you really got to
know.

"Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.
You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't."

And it clicked for me. He was a missionary -- one of those fringe-
dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the 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 -- you have to be awfully convincing to get
through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a
century's worth of propaganda -- 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 --
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 -- 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 --
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
adhocracy, 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 _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
_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, _anything_, else. He
had a point -- 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 _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 --
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 _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."

#

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 -- all the savings from
the symphonies and the first three theses -- 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 -- 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 -- your personal capital with your friends and neighbors --
you more accurately gauged your success.

And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led 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.

========= 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 --
if eclectic -- 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 _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, _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 --" 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 utilidoor 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.

#

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 _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 _done_. It's _over_."

"So do it," Lil said.

"I _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 -- 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. _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.

========= 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 -- a
group who'd worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved off
to other pursuits -- 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 -- 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 _really good_ at coding sims. Her Great
Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 _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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 --
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 -- 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.

========= CHAPTER 3 =========

The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup --
in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some
people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.

Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't participate in it.
Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just,
you know, _died_, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need
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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 _sucks_," I said.

I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors -- 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 -- 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 --
that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point."

Right -- which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last 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 -- 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 _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.

"_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 -- good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going to
let those bastards disrupt my life any more."

_Those bastards_? I thought -- 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 -- sympathy Whuffie
-- but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em.

I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as 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 _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 _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 --"

"What difference does that make?"

"Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy.
You're a clone, with a copied _brain_ -- that's not the same as 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.

#

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
-- 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 _happened_ to have plans for a new
Hall standing by. And they just _happened_ to file them after I got
shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a 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.

#

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
-- 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! _He_ was nervous. What did _he_ have to be nervous
about? I was the one who'd been murdered -- 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 -- if
I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to
do it? The attic staircase-- the next sequence -- 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 -- instead of shaving off three
seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry.

#

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
_seriously_. It wasn't like they'd done something _permanent_.

In the meantime, I _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. _Careful_, I thought, _no need to escalate the
hostilities._ "It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have
done with 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 --
the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really
clarify the vision. Beijing -- well, it was exciting, but it was rushed,
you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was
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 -- 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 _never_ touch the Mansion," he said. "It's _perfect_!"

Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked
concerned -- now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed 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 --
higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect
from the elf -- _Tim_, I had to remember to call him Tim -- 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 -- 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 _inside_ you, core-dumped in a few
seconds. Debra said we're going to _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 _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 -- 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, _If he's
going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him_. I was past
caring -- I was going to beard the lion in his den!

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

#

On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept 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.

_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 -- 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 -- 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 _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 -- it's my
specialty."

Debra spoke up from behind him -- 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 -- we want to _transcend it_."

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

========= CHAPTER 4 =========

One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:

1. That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,

2. That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a
play for the Haunted Mansion,

3. That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike
against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.

Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in 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 -- rides that had entertained the world
for two centuries and more -- 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 -- 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 --
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 -- 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 -- 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.

#

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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 _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.

#

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 -- a narrow cylinder as long as my palm -- 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 -- 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.

#

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.

#

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 -- 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 -- they visit this place for continuity as much as for
entertainment. We provide that." I'm offline, and they're not -- what
the hell happened?

"It'll be okay, Lil. There's nothing in that place that's better than
us. Different and new, but not better. You know that -- you've spent
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 -- it's just shocking. Maybe you're right.
And even if you're not -- 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.

#

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 -- 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 --
myself included -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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.

#

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 -- 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
-- 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 -- 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 -- 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 --
apparent and real -- and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss
her, at first, as just another airhead castmember.

Her parents -- Tom and Rita -- 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 -- who worked the Park for the
chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the
management decisions -- 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" -- she
chucked her husband on the shoulder -- "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 -- 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 -- 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-extension stuff -- 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 -- they
don't need it -- 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 --" he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who
nodded -- "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 -- 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 -- 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.

========= 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 -- 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
_was_, but I'm not _now_." I felt better than I had in days, ready to
beat the world -- or at least Debra.

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

#

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 -- tending
bar, mopping toilets -- commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure
in your off-hours.

"But that guy in the suit of armor, he could _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 -- telecontrollers, 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 --"

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

#

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-clipboard
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 -- 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 -- souvenirs 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 -- 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 --" 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 --
what Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It made her
and her ad-hoc better -- it made them sharper." _Sharper than us, that's
for sure_. "They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them
just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too."

Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped
out, but I saw that I'd been right -- 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
-- 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 -- one that didn't have any review,
just take the idea and run with it -- 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 -- 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 _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
_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 -- that would be even _more_ Bitchun.

"Lil," I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her.
"We have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds to
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 -- she was a real opinion-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 --"

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.

#

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 -- moving with
precision and grace and, above all, _expedience_.

On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground,
pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch 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 -- 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 _everything_ because they lack the organizational smarts to
figure out what they should pack -- 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 _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 _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 -- 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 _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 -- we _do_ try
to keep it _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 -- 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 -- and I never told her this
-- that the thing I love best about the Mansion is:

It's where I met her.

#

Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 _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 --"

"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."

#

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 _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 _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 _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 -- 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 _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 -- 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 -- 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 _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.

_And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you._

_And then what?_

_I'm going to bang you till you limp. _

_Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl._

My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters.
Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who 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 -- we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the
rehab."

It was her house.

"Lil, Julius --" Dan began.

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

I dropped my papers -- I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them,
_flump_, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close
the door behind me.

#

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 -- _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 _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.

_I guess I'll take what I can get, too_, I thought.

========= CHAPTER 6 =========

Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan,
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 _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 _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 -- 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 -- 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. Fifty years later, I was dating
Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.

I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at 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.

#

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 _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.

_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 -- especially not to
Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy
exes.

#

If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone.
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 _de rigeur_ 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 --"

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 _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 -- Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always
been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new people you propose
to recruit -- won't having more people slow us down when it comes to
making new decisions?"

_No_, I thought sourly, _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 -- they 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 -- in reference to Debra's work -- and
hearing it from this jerk in reference to _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 _for_ us. By someone else. The question, _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.

#

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 palette 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 steadily, and it's only a
matter of time before it does some serious damage."

"Waaagh?" I asked. I meant to say, _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 -- you were thrashing pretty hard when
they brought you in, and we didn't want you to hurt yourself."

_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 -- 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.

#

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. _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."

#

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, _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 --
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.

#

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.

========= 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 -- 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 --
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
-- very Bitchun."

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

Dan cogitated a moment. "_She_ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list.
Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership."

"Call her," I said.

This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume,
and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned 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.

#

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 -- 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.

#

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 needed 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 -- just off-
the-shelf stuff, really -- but the costumes and kinematics routines were
something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's gang of
hypercreative super-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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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.

#

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-conditioned comfort of the utilidors.

As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for
_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 -- easily an hour's wait. The Hall _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 -- instead of sleeping! -- 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.

#

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

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