Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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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

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======= 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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to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It's a
great project, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

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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.

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