Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
C >>
Cory Doctorow >> Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 | 12
"Shoot," I said.
"I'm thinking -- why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here
for now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?"
"Why did you want to before?" I asked.
"Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I
don't have to prove anything, right?"
"Sure," I said, magnanimously.
"So," he said, thoughtfully. "The question I'm asking is, how long can I
deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten
thousand, right?"
"So, you're thinking, what, a million?" I joked.
He laughed. "A _million_? You're thinking too small, son. Try this on
for size: the heat death of the universe."
"The heat death of the universe," I repeated.
"Sure," he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. "Ten to the
hundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period -- it's when all the black
holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold,
too. So I'm thinking -- why not leave a wake-up call for some time
around then?"
"Sounds unpleasant to me," I said. "Brrrr."
"Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass
enough to feed it -- say, a trillion-ton asteroid -- and a lot of
solitude when the time comes around. I'll poke my head in every century
or so, just to see what's what, but if nothing really stupendous crops
up, I'll take the long ride out. The final frontier."
"That's pretty cool," Jeanine said.
"Thanks," Dan said.
"You're not kidding, are you?" I asked.
"Nope, I sure ain't," he said.
#
They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left in
Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was.
Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they
thought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to
kill someone, I swear. _A house divided against itself can_not_ stand_,
as Mr. Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.
I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbag and
checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanine
and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he'd picked
up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played
old Beatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our
shuttle lifted at noon.
The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been through
decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor
as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the
big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we
watched the universe get colder for a while.
There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of
tubs, and they weren't half bad.
Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space with
her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul
generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded
back to Earth in a support-pod. She'd get used to life in space after a
while. Or she wouldn't.
"Well," Dan said.
"Yup," I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled.
"It's that time," he said.
Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed them
away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some real tender,
brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye
her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance -- not for me, thanks! But
camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.
"See you in ten to the hundred," Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I
started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.
"He hates long good-byes," she said.
"I know," I said, and watched him go.
#
The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in
redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or
age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my
life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a
clone somewhere, somewhen. It's important that whoever I am then knows
about this year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to get it
right.
In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little bit
of "Grim Grinning Ghosts," and a nod to "It's a Small World After All,"
and especially "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow."
Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely
fifty.
We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what.
--
================= Acknowledgements: =================
I could never have written this book without the personal support of my
friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil
Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John
Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark
Frauenfelder.
I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and
encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha
Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen
Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.
I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent
Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to
fruition.
Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who
inspired this book.
Cory Doctorow San Francisco September 2002
--
================= About the author: =================
Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at
www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing
at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won
the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards.
Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. He enjoys
using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on the beach.
--
============================= Other books by Cory Doctorow:
=============================
A Place So Foreign and Eight More - short story collection, forthcoming
from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by
Bruce Sterling
Essential Blogging, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002 - with Rael Dornfest,
J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, Alpha Books,
2000 - co-written with Karl Schroeder
--
========================== Machine-readable metadata:
==========================
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> rdf:about="http://craphound.com/down"> Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom 2003-1-9 A
novel by Cory Doctorow:
Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see
the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and
compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up
residence in Disney World.
Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago
twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer
"ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always
have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.
Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has
taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable
audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces
that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the
others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney
World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed.
This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.)
Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of
ever-shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely
unpredictable outcomes.
Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and
Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a
coming-of-age romantic comedy and a kick-butt cybernetic
tour de force. Cory
Doctorow
Cory Doctorow rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" /> rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0" />
eof
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 | 12