Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

C >> Cory Doctorow >> Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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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.

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