Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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

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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.

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