Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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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."

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