Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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

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Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped
out, but I saw that I'd been right -- we'd have to beat Debra at her own
game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.

"I understand what you're saying," Lil said. I could tell she was upset
-- she'd reverted to castmemberspeak. "It's a very good idea. I think
that we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach the group
and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans, laying
out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from some of
them."

I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty
Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements reviews while
Debra's people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different
tactic.

"Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?"

Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal
being drawn into a political discussion.

"Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to
pull together a production schedule -- one that didn't have any review,
just take the idea and run with it -- and then pull it off, how long
would it take you to execute it?"

Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before.

"About five years," he said, almost instantly.

"Five years?" I squawked. "Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the
Hall in a month!"

"Oh, wait," he said. "No review at all?"

"No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do
it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts
around the clock."

He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while
muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of
curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby
fingers while he thought.

"About eight weeks," he said. "Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf
parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability. . ."
He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a
HUD and started making a list.

"Wait," Lil said, alarmed. "How do you get from five years to eight
weeks?"

Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they
were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups -- I knew
that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the
ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned
their work.

Suneep looked sheepish. "Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself
that my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make it
happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be
halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or
approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's back
to the drawing board. . . So I stay at the drawing board for a long time
at the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from
focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of
construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven't
thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.

"It's slow, but it works."

Lil was flustered. "But if you can do a complete revision in eight
weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do _that_ one
in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride
the thing?"

"Because that's how it's done," I said to Lil. "But that's not how it
_has_ to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion."

I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right.
Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization
needed to turn on a dime -- that would be even _more_ Bitchun.

"Lil," I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her.
"We have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds to
come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll give every Mansion nut on
the planet a shot at joining up, then we'll recruit them again to work
at it, to run the telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggest
super-recommenders in the world, and we'll build something better and
faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original
Imagineers' vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun."

Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor,
hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with
me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate.

"It's not up to me, you know," she said at length, still pacing. Dan and
I exchanged wicked grins. She was in.

"I know," I said. But it was, almost -- she was a real opinion-leader in
the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth,
someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a
crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This
plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it,
in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd have plenty of
Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.

"I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans that
Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs --"

I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but
she beat me to it.

"But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm in."

She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss me and tell me everything was
forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.

#

My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I
was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever
audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one
had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris
version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was
just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time.
No one wanted to screw up the legend.

What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney World
any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told,
it had never been my absolute favorite.

But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly bored
stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd found
myself crowd-driven to it.

I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was a
punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling into
the only seat on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.

In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack player,
a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy,
unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderately
successful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with
software agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was
fabulously wealthy: he'd never raised a cent of financing for his
company, and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub
full of money. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd
pilgrim off to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the
monkey-cards and calculate the odds and Beat The House.

Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut,
he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding
out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating
The House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice
every time the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a
deckfull of face cards.

Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got
his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of
least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging
the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare -- moving with
precision and grace and, above all, _expedience_.

On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground,
pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over
to the Main Gate.

Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing
queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one,
beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest
wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks
and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd
have been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less
a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully
examined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything,
their burdens.

You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate the
complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other
means -- if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the
unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or
marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of
as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and
come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the
flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting
down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a
piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.

No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a
person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one
description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-
grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to
watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do
they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease
of access? Someone who's given that much consideration to their gear is
likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces
they'll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready
for fastest-possible processing.

This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs
who pack _everything_ because they lack the organizational smarts to
figure out what they should pack -- they're just as apt to be burdened
with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of
that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling
this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.

I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue
that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced
nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I
could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World,
and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates.

Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents had
brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first
inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone's
consciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle
to rejig an economy that had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity
and death. My memories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida
climate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened
moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama.

I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the richness
of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week there
stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, I
knew, I'd come to live there.

The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where
everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, grounding
myself, communing with all the people I'd been.

That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the short
lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity. I'd
take high ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do a
visual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents
in the flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time.
Truth be told, I probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I
would've spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun
and got more exercise.

The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow Crash
Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route to
Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to the
JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of the
brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghost
town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in a
row, walking on every time.

The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion,
but to tell the truth it was the other way around.

The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air
conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But
on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing
was. There wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop
projector in the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that
the illusion of a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled
through the ballroom were _ghosts_, three-dimensional and ethereal and
phantasmic. The ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the
graveyard were equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously
creepy.

My fourth pass through, I noticed the _detail_, the hostile eyes worked
into the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, the
chandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to "Grim
Grinning Ghosts," the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether
in sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the
spritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.

It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, this
time noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious
chills that blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their
presence felt. By the time I debarked for the fifth time, I was
whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a mixed-up tempo.

That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up a
discarded ice-cream wrapper -- I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking up
trash that day, seen it so frequently that I'd started doing it myself.
She grinned slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-
disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased
with myself for having so completely _experienced_ a really fine hunk of
art.

I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the
Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly
entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.

"That's really, really Bitchun," I said to her, admiring the titanic
mountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her.

She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembers
of her generation can't help but be friendly. She compromised between
ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me,
thumped through a zombie's curtsey, and moaned "Thank you -- we _do_ try
to keep it _spirited_."

I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute she
was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's uniform and
her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed and
happy about everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch her
cheeks -- either set.

The moment was on me, and so I said, "When do they let you ghouls off?
I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary."

Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for a
couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process and
losing my nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could possibly
have to say to each other across a century-wide gap.

While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, the
reverse is indeed true. But it's also true -- and I never told her this
-- that the thing I love best about the Mansion is:

It's where I met her.

#

Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for the
telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in a
totally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe
it. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-time
could be.

I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-
and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down.

She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking among
the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and she
didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would come from having
outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc.

Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around -- it was a skill I'd never
really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I think
that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a
peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was
smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in
short words for mouth-breathers who just didn't get it.

The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly a
genius. Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from Beating
The Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass -- the enemy of
expedience.

I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lil
made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'd
assumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining
up, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay
much attention to a newcomer like me.

Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talking
me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work.
And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the
others I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them and
couldn't help but treat them as individuals.

In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with
Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world.
The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy
but not much friendliness.

I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they
were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy
world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.

Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address
lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe,
spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of
course, their Whuffie.

"That's weird," I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was
using -- my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up and
down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but
I'd never gotten 'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgency
when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the
Mansion always took precedence.

"Huh?" he said.

I tapped the display. "See these?" It was a fan-site, displaying a
collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion,
part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades,
to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd used
those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.

"Those are terrific," Dan said. "That guy must be a total _fiend_." The
meshes' author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated every
ghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for
full motion. Where a "normal" fan-artist might've used a standard human
kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written his
own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral
fluidity that was utterly unhuman.

"Who's the author?" Dan asked. "Do we have him on our list yet?"

I scrolled down to display the credits. "I'll be damned," Dan breathed.

The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs a
week before my assassination.

"What do you think it means?" I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas
on the subject myself.

"Tim's a Mansion nut," Dan said. "I knew that."

"You knew?"

He looked a little defensive. "Sure. I told you, back when you had me
hanging out with Debra's gang."

Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had been
his suggestion. Too much to think about.

"But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruit
him? Or is he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to take over the
Mansion?"

Dan shook his head. "I'm not even sure that she wants to take over the
Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as
fast and as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully.
She's acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great idea for
Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk about the
Mansion."

"Of course you didn't. She's cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall
of Presidents?"

Dan fumbled. "Not really. . . I mean, not in so many words, but --"

"But nothing," I said. "She's after the Mansion, she's after the Magic
Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it, and I'm
the only one who seems to have noticed."

#

I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting.
Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken to
sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it.

I'd started it, of course. "We're going to get killed if we don't get
off our asses and start the rehab," I said, slamming myself down on the
sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and
unreason in my voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not
being able to check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late
at night to call anyone and do anything about it. By the morning, I'd
have forgotten again.

From the kitchen, Lil barked back, "I'm doing what I can, Jules. If
you've got a better way, I'd love to hear about it."

"Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm ready
to _go_. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep
telling me they're not. When will they be?"

"Jesus, you're a nag."

"I wouldn't nag if you'd only fucking make it happen. What are you doing
all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs
on the Great Titanic Adventure?"

"I'm working my fucking _ass_ off. I've spoken to every goddamn one of
them at least twice this week about it."

"Sure," I hollered at the kitchen. "Sure you have."

"Don't take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs."

She waited.

"Well? Check them!"

"I'll check them later," I said, dreading where this was going.

"Oh, no you _don't_," she said, stalking into the room, fuming. "You
can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence." She
planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone
pale and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her
collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I'd
given her on a day-trip to Nassau.

"Well?" she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck.

"I can't," I admitted, not meeting her eyes.

"Yes you can -- here, I'll dump it to your public directory."

Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me
on her network. "What's going on?"

So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.

"Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor? I mean, it's been _weeks_.
I'll call him right now."

"Forget it," I said. "I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him out
of bed."

But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much to
do, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from
a public terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came
online a couple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the
Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered
the house, to printing out her annotations to my designs and leaving
them on my favorite chair -- to living like the cavemen of the
information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.

Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it -- I
obsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I'd brought home all day, every
day, crunching plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach me
had to haul ass out to the house, and _speak_ to me.

I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was my
turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn't keep
him up nights. He and Lil were working a full-time campaign to recruit
the ad-hoc to our cause, and I started to feel like we were finally in
harmony, about to reach our goal.

I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst into
the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my original
plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasing
the number of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasing
throughput.

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