Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public chatter in
the room sprang up on my HUD.

_And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you._

_And then what?_

_I'm going to bang you till you limp. _

_Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl._

My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters.
Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who was
flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared.

"What's going on, Dan?" I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my chest,
but I felt calm and detached.

"Jules," he began, then gave up and looked at Lil.

Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their
secret messaging had been discovered.

"Having fun, Lil?" I asked.

Lil shook her head and glared at me. "Just go, Julius. I'll send your
stuff to the hotel."

"You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?"

"This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you to get out of it. I'll see you
at work tomorrow -- we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the
rehab."

It was her house.

"Lil, Julius --" Dan began.

"This is between me and him," Lil said. "Stay out of it."

I dropped my papers -- I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them,
_flump_, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close
the door behind me.

#

Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my
door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of
tequila -- _my_ tequila, brought over from the house that I'd shared
with Lil.

He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I took
the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured.

"It's my fault," he said.

"I'm sure it is," I said.

"We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset. Hadn't
seen you in days, and when she _did_ see you, you freaked her out.
Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting her."

"So you made her," I said.

He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. "I did. It's been a long
time since I. . ."

"You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away,
working."

"Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I'm not much of a
friend to either of you.

"She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you it
was all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid."

We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own.

"I couldn't do that," he said. "I'm worried about you. You haven't been
right, not for months. I don't know what it is, but you should get to a
doctor."

"I don't need a doctor," I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness
and left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. "I need a
friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned."

I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on
the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated.
If he'd stood up, I would've hit him. Dan's good at crises.

"If it's any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon," he said. He
gave me a wry grin. "My Whuffie's doing good. This rehab should take it
up over the top. I'll be ready to go."

That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good friend
Dan, was going to kill himself.

"You're going to do it," I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to
think about it. I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best
friend.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the
peephole. It was Lil.

She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snide
remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.

She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace.

"No," he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at
the Seven Seas Lagoon.

"Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a
couple months," I said. "Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't
it, Lil?"

Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. "I'll
take what I can get," she said.

I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil,
whose loss upset me the most.

Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room.

_I guess I'll take what I can get, too_, I thought.

========= CHAPTER 6 =========

Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan,
I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.

It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even
though there were cures, they weren't pleasant.

I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I was
living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed.

We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravity
sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at
ten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you _bounce_, and
when you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy,
boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.

I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter,
filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity,
deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, and
if you knew how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and start
playing. Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes
varied from terrific to awful, but they were always energetic.

I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I
thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere
playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and
interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn't,
playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting,
naked stranger.

Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouse
runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on a
cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to a
dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it was
really _good_. I'm a sucker for musicians.

We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as
spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into
the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp
who killed her partner.

I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble.
The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud.
She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the
hatch.

I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate to
reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving.

"Hey!" I said. "That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?"

She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit
simultaneously -- not hard, you understand, but playfully. "Honk!" she
said, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning
chub-on.

I chased after her. "Wait," I called as she tumbled through the spoke of
the station towards the gravity.

She had a pianist's body -- re-engineered arms and hands that stretched
for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace,
vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could
on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of
the station, she was gone.

I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went to
the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when
she passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.

This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her before
moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, looking
her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-V
progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk,
teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodled
back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a
smidge of tuneful wit.

She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downy
fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-
controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating
Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.

I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at the
keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a
particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow
bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I
could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch.

When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I
summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmly
untied and floated over to me.

I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd been
staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their
corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back
at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again.

"You'll do," she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the
station.

We didn't sleep.

#

Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband
constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's ascent into
Bitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had
generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a
bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes
that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg
reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn't
prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of
us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and
slipped discs.

I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only
talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do,
and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim
that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-
skinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.

I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle
her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days,
floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior.
She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was
watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone's
benefit.

But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her
eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the
breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the
station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of
rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and
shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we
interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.

You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own,
and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the
game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway
through, I'd lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of
childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the
giggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous
corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazy
pair that's always zipping in and zipping away, like having your party
crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.

When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live with
me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my nose
and my willie and shouted, "YOU'LL _DO_!"

I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories
underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn't
so hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feel
at home while affording her opportunities for mischief.

But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. At
first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was
finally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of
pranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We
gave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her fur
removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as
fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable.

We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony in
low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and she
came out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiled
with a smile that never went beyond her lips.

She went nuts.

She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. She
accused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors'
apartments, wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the
furniture.

She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of our
bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant. I
smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed
her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's office on the
second floor. She'd been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but
it took me that long to face up to it.

The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of saying
that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In other words,
I'd driven her nuts.

You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically trying to
talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn't want to.

She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of lucidity
that she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from a
backup that was made before we came to Toronto.

I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared a
written synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she
read it over the next couple days.

"Julius," she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterranean
apartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately
that the news wouldn't be good.

"Yes?" I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of
coffee.

"I'm going to go back to space, and revert to an older version." She had
a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.

_Oh, shit._ "Great," I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental
inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. "Give me a minute or two,
I'll pack up. I miss space, too."

She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel
eyes. "No. I'm going back to who I was, before I met you."

It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun
and mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed was terrible and
terrifying, but I'd stuck with her out of respect for the person she'd
been.

Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she met me.
She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revert
to a saved version.

Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.

I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in the
sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his
hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano,
and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't a shred of recognition
in them. She'd never met me.

I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning to
Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a
new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again -- especially not to
Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy
exes.

#

If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone.
It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends,
sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend's arms.

I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the rehab
past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight.

I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail station
in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and
cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried to
make myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept
turning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform
to keep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.

The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in
Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned into a road-pizza
by the still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the
Liberty Square crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf,
so they had given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida
sun streamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-
filled shafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-
drums and the spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a
low-key ambient buzz from two of the Park's oldest rides.

There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almost
all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the
room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before the
meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was too small for
the _de rigeur_ ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand
at a podium and command a smidge of respect.

"Hi there!" she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present
around her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at
putting on a brave face no matter what the ache.

The ad-hocs roared back a collective, "Hi, Lil!" and laughed at their
own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the Magic
Kingdom.

"Everybody knows why we're here, right?" Lil said, with a self-
deprecating smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. "Does
anyone have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start executing
right away."

A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in the
air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. "When you say 'right away,' do you
mean --"

I cut in. "Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week
production schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be
finished."

The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I shrugged.
Politics was not my game.

Lil said, "Don, we're trying something new here, a really streamlined
process. The good part is, the process is _short_. In a couple months,
we'll know if it's working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it
around in a couple months, too. That's why we're not spending as much
time planning as we usually do. It won't take five years for the idea to
prove out, so the risks are lower."

Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly demeanor
said, "I'm all for moving fast -- Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always
been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new people you propose
to recruit -- won't having more people slow us down when it comes to
making new decisions?"

_No_, I thought sourly, _because the people I'm bringing in aren't
addicted to meetings_.

Lil nodded. "That's a good point, Lisa. The offer we're making to the
telepresence players is probationary -- they don't get to vote until
after we've agreed that the rehab is a success."

Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, self-
important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blew his
spiel about half the time. "Lillian," he said, smiling sadly at her, "I
think you're really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all
of us, and so do the guests. It's a piece of history, and we're its
custodians, not its masters. Changing it like this, well. . ." he shook
his head. "It's not good stewardship. If the guests wanted to walk
through a funhouse with guys jumping out of the shadows saying 'booga-
booga,' they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The
Mansion's better than that. I can't be a part of this plan."

I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd delivered essentially
the same polemic a thousand times -- in reference to Debra's work -- and
hearing it from this jerk in reference to _mine_ made me go all hot and
red inside.

"Look," I said. "If we don't do this, if we don't change things, they'll
get changed _for_ us. By someone else. The question, _Dave_, is whether
a responsible custodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him,
or whether he does everything he can to make sure that he's still around
to ensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship
isn't sticking your head in the sand."

I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the crowd was getting
darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until the
meeting was done, no matter what the provocation.

Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it looked
like the objections would continue all afternoon and all night and all
the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all at the
same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervous
smoothing of her hair over her ears.

Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collected
in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group's
eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they
rolled in. I was offline and unable to vote or watch.

At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her hands
behind her back.

"All right then," she said, over the crowd's buzz. "Let's get to work."

I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's eyes, a meaningful
glance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My vision washed
over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. I took two
lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth to say something
horrible, and what came out was "Waaagh." My right side went numb and my
leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to the floor.

The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as I
tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black.

#

I wasn't nuts after all.

The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and white and
decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors' whites with an
outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that
reminded me to get a check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring
my hands up to shield my eyes from the over bright light and the over-
cheerful signage, and discovered that I couldn't move my arms. Further
investigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, in
full-on four-point restraint.

"Waaagh," I said again.

Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a serious-
looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full of
crow'sfeet and smile-lines.

"Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete," the doctor said, in a kindly
voice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with
castmember bullshit, I found his schtick comforting.

I slumped back against the palette while the doc shone lights in my eyes
and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence,
too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech. The
doc would tell me what was going on when he was ready.

"Does he need to be tied up still?" Dan asked, and I shook my head
urgently. Being tied up wasn't my idea of a good time.

The doc smiled kindly. "I think it's for the best, for now. Don't worry,
Julius, we'll have you up and about soon enough."

Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him out of
the room. He took my hand instead.

My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until
it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at
the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my
restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately
scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just
hoped my nuts didn't start itching anytime soon.

Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused the
head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye.

"Well, now," he said, stroking his chin. "Julius, you've got a problem.
Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than a
month. It sure would've been better if you'd come in to see me when it
started up.

"But you didn't, and things got worse." He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's
recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! "It's good advice, son, but
what's done is done. You were restored from a backup about eight weeks
ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't be sure, but my theory is that
the brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a material
defect. It's been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The
shut-downs are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing
the kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface
senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic mode,
attempts to fix itself and come back online.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12