Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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

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"Well, that's fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it's bad
news. The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a
matter of time before it does some serious damage."

"Waaagh?" I asked. I meant to say, _All right, but what's wrong with my
mouth?_

The doc put a finger to my lips. "Don't try. The interface has locked
up, and it's taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. In
time, it'll probably shut down, but for now, there's no point. That's
why we've got you strapped down -- you were thrashing pretty hard when
they brought you in, and we didn't want you to hurt yourself."

_Probably shut down_? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. I
started shaking.

The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed a
transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's sedative
oozed into my bloodstream.

"There, there," he said. "It's nothing permanent. We can grow you a new
clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that backup
is a few months old. If we'd caught it earlier, we may've been able to
salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed
to date. . . Well, there just wouldn't be any point."

My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months -- lose it all, never
happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shameful
attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. My plans
for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every moment flensed away.

I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one who
understood how it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the
ad-hocs would surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even
leave it half-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present
a soft belly for Debra to savage.

I wouldn't be restoring from backup.

#

I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shut
itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding
strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the
second happened without waking me from deep unconsciousness.

When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had a
day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newly
rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head.

"Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've drawn up the consent
forms for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two.
In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore's
been completed, we'll retire this body for you and we'll be all finished
up."

Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.

"No," I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my
control!

"Oh, really now." The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation
slip through. "There's nothing else for it. If you'd come to me when it
all started, well, we might've had other options. You've got no one to
blame but yourself."

"No," I repeated. "Not now. I won't sign."

Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but the
restraints and his grip held me fast. "You've got to do it, Julius. It's
for the best," he said.

"I'm not going to let you kill me," I said, through clenched teeth. His
fingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond the
normal call of duty.

"No one's killing you, son," the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew
how old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. "It's just the opposite:
we're saving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. The
seizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don't want
that."

I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a crazy person. _No,
I sure don't_. "I don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't
do it now." I swallowed. "Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks."

#

The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of the room
and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge work as
he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait.

No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have been
ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn't know it
until urgent necessity made the discovery for me.

When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly
recognized: a HERF gun.

Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on the Hall of Presidents. This
one was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a
surgical tool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. "You know what this
is," he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, _he knows, he
knows, the Hall of Presidents_. But he didn't know. That episode was
locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup.

"I know," I said.

"This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the
interface's shielding and fuse it. It probably won't turn you into a
vegetable. That's the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you
from your last backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it."
He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to
disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun
Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted the medical profession:
why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a backup, and
refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a
cold.

I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the
utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineering
compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: using
the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood. They had
to shield me before they pulled the trigger.

The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He sealed
the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He pulled a heavy apron and
helmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door.

"Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger.
I'll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on
the floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I
have no desire to find out I'm wrong."

He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, dense
with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its
cone.

I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found the
trigger-stud.

I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock the interface
forever, paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that
I would never be able to pull the trigger. The doc must've known, too --
this was his way of convincing me to let him do that restore.

I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was "Waaagh!"

The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, and
there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.

I had no more interface.

#

The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the gurney,
rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool and pointed
it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitry in
it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I was no more advanced
than nature had made me.

The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I'd
thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab
under my own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning from the
inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure.

Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall.
The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching the
doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan's old line
of work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the
doc's arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My
old pal, the action hero.

Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physical
state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. I
didn't have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep.

"I'm taking you home," he said. "We'll fight Debra off tomorrow."

"Sure," I said, and boarded the waiting tram.

But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary,
and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stood awkwardly
as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, as I collapsed
into the bed that was mine now.

With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we'd
shared.

I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and added
a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my "personality
swings." In seconds, I was asleep.

========= CHAPTER 7 =========

The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehab
on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around the
facade, though no real work would be done on it -- we wanted the
appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea.

I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling my
calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as
the Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down
for a full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any unnecessary words,
standing side by side without ever looking into one another's eyes. I
couldn't really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and
besides we had our hands full directing disappointed guests away from
the Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of
Presidents.

We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the
Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: "Hey! Anyone hear
anything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on the
way to the new H of P's and it looks like some big stuff's afoot --
scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hope
they're not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new H of P's
-- very Bitchun."

"Right," I said. "Who's the author, and is he on the list?"

Dan cogitated a moment. "_She_ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list.
Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership."

"Call her," I said.

This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume,
and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools
and get them to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead
pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang would have a batch of
telepresence robots up and running, and we'd move to them, get them
wandering the queue area, interacting with curious guests. The new
Mansion would be open for business in 48 hours, albeit in stripped-down
fashion. The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a visual draw that
would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall of Presidents over for
a curious peek or two. Buzz city.

I'm a pretty smart guy.

#

Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the
Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the
job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew
had performed. If I'd had more time, I would've run a deep background
check on every one of the names on my list, but that would've taken
months.

Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to my
handicap, before coming to the point. "We read your post about the
Mansion's rehab. You're the first one to notice it, and we wondered if
you'd be interested in coming by to find out a little more about our
plans."

Dan winced. "She's a screamer," he whispered.

Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fans
we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done that a dozen
times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn't seem to
get lathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the
hickey just visible under Dan's collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on
my bicep was seeing to that -- doctor's orders.

"Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members, male,
in Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us."

She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was
apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-
control cowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and
double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set, including the girl
who'd shot me.

But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She
wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections
to be the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and
slightly squashed.

I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but without
jostling anyone. "Kim," I called as she drew near. "Over here."

She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-
bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn't brush
against a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short and
bounced a little. "Hi, I'm Kim!" she said, pumping my arm with the
peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. "Julius," I said, then waited
while she repeated the process with Dan.

"So," she said, "what's the deal?"

I took her hand. "Kim, we've got a job for you, if you're interested."

She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. "I'll take it!" she said.

I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh,
but underneath it was relief. "I think I'd better explain it to you
first," I said.

"Explain away!" she said, and gave my hand another squeeze.

I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehab
plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it
all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide.
It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, "Are you recording this?"

Kim blushed. "I hope that's okay! I'm starting a new Mansion scrapbook.
I have one for every ride in the Park, but this one's gonna be a world-
beater!"

Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc business
was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred to me that the
new castmembers we brought in would want to record every little detail
and push it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector.

"I can switch it off," Kim said. She looked worried, and I really
started to grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were
recruiting, how much of a privilege we were offering them.

"Leave it rolling," I said. "Let's show the world how it's done."

We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-naked by
the time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation
of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we'd
stashed at costuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting
maid's uniform with an oversized toolbelt.

We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-based
cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new
spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe that we'd have to tear
her away when the time came.

We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.

#

By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new
castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing
"Grim Grinning Ghosts" and generally having a high old time.

"This'll do," I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and
the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my
bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through my
mood. I needed to get offstage.

Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered in
my ear, "This was a great idea, Julius. Really."

We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride.
Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first generation of
mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a
prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy enough -- just off-
the-shelf stuff, really -- but the costumes and kinematics routines were
something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's gang of
hypercreative super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little,
as did being out of the public eye.

Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packs
rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative
knots in the corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were
displaying. In the middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was
barely restraining an urge to shout Yippee! He was clearly in his
element.

He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw them
wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. "What wonderful
flumgubbery!" he shouted, over the noise.

"Sure is," I agreed. "How's the prototype coming?"

Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the
air. "In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto something else,
a kinematics routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to
stay aloft -- silent and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's
coming tremendously. Take a look!" He pointed a finger at me and,
presumably, squirted some data my way.

"I'm offline," I reminded him gently.

He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his face,
and gave me an apologetic wave. "Of course, of course. Here." He
unrolled an LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the
screen, rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically
consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary, and
their faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized that
they'd caricatured various Imagineers.

"Ah! You noticed," Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. "A very good
joke, yes?"

"This is terrific," I said, carefully. "But I really need some robots up
and running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?"
Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans like
Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than that.

Suneep looked disappointed. "Of course. We discussed it. I don't like to
stop my people when they have good ideas, but there's a time and a
place. I'll put them on it right away. Leave it to me."

Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil. Of
course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out for Dan's
hand, saw me, and changed her mind.

"Hi, guys," she said, with studied casualness.

"Oh, hello!" said Suneep. He fired his finger at her -- the flying
ghosts, I imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she nodded
exhaustedly at him.

"Very good," she said. "I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor
crews are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics dismantled,
and they're taking down the glass in the Ballroom now." The Ballroom
ghost effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished
glass that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been built
around it -- it was too big to take out in one piece. "They say it'll be
a couple days before they've got it cut up and ready to remove."

A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of the
Imagineers rushing in to fill it.

"You must be exhausted," Dan said, at length.

"Goddamn right," I said, at the same moment that Lil said, "I guess I
am."

We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's and my shoulders
and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of industrial lubricant,
ozone, and fatigue poisons.

"You two should go home and give each other a massage," he said. "You've
earned some rest."

Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out from
under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to the
Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of sleep.

#

I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I took a
surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of riding
through the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors.

As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for
_real_ weather, the kind of climate I'd grown up with in Toronto. It was
October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it
was May. I stopped and leaned on a bench for a moment and closed my
eyes. Unbidden, and with the clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in
Toronto, clothed in its autumn colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of
evergreen and earthy brown. God, I needed a vacation.

I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the Hall
of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one that
stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked air
between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six full houses
waiting here -- easily an hour's wait. The Hall _never_ drew crowds like
this. Debra was working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she
caught my eye and snapped a nod at me.

I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new recruits
had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their way through
"Grim Grinning Ghosts," with a new call-and-response structure. A small
audience participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding.

"Well, at least that's going right," I muttered to myself. And it was,
except that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from the
sidelines, and the looks weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a
good measure of a ride's popularity, but they're kind of a pain in the
ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge souvenirs and pester you
with smarmy, show-off questions. After a while, even the cheeriest
castmember starts to lose patience, develop an automatic distaste for
them.

The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had been
railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it, and
were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding megafans.
If I'd been there when it all started -- instead of sleeping! -- I
may've been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if it
was too late.

Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into my
costume and went back onstage. I joined the call-and-response
enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join
in, reluctantly or otherwise.

By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of ad-hocs
were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to an
offstage break-room.

#

Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me that
it would be another week before I could have even five production units.
Though he didn't say it, I got the sense that his guys were out of
control, so excited by the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were
running wild. Suneep himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I
didn't press it.

Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were multiplying. I
was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab from a terminal I'd
had installed in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues were
fielding millions of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as
envious fans around the world logged in to watch their progress on the
scaffolding.

That was all according to plan. What wasn't according to plan was that
the new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitations
to their net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas and
guest-beds, and present themselves to me for active duty.

The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Her
gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the middle
distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless missive about
the magic of working in the Mansion. "Hey, there," I said. "Have you got
a minute to meet with me?"

She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a bright
smile.

"Hi, Julius!" she said. "Sure!"

"Why don't you change into civvies, we'll take a walk through the Park
and talk?"

Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been quite firm about her
turning it in to the laundry every night instead of wearing it home.

Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her cowl.
We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked through the
late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued deep and thick
for Snow White, Dumbo and Peter Pan.

"How're you liking it here?" I asked.

Kim gave a little bounce. "Oh, Julius, it's the best time of my life,
really! A dream come true. I'm meeting so many interesting people, and
I'm really feeling creative. I can't wait to try out the telepresence
rigs, too."

"Well, I'm really pleased with what you and your friends are up to here.
You're working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs you've
been working up, too."

She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of any
number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing in front
of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She looked serious.

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