Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (epub e ink reader .TXT) š
- Author: Cory Doctorow
Book online Ā«Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (epub e ink reader .TXT) šĀ». Author Cory Doctorow
āLetās run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night and at lunchtimeāwith things the way they are, we canāt afford to lose an afternoonās work, much less a weekās.ā
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. āYou can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but donāt tell me how to live my life, okay?ā
āCome on, Lilāit only takes a minute, and itād make me feel a lot better. Please?ā I hated the whine in my voice.
āNo, Julius. No. Letās go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the Mansionāsome collectible stuff, maybe.ā
āFor Christās sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?ā
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 sheād had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadnāt told her that I was offline yetāit just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises she was coping with.
Besides, Iād been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good nightās 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 Iād 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.
āWhy didnāt you wake me up last night? Iām one big ache from sleeping on the couch,ā 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.
āYou wouldnāt get up,ā I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.
āAnd why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for meāthe merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping.ā
āCanāt.ā I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.
āReally?ā she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Danās plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.
āYes. Really. Itās your shiftāfucking work it or call in sick.ā
Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. āWhatās wrong, honey?ā she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall.
āJust leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. Iāve got real work to doāin case you havenāt noticed, Debraās about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For Godās sake, Lil, donāt you ever get fucking angry about anything? Donāt you have any goddamned passion?ā
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. Sheād been just 19āapparent and realāand had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember.
Her parentsāTom and Ritaāon 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 whoād 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 daughterās 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 shareholdersā lackeysāwho worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the management decisionsāput 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.
āBut we knew the shareholders wouldnāt give in as easy as that,ā Lilās mother said, sipping her lemonade. āWe 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. Weād prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouring in.ā She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in repose were Lilās 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.
āI spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leotaās 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"āshe chucked her husband on the shoulderā"heād gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldnāt budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history.ā
Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. āJesus, Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it.ā
Tom patted her arm. āLil, youāre an adultāif you canāt stomach hearing about your parentsā courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. But you donāt get to dictate the topic of conversation.ā
Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head at Lilās departing backside. āThereās not much fire in that generation,ā she said. āNot a lot of passion. Itās our faultāwe thought that Disney World would be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was, but ā¦ā She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture Iād come to know in Lil, by and by. āI guess there arenāt enough challenges for them these days. Theyāre too cooperative.ā She laughed and her husband took her hand.
āWe sound like our parents,ā Tom said. āāWhen we were growing up, we didnāt have any of this newfangled life-extension stuffāwe took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!āā 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. āWeāre just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists, I guess.ā
Lil called over from a nearby conversation: āAre they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why donāt you come over here and have a smoke?ā I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack pipe.
āWhatās the use?ā Lilās mother sighed.
āOh, I donāt know that itās as bad as all that,ā 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. āTheyāre passionate about maintaining the Park, thatās 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 couldnāt have been more than 18. I think that they donāt have the passion for creating Bitchunry that we haveāthey donāt need itābut theyāve got plenty of drive to maintain it.ā
Lilās mother gave me a long, considering look that I didnāt know what to make of. I couldnāt tell if I had offended her or what.
āI mean, you canāt be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didnāt we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldnāt have to?ā
āFunny you should say that,ā Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. āJust yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talkingāā he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who noddedā"about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years.ā
I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldnāt be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it cameāI was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important.
āReally? Deadheading.ā 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. Heād 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 weād 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 cowās milk and thereād been a thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name Iād long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh Iād remember forever. And it wasnāt 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 girlās laugh.
āHave you talked to Lil about it?ā
Rita shook her head. āItās just a thought, really. We donāt want to worry her. Sheās not good with hard decisionsāitās her generation.ā
They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than theyād 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,
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