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
Lil didnāt deal well with her parentsā decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.
For Godās sake, Lil, donāt you ever get fucking angry about anything? Donāt 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.
When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had not come back to the house. If sheād tried to call, she wouldāve gotten my voicemailāI had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadnāt been trying to reach me at all.
Iād 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.
āJesus,ā 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.
āHey, Dan. Howās it goinā?ā
He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weird reversal of roles that weād 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 whoād 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!
āNow, what do you know about that?ā I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie.
āWhat?ā he said.
I called his cochlea. āMy systems are back online,ā I subvocalized.
He started. āYou were offline?ā
I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. āI was, but Iām not now.ā I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the worldāor at least Debra.
āLet me take a shower, then letās get to the Imagineering labs. Iāve got a pretty kickass idea.ā
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 Iād 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.
āBack in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,ā I explained, āWalt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, heād leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didnāt last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasnāt too comfortable for long shifts.ā
Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remainedātending bar, mopping toiletsācommanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.
āBut that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. Youād get a slightly different show every time. Itās like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. Theyāve each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics arenāt so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.ā
āYouāre going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?ā 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. āNo,ā I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. āNot at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operatorsātelecontrollers, working with waldoes? Weāll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them ā¦ Weāll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace āem 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 ā¦ Weāll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shiftsāll be based on popular vote. In effect, weāll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansionās throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.ā
āThatās pretty good,ā Dan said. āVery Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but youāll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the worldāā
āAnd those are the very fans Debraāll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?ā
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 anyoneāshirts, 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. āMake a hardcopy,ā I hissed.
Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to roll out of a printer in the labās 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. Sheād been thinking just the way I hadāsouvenirs 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 behaviorsāthe raven cawed, Mme. Leotaās head incanted, the singing busts sang. Sheād worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this yearās stylish lines.
It was good merch, is what Iām trying to say. In my mindās eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world āround, Mme. Leotaās gift cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area ā¦
Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.
āPassionate enough for you?ā 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, Iād started the fight.
āThis is fucking fantastic, Lil,ā I said. Her look didnāt soften. āReally choice stuff. I had a great ideaāā 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.
āThis isnāt easy,ā she said, finally. Suneep, whoād been politely pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.
āI know that,ā I said. The flush burned hotter. āBut thatās the pointāwhat Debra does isnāt easy either. Itās risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc betterāit made them sharper.ā Sharper than us, thatās for sure. āThey can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.ā
Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The wordsād just popped out, but I saw that Iād been rightāweād have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.
āI understand what youāre saying,ā Lil said. I could tell she was upsetāsheād reverted to castmemberspeak. āItās 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.ā
I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, weād be holding formal requirements reviews while Debraās people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic.
āSuneep, youāve been involved in some rehabs, right?ā
Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being drawn into a political discussion.
āOkay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull together a production scheduleāone that didnāt have any review, just take the idea and run with itāand then pull it off, how long would it take you to execute it?ā
Lil smiled primly. Sheād dealt with Imagineering before.
āAbout five years,ā he said, almost instantly.
āFive years?ā I squawked. āWhy five years? Debraās people overhauled the Hall in a month!ā
āOh, wait,ā he said. āNo review at all?ā
āNo 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.ā
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.
āAbout eight weeks,ā he said. āBarring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability ā¦ā He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUD and started making a list.
āWait,ā Lil said, alarmed. āHow do you get from five years to eight weeks?ā
Now it was my turn to smirk. Iād seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockupsāI 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. āWell, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings wonāt fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans arenāt perfect. Sometimes, Iāll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new
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