Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

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.

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.