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
I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about itāIād gotten through to him.
āJules, this isnāt one of your better ideas.ā My chest tightened, and he patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when he was telling me that I was an idiot. āEven if Debra was behind your assassinationāand thatās not a certainty, we both know that. Even if thatās the case, weāve got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing with her head to head, thatās smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over the Hallāeven the Pirates, thatād really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going to do you any good. Youāve got lots of other options.ā
āBut none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn balls.ā
We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heard Danās door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind.
We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. Iād picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. Iād made a point of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be discrepant.
Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the wall, in the cameraās blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags theyād once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the propertyās outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster.
I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. āIf they hadnāt killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldnāt be flexible enough to fit in,ā I hissed at Dan. āIronic, huh?ā
I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way under the Hall of Presidents.
My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didnāt occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmerās.
How was I going to reach into my pockets?
Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back pants-pocket, when I couldnāt even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. Iād gotten the germ of the idea during Timās first demo, when Iād seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.
āDan,ā I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tubeās walls.
āYeah?ā he said. Heād been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence.
āCan you reach my back pocket?ā
āOh, shit,ā he said.
āGoddamn it,ā I said, ākeep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it or not?ā
I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tubeās floor and his hand was pawing around my ass.
āI can reach it,ā he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasnāt too happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn.
He fumbled the gunāa narrow cylinder as long as my palmāout of my pocket. āNow what?ā he said.
āCan you pass it up?ā I asked.
Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my glutes. āI canāt get any further,ā he said.
āFine,ā I said. āYouāll have to fire it, then.ā I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction.
āAw, Jules,ā he said.
āA simple yes or no, Dan. Thatās all I want to hear from you.ā I was boiling with angerāat myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing.
āFine,ā he said.
āGood. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.ā
I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something Iād confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when theyād had a brief vogue.
āHang on to it,ā I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch, near the parking lot, where Iād stashed an identical change of clothes for both of us.
We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debraās ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.
Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh electronics.
We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, dressed in Lincolnās coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst.
Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and they started the demo.
Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.
Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.
Nothing.
I was offline.
Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lilās hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.
Lil was upsetāeven through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes.
āWhy didnāt you tell me?ā she said, after a hard momentās staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river.
āTell you?ā I said, dumbly.
āTheyāre really good. Theyāre better than good. Theyāre better than us. Oh, God.ā
Offline, I couldnāt find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. āI donāt think so. I donāt think theyāve got soul, I donāt think theyāve got history, I donāt think theyāve got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneysāthey visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.ā Iām offline, and theyāre notāwhat the hell happened?
āItāll be okay, Lil. Thereās nothing in that place thatās better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know thatāyouāve spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing weāve been maintaining for all these years?ā
She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. āSorry,ā she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. āSorryāitās just shocking. Maybe youāre right. And even if youāre notāhey, thatās the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted.
āOh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,ā she said. āLetās go congratulate them.ā
As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having improved her mood without artificial assistance.
Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall, where Debraās ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth.
She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a torch to the bowl.
āThanks,ā she said, laconically. āIt was a team effort.ā She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads together.
Lil said, āWhatās your timeline, then?ā
Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they werenāt floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper meshāa Faraday cage. Thatās why the HERF gun hadnāt done anything; thatās why theyād been so casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of Debraās ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Floridaāmyself includedācame up with.
For instance, I didnāt think there was a single castmember in the Park outside of Debās clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once Iād made that leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged another oneāand another, and another. Whatever they could get away with.
Debraās spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. āWhen was the last time you backed up?ā I asked her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us.
āYesterday,ā she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an
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