Chapter 4

One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:

1. That Debra’s people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,

2. That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion,

3. That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.

Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the Hall of Presidents, Debra’s people working with effortless cooperation born of the adversity they’d faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired activity in her wake.

It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army.

Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride.

Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory, and, gingerly, I executed it.

God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump.

“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was...” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears.

Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne. “You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat.

Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and expense that had given us the Disney rides -- rides that had entertained the world for two centuries and more -- could never compete head to head with what they were working on.

My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn’t they do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere -- they could distribute it online and people could access it from their living rooms!

But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie -- they’d make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan.

I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.

I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.

“They did it -- they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do next easier.

“Oh, Jesus. They didn’t kill you -- they offered their backups, remember? They couldn’t have done it.”

“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It’s all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.”

Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don’t. It’s not the first time we’ve disagreed. So now what?”

“Now we save the Mansion,” I said. “Now we fight back.”

“Oh, shit,” Dan said.

I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.

My opportunity came later that week. Debra’s ad-hocs were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra’s people came up with would have to answer their longing.

“I’m going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.

“I’m not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It’s better that she doesn’t know -- plausible deniability.”

“And me?” he said. “Don’t I need plausible deniability?”

“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. You’re an outsider. You can make the case that you were working on your own -- gone rogue.” I knew it wasn’t fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirty scheme, he’d have to start over again. I knew it wasn’t fair, but I didn’t care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It’s good versus evil, Dan. You don’t want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We’re physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra’s people are building -- it’s hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It’s not an experience, it’s brainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with myself as much as with him.

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 it -- I’d gotten through to him.

“Jules, this isn’t one of your better ideas.” 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. “Even if Debra was behind your assassination -- and that’s not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that’s the case, we’ve got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing with her head to head, that’s smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over the Hall -- even the Pirates, that’d 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. You’ve got lots of other options.”

“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn balls.”

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 Dan’s 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. I’d 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. I’d 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 camera’s 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 they’d once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the property’s 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. “If they hadn’t killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn’t be flexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?”

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 didn’t occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer’s.

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 couldn’t 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. I’d gotten the germ of the idea during Tim’s first demo, when I’d seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.

“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube’s walls.

“Yeah?” he said. He’d been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence.

“Can you reach my back pocket?”

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it or not?”

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 tube’s floor and his hand was pawing around my ass.

“I can reach it,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t 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 gun -- a narrow cylinder as long as my palm -- out of my pocket. “Now what?” he said.

“Can you pass it up?” I asked.

Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my glutes. “I can’t get any further,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. “You’ll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction.

“Aw, Jules,” he said.

“A simple yes or no, Dan. That’s all I want to hear from you.” I was boiling with anger -- at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing.

“Fine,” he said.

“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.”

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 I’d confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they’d had a brief vogue.

“Hang on to it,” 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 I’d stashed an identical change of clothes for both of us.

We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra’s 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 Lincoln’s 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 Lil’s hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.

Lil was upset -- even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment’s staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river.

“Tell you?” I said, dumbly.

“They’re really good. They’re better than good. They’re better than us. Oh, God.”

Offline, I couldn’t find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I don’t think so. I don’t think they’ve got soul, I don’t think they’ve got history, I don’t think they’ve got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys -- they visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I’m offline, and they’re not -- what the hell happened?

“It’ll be okay, Lil. There’s nothing in that place that’s better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know that -- you’ve 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 we’ve been maintaining for all these years?”

She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,” she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry -- it’s just shocking. Maybe you’re right. And even if you’re not -- hey, that’s the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted.