Chapter 5

When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had not come back to the house. If she’d tried to call, she would’ve gotten my voicemail -- I had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn’t been trying to reach me at all.

I’d 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.

“Jesus,” 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.

“Hey, Dan. How’s it goin’?”

He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weird reversal of roles that we’d 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 who’d 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!

“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie.

“What?” he said.

I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized.

He started. “You were offline?”

I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. “I was, but I’m not now.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the world -- or at least Debra.

“Let me take a shower, then let’s get to the Imagineering labs. I’ve got a pretty kickass idea.”

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 I’d 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.

“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,” I explained, “Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, he’d leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn’t last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn’t too comfortable for long shifts.”

Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained -- tending bar, mopping toilets -- commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.

“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. You’d get a slightly different show every time. It’s like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They’ve each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren’t so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.”

“You’re going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” 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. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white- faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators -- telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We’ll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them ... We’ll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace ‘em 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 ... We’ll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts’ll be based on popular vote. In effect, we’ll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion’s throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.”

“That’s pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but you’ll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world --”

“And those are the very fans Debra’ll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”

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 anyone -- shirts, 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. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed.

Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to roll out of a printer in the lab’s 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. She’d been thinking just the way I had -- souvenirs 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 behaviors -- the raven cawed, Mme. Leota’s head incanted, the singing busts sang. She’d worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year’s stylish lines.

It was good merch, is what I’m trying to say. In my mind’s eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world ‘round, Mme. Leota’s gift cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area...

Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.

“Passionate enough for you?” 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, I’d started the fight.

“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn’t soften. “Really choice stuff. I had a great idea --” 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.

“This isn’t easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who’d been politely pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.

“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that’s the point -- what Debra does isn’t easy either. It’s risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc better -- it made them sharper.” Sharper than us, that’s for sure. “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.”

Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words’d just popped out, but I saw that I’d been right -- we’d have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset -- she’d reverted to castmemberspeak. “It’s 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.”

I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we’d be holding formal requirements reviews while Debra’s people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic.

“Suneep, you’ve been involved in some rehabs, right?”

Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being drawn into a political discussion.

“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull together a production schedule -- one that didn’t have any review, just take the idea and run with it -- and then pull it off, how long would it take you to execute it?”

Lil smiled primly. She’d dealt with Imagineering before.

“About five years,” he said, almost instantly.

“Five years?” I squawked. “Why five years? Debra’s people overhauled the Hall in a month!”

“Oh, wait,” he said. “No review at all?”

“No 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.”

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.

“About eight weeks,” he said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability...” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUD and started making a list.

“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight weeks?”

Now it was my turn to smirk. I’d seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups -- I 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. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won’t fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren’t perfect. Sometimes, I’ll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it’s back to the drawing board ... So I stay at the drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven’t thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.

“It’s slow, but it works.”

Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do that one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?”

“Because that’s how it’s done,” I said to Lil. “But that’s not how it has to be done. That’s how we’ll save the Mansion.”

I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization needed to turn on a dime -- that would be even more Bitchun.

“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We have to do this. It’s our only chance. We’ll recruit hundreds to come to Florida and work on the rehab. We’ll give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then we’ll recruit them again to work at it, to run the telepresence rigs. We’ll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders in the world, and we’ll build something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original Imagineers’ vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun.”

Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor, hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate.

“It’s not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I exchanged wicked grins. She was in.

“I know,” I said. But it was, almost -- she was a real opinion-leader in the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she’d have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.

“I mean, I can’t guarantee anything. I’d like to study the plans that Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs --”

I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but she beat me to it.

“But I won’t. We have to move fast. I’m in.”

She didn’t come into my arms, didn’t kiss me and tell me everything was forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.

My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.

What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I’d been to Disney World any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told, it had never been my absolute favorite.

But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I’d found myself crowd-driven to it.

I’m a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I’d been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.

In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I’d known a blackjack player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulously wealthy: he’d never raised a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he’d pilgrim off to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards and calculate the odds and Beat The House.

Long after his software company was sold, long after he’d made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards.

Though I’d never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare -- moving with precision and grace and, above all, expedience.

On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over to the Main Gate.

Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I’d have been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.

You can tell more about someone’s ability to efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other means -- if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I’d done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit’s foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.

No, for my money, I’ll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military- grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who’s given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they’ll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing.

This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack everything because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack -- they’re just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.

I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could’ve chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates.

Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone’s consciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama.