Chapter 8

Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary.

“Hi, doc,” I said.

“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional medical and castmember friendliness, I sensed irritation.

Make it all good again. “I’m not really sure. I wanted to see if I could talk it over with you. I’m having some pretty big problems.”

“I’m on-shift until five. Can it wait until then?”

By then, I had no idea if I’d have the nerve to see him. “I don’t think so -- I was hoping we could meet right away.”

“If it’s an emergency, I can have an ambulance sent for you.”

“It’s urgent, but not an emergency. I need to talk about it in person. Please?”

He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius, I’ve got important things to do here. Are you sure this can’t wait?”

I bit back a sob. “I’m sure, doc.”

“All right then. When can you be here?”

Lil had made it clear that she didn’t want me in the Park. “Can you meet me? I can’t really come to you. I’m at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.”

“I don’t really make house calls, son.”

“I know, I know.” I hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception? I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll have to get someone to cover for me. Let’s not make a habit of this, all right?”

I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.”

He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan.

“Yes?” he said, cautiously.

“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don’t know if he can help me -- I don’t know if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.”

He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my friend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come over?”

“That would be very nice,” I said, quietly. “I’m at the hotel.”

“Give me ten minutes,” he said, and rang off.

He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks of Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom. In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced anonymity. I missed it.

Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We both stared out at the view for a long while.

“It’s something else, isn’t it?” I said, finally.

“I suppose so,” he said. “I want to say something before the doc comes by, Julius.”

“Go ahead.”

“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first place, and I’m not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up, that’s none of my business, but I had no right to hurry it along.”

“All right,” I said. I was too drained for emotion.

“I’ve taken a room here, moved my things.”

“How’s Lil taking it?”

“Oh, she thinks I’m a total bastard. I suppose she’s right.”

“I suppose she’s partly right,” I corrected him.

He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.”

We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived.

He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on the bed.

“I’m cracking up or something,” I said. “I’ve been acting erratically, sometimes violently. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I’d rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn’t easy to choke out.

“We both know what’s wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire this one. We’ve had this talk.”

“I can’t do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can’t -- isn’t there another way?”

The doc shook his head. “Julius, I’ve got limited resources to allocate. There’s a perfectly good cure for what’s ailing you, and if you won’t take it, there’s not much I can do for you.”

“But what about meds?”

“Your problem isn’t a chemical imbalance, it’s a mental defect. Your brain is broken, son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get worse. I can’t tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately. Now, If you’re ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediately and get you restored into a new one in 48 hours.”

“Isn’t there another way? Please? You have to help me -- I can’t lose all this.” I couldn’t admit my real reasons for being so attached to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even to myself.

The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven’t got the Whuffie to make it worth anyone’s time to research a solution to this problem, other than the one that we all know about. I can give you mood- suppressants, but that’s not a permanent solution.”

“Why not?”

He boggled. “You can’t just take dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will happen to this body -- I see from your file that you’re stroke-prone -- and you’re going to get refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic it’ll be. You’re robbing from your future self for your selfish present.”

It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a President’s guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake without disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend would betray me, had betrayed me.

I just couldn’t do it -- not yet, anyway.

Dan -- Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself from my old backup, I’d lose my last year with him. I’d lose his last year.

“Let’s table that, doc. I hear what you’re saying, but there’re complications. I guess I’ll take the mood-suppressants for now.”

He gave me a cold look. “I’ll give you a scrip, then. I could’ve done that without coming out here. Please don’t call me anymore.”

I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn’t understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened.

“Us old-timers, we’re used to thinking of doctors as highly trained professionals -- all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy drills ... Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledge you’re looking for is working as a historical researcher, not a doctor.

“But that’s not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority on medical matters, even though he’s only got one trick: restore from backup. You’re reminding Pete of that, and he’s not happy to have it happen.”

I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.

On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure.

Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficiently than I once may’ve. I took it downstairs the next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom’s castmember lot.

At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary’s parking lot, my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could.

With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied bzzz and lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the Whuffie stick.

At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to me, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was necessary. I had hit bottom.

I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of my fellow castmembers in the utilidors.

I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell instantly that I was being humored.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.”

In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she’d never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and from people who’d read the popular accounts of their struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage -- i.e., me.

I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into the heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square.

I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant, lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning -- I could feel it hovering like storm clouds.

He wouldn’t talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn’t rope-drop yet, and there weren’t any guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what was coming next.

“Have you taken a look at Debra’s Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally, as we stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding.

I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. “Don’t bother,” he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra’s gang is number one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall, they’ve been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with it.”

My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. “So, what is it they’ve done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

Dan didn’t have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over.

“Hey guys!” he said.

“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said.

“I haven’t told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don’t you run it down?”

“Well, it’s pretty radical, I have to admit. We’ve learned some stuff from the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some of the historical character of the ghost story.”

I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm. “Really?” he asked innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?”

“Well, we’re keeping the telepresence robots -- that’s a honey of an idea, Julius -- but we’re giving each one an uplink so that it can flash-bake. We’ve got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they’ve done since, you know.

“The way we’ve storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride pretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and then getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here’s the big change: we slow it all down. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more of a premium product.

“So you’re a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you’re being chased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they’re really scary -- I’ve got Suneep’s concept artists going back to the drawing board, hitting basic research on stuff that’ll just scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you -- wham! Flash- bake! You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you’ve left, you’ve had ten or more ghost- contacts, and the next time you come back, it’s all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall’s drawing ‘em, we’re bound to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself.

When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there’d been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they’d turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We’ll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute -- compelling and inspirational, even -- but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia.

And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.

“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn’t be trying to take it away from us. Didn’t you say that?”

Tim rocked back as if I’d slapped him and the blood drained from his face. “But we’re not taking it away!” he said. “You invited us to help.”

I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they’ve come up with some great ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to the other side and we’re going to lose everything because of them. I felt like shit.