Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Part 9

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns, and felt like s.h.i.t.

========= CHAPTER 5 =========

When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had pa.s.sed 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 kicka.s.s 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 b.i.t.c.hun Society was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite a.s.sa.s.sinations 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 h.e.l.l out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts."

Dan chuckled appreciatively. The b.i.t.c.hun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repet.i.tious 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 b.i.t.c.hun. 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 ma.s.sive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the b.i.t.c.hun 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, cla.s.sic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they acc.u.mulated 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

"Pa.s.sionate 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 f.u.c.king 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 mola.s.ses. 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."