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The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd had a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of a house-league hockey game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax in backing up, and I ...
After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synth...
Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for words appropri...
Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and...
I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room and helped me to the bed. "Well, this _sucks_," I said.
I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors -- three quick cuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the ...
Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. D...
The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms a...
The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes la...
"Has anyone ID'd the girl?" I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.
Dan shook his head. "None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters -- Hope." The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them.
"How about Jungle Traders?" I asked. "Did they have a record of the pith helmet purchase?"
Lil frowned. "We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it."
"Why?" I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me.
"It wasn't random," Lil said. "The slug was definitely keyed to you -- that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point."
Right -- which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all right.
"What happened to her after Tomorrowland?" I said.
"We don't know," Lil said. "Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared." She sounded hot and angry -- she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.
"Who'd want to do this?" I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it.
Dan's eyes got a far-away look. "Sometimes, people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards." He stroked his chin. "Sometimes, it's better to look for temperament, rather tha...
Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple...
I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.
"_What_ are you doing?" Lil asked, alarmed.
"I've got a shift. I'm running late."
"You're in no shape to work," Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her.
"I'm fine -- good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more."
_Those bastards_? I thought -- when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly.
Dan moved to block the bedroom door. "Wait a second," he said. "You need rest."
I fixed him with a doleful glare. "I'll decide that," I said. He stepped aside.
"I'll tag along, then," he said. "Just in case."
I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles -- sympathy Whuffie -- but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em.
I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in gear and sped out.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac.
"Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "I'm as good as new."
"Funny choice of words," he said. "Some would say that you _were_ new."
I groaned. "Not this argument again," I said. "I feel like me and no one else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a backup?"
"All I'm saying is, there's a difference between _you_ and an exact copy of you, isn't there?"
I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. "So you're saying that if you were obliterated and then recreated...
"For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?"
"Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second."
"On a very, very small level --"
"What difference does that make?"
"Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a copied _brain_ -- that's not the same as quantum destruction."
"Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?"
And we were off and running.
#
The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me. . . I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they wa...
He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. "They did it already," he said.
I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. "Excuse our mess!" the sign declared. "We're renovating to serve you better!"
I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood -- Debra had established a toehold in ...