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"Wow," I said. "That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?" The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars. |
"That's not really my area," Tim said. "I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want." |
"That would be fine," Lil said, taking my elbow. "I think we should be heading home, now, though." She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight. |
"That's too bad," Tim said. "My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by." |
The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. "That would be _great_!" I said, too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away. |
"But we've got an early morning tomorrow," Lil said. "You've got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for groceries." She was lying, but she was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But my faith was unshakeable. |
"Eight a.m. shift? No problem -- I'll be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time to change. All right?" |
Dan tried. "But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made reservations." |
"Aw, we can eat any time," I said. "This is a hell of an opportunity." |
"It sure is," Dan said, giving up. "Mind if I come along?" |
He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, _If he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him_. I was past caring -- I was going to beard the lion in his den! |
Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. "Then it's settled! Let's go." |
# |
On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over. |
Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stin... |
She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age be... |
She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously. |
_Did you have me killed_? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big deal for her. |
"Hi there," I said, brightly. "Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan, right?" |
Debra nodded at him. "Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?" |
Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle. "Hello, Debra," he said. He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerate... |
Tim said, "Can I show them the demo, Debra?" |
Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, "Sure, why not. You'll like this, guys." |
Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment -- they'd spent a week tearing down a show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the projected portions of the show no... |
Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype. |
"This is it -- our uplink. So far, we've got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild." |
I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I _was_ Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But... |
I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit. |
Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me. |
"That's really fine," I said. "Really, really fine. Moving." |
Tim blushed. "Thanks! I did the gestalt programming -- it's my specialty." |
Debra spoke up from behind him -- she'd sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. "I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all." |
Tim sniffed. "Not synthetic at all," he said, turning to me. "It's nice and soft, right?" |
I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: "Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course. We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the show -- we want to _transcend it_." |
Tim nodded reluctantly. "Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by making the experience _human_, a mile in the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's brain?" |
========= |
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... |
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 gimc... |
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 undifferenti... |
"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! |
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