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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie -- they'd make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan.
I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a mon...
I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.
"They did it -- they killed me." I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do next easier.
"Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you -- they offered their backups, remember? They couldn't have done it."
"Bullshit!" I shouted into the empty night. "Bullshit! They did it, and they fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they jus...
Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crews scurrying in the night. "I do believe that. Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time we've disagreed. So now what?"
"Now we save the Mansion," I said. "Now we fight back."
"Oh, shit," Dan said.
I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.
#
My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed re...
"I'm going to do it during the demo," I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.
"I'm not going to tell Lil," I continued. "It's better that she doesn't know -- plausible deniability."
"And me?" he said. "Don't I need plausible deniability?"
"No," I said. "No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the case that you were working on your own -- gone rogue." I knew it wasn't fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I knew that we were...
I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about it -- I'd gotten through to him.
"Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas." My chest tightened, and he patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when he was telling me that I was an idiot. "Even if Debra was behind your assassination -- and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the case, we've got bette...
"But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn _balls_."
We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind.
We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice during the ...
Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious explore...
I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. "If they hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't be flexible enough to fit in," I hissed at Dan. "Ironic, huh?"
I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way under the Hall of Presidents.
#
My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn't occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer's.
How was I going to reach into my pockets?
Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scr...
"Dan," I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls.
"Yeah?" he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence.
"Can you reach my back pocket?"
"Oh, shit," he said.
"Goddamn it," I said, "keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it or not?"
I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my ass.
"I can reach it," he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn.
He fumbled the gun -- a narrow cylinder as long as my palm -- out of my pocket. "Now what?" he said.
"Can you pass it up?" I asked.
Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my glutes. "I can't get any further," he said.
"Fine," I said. "You'll have to fire it, then." I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction.
"Aw, Jules," he said.
"A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you." I was boiling with anger -- at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing.
"Fine," he said.
"Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up."
I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue.
"Hang on to it," I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical change of clothes for both of us.
#
We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.
Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smel...
We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst.
Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and they started the demo.