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The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders' lac... |
"But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that," Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. "We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra ro... |
"I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour shifts. That was w... |
Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. "Jesus, Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it." |
Tom patted her arm. "Lil, you're an adult -- if you can't stomach hearing about your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate the topic of conversation." |
Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head at Lil's departing backside. "There's not much fire in that generation," she said. "Not a lot of passion. It's our fault -- we thought that Disney World would be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was, but. . ."... |
"We sound like our parents," Tom said. "'When we were growing up, we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff -- we took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'" Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air o... |
Lil called over from a nearby conversation: "Are they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a smoke?" I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack pipe. |
"What's the use?" Lil's mother sighed. |
"Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that," I said, virtually my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. "They're passionate about maintaining the P... |
Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what. |
"I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?" |
"Funny you should say that," Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. "Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talking --" he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded -- "about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred yea... |
I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came -- I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important. |
"Really? Deadheading." I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, ... |
"Have you talked to Lil about it?" |
Rita shook her head. "It's just a thought, really. We don't want to worry her. She's not good with hard decisions -- it's her generation." |
They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little. |
Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot item. |
Lil didn't deal well with her parents' decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers. |
For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion? |
The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout and... |
I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns, and felt like shit. |
========= |
CHAPTER 5 |
========= |
When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed 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 pr... |
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 checke... |
"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 kickass 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 Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations an... |
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 hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and b... |
Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious 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 wi... |
"That's pretty good," Dan said. "Very Bitchun. 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 massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun 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, cl... |
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