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Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and sprang to his feet, eyes...
Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. I didn't have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep.
"I'm taking you home," he said. "We'll fight Debra off tomorrow."
"Sure," I said, and boarded the waiting tram.
But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now.
With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we'd shared.
I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my "personality swings." In seconds, I was asleep.
=========
CHAPTER 7
=========
The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around the facade, though no real work would be done on it -- we wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea.
I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever looki...
We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: "Hey! Anyone hear anything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of P's and it looks like some big stuff's afoot -- scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out...
"Right," I said. "Who's the author, and is he on the list?"
Dan cogitated a moment. "_She_ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list. Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership."
"Call her," I said.
This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume, and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd move to ...
I'm a pretty smart guy.
#
Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I would've run a deep background check on every one of the names on my ...
Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to my handicap, before coming to the point. "We read your post about the Mansion's rehab. You're the first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be interested in coming by to find out a little more about our plans."
Dan winced. "She's a screamer," he whispered.
Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's co...
"Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members, male, in Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us."
She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-control cowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set, including the girl who'd shot me.
But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and slightly squashed.
I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but without jostling anyone. "Kim," I called as she drew near. "Over here."
She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short and bounced a little. "Hi, I'm Kim!" she said, pumping my arm with the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. "Juli...
"So," she said, "what's the deal?"
I took her hand. "Kim, we've got a job for you, if you're interested."
She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. "I'll take it!" she said.
I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh, but underneath it was relief. "I think I'd better explain it to you first," I said.
"Explain away!" she said, and gave my hand another squeeze.
I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, "Are you recording this?"
Kim blushed. "I hope that's okay! I'm starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have one for every ride in the Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!"
Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to record every little detail and push it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector.
"I can switch it off," Kim said. She looked worried, and I really started to grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much of a privilege we were offering them.
"Leave it rolling," I said. "Let's show the world how it's done."
We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform with an oversized toolb...
We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe that we'd have to tear her away when the time came.
We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.
#
By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing "Grim Grinning Ghosts" and generally having a high old time.
"This'll do," I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through my mood. I needed to get offstage.
Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered in my ear, "This was a great idea, Julius. Really."
We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride. Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first generation of mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy enough -- just off-the-shelf stuff, really -- but the costumes and ...
Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout Yippee!...
He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. "What wonderful flumgubbery!" he shouted, over the noise.
"Sure is," I agreed. "How's the prototype coming?"
Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the air. "In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto something else, a kinematics routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft -- silent and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's coming tremendously. Take a look!" H...
"I'm offline," I reminded him gently.