"Sure, pal, sure," I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. "You look
beat."
"Beat doesn't begin to cover it," he said.
"Good night, then," I said.
========= CHAPTER 2 =========
Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks had taken over the
running of Liberty Square with a group of other interested, compatible
souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of Whuffie, and anyone who
came around and tried to take it over would be so reviled by the guests
they wouldn't find a pot to piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked,
radical approach that they'd ouster Lil's parents and their pals, and do
a better job.
It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne -- a
group who'd worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved off
to other pursuits -- some of them had gone to school, some of them had
made movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help
start things up. A few had deadheaded for a couple decades.
They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the attractions.
The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the
Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park
that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the
rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might make a
successful go of it.
So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager
attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty
Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest
attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney
Imagineers.
I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with
Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything
running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead bot for a
backup in five minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would
permit.
It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen
him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-
house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss,
something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front
of our porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in
from his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal
capital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring,
pulling me into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.
"You just missed Dan," she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest,
working with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied
back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of
girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress
somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately,
and she wriggled appreciatively. "He's looking better."
His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him.
He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had
startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. "What did he want?"
"He's been hanging out with Debra -- he wanted to make sure I knew what
she's up to."
Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd
spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her
way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and
replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.
The problem was that she was _really good_ at coding sims. Her Great
Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking -- the Star Wars sequence had
already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits.
She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland ad-hocs
to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areas were
piled high with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits.
It was terrifying to walk through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt
personally supervised, and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had
built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century
Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from
obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best
aspects of its Chinese cousin -- the AI-driven sims that communicated
with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each time
they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas;
the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks
on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered
a violent, breath-taking storm -- but with Western themes: wafts of
Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean
accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who
plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like
cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus and
dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.
"So, what's she up to?"
Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made
a comical moue of worry. "She's rehabbing the Pirates -- and doing an
incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz,
the focus groups are cumming themselves." The comedy went out of her
expression, baring genuine worry.
She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him.
Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum
and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack
kicked in low: "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa _combined_
could not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink
from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its
author -- and its finisher." She mimed turning down the gain and he fell
silent again.
"You said it, Mr. President," she said, and fired her finger at him
again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period
topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-
pocket.
I put my arm around her shoulders. "You're doing all you can -- and it's
good work," I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of
speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush
of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for
better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final
squeeze and let her go.
She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. "It'll be fine, of
course," she said. "I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra
will do her job very, very well, and make things even better than they
are now. That's not so bad."
This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last
time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without
learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not to.
My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup
reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved
good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was
close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back
up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it.
"Yes," I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a
backup -- one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup
altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next
reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence,
giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious
choice.
"It's Dan." I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him --
children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of
thousands of feet. "Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty
important."
"Can it wait for fifteen?" I asked.
"Sure -- see you in fifteen."
I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD,
dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it
finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my
head and my life flashed before my eyes.
========= CHAPTER 3 =========
The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup --
in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some
people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.
Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't participate in it.
Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just,
you know, _died_, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need
to convert its detractors, just outlive them.
The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. I was
SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course, I don't
remember the incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-
site and having read the dive-logs of my SCUBA-buddies, I've
reconstructed the events.
I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottle
and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn't wearing it -- the
blood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it
and my skin. The caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and
twisted like intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there
was a hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters
skittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as
bright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision maneuvers
as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best thinking under
water, and I'm often slipping off into dangerous reverie at depth.
Normally, my diving buddies ensure that I don't hurt myself, but this
time I got away from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole.
Where I got stuck.
My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with the
hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My buddies
saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottle and
buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others exchanged hand
signals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. Suddenly, I was
thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared into the cave, minus my
vest and bottle. I'd apparently attempted to cut through my vest's
straps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a
jolt of sea water, I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a
monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled another lungful of
water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave's ceiling, whence my
buddies retrieved me shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the
patchy red welts from the stinging coral.
In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the procedure
took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic.
Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for Cuba, a few weeks
earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three years old, dating from the
completion of my second symphony.
They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at Toronto
General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the backup clinic one moment
and arisen the next. It took most of a year to get over the feeling that
the whole world was putting a monstrous joke over on me, that the
drowned corpse I'd seen was indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was
figurative as well as literal -- the missing time was enough that I
found myself hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends.
I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediately
pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to spend a week
sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a
crazy lady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself at
Disney World. When I told him that I was going to live there someday, he
asked me if that would mean that I was done reinventing myself.
Sometimes, as I ran my fingers through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought
of that remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that
my friend Dan had been so prescient.
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 lost most of a year. But they
woke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of the
missing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I
felt at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found
myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships I'd
built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and
working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to
my Chem thesis at U of T.
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, synthesized memories extracted
from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the
scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing
that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter
presets that had been put in place when I was restored.
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 appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it,
opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, "I have to pee."
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 buttocks. A scar on my knee was
missing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When I
looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller and
perkier. The familiar crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my
eyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over -- head, face, pubis,
arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish
newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to
keep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets
were evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up
on me.
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 crowd, using a kind of
sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-work
on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd
toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of
shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.
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. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki
Room's entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back,
just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic
pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually,
grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like
Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lunges
forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs
bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal
gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my
nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to
blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the
girl with the pistol is long gone.
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 and fires her pistol. The self-
guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground
level, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below the
speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my
spine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity.
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 later, in
Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears
again.
"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 than motivation: who _could_ do
something like this?"
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 of those shifts a month,
just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while I
was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control
simulations.