"_What_ are you doing?" Lil asked, alarmed.
"I've got a shift. I'm running late."
"You're in no shape to work," Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked
free of her.
"I'm fine -- good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going to
let those bastards disrupt my life any more."
_Those bastards_? I thought -- when had I decided that there was more
than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all
planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too
thoroughly.
Dan moved to block the bedroom door. "Wait a second," he said. "You need
rest."
I fixed him with a doleful glare. "I'll decide that," I said. He stepped
aside.
"I'll tag along, then," he said. "Just in case."
I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles -- sympathy Whuffie
-- but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em.
I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put
it in gear and sped out.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Dan said as I nearly rolled the
runabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac.
"Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "I'm as good as new."
"Funny choice of words," he said. "Some would say that you _were_ new."
I groaned. "Not this argument again," I said. "I feel like me and no one
else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a
backup?"
"All I'm saying is, there's a difference between _you_ and an exact copy
of you, isn't there?"
I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but
I couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it
actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person
who knew you better than you knew yourself. "So you're saying that if
you were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you
wouldn't be you anymore?"
"For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is
different from not being destroyed at all, right?"
"Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and
recreated a trillion times a second."
"On a very, very small level --"
"What difference does that make?"
"Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy.
You're a clone, with a copied _brain_ -- that's not the same as quantum
destruction."
"Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You
got a problem with clones?"
And we were off and running.
#
The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of
them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched
shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was
anything they could do for me. . . I gave them all a fixed smile and
tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived,
how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby,
occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through,
running interference for me with the other castmembers.
He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we
walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting
as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the
queue-area. Dan groaned. "They did it already," he said.
I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey
in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. "Excuse our mess!"
the sign declared. "We're renovating to serve you better!"
I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-
satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat, northern
Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so
that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood
-- Debra had established a toehold in Liberty Square.
"They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour
after you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net.
They're promising not to touch the Mansion."
"You didn't mention this," I said, hotly.
"We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's
no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an
alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for
proof."
"Right," I said. "Right. So they just _happened_ to have plans for a new
Hall standing by. And they just _happened_ to file them after I got
shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big
coincidence."
Dan shook his head. "We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a
coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans
standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared
opportunist, not a murderer."
I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I
sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down.
Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.
Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning
wryly. "Posit," he said, "for the moment, that Debra really did do this
thing, set you up so that she could take over."
I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he
would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the
old days. "All right, I've posited it."
"Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-
timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer
Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant,
suspicious move?"
"All right," I said, warming to the challenge. "One: I'm important
enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full
investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it
without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of
a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real important."
"Sure," Dan said, "sure." Then he launched an answering salvo, and while
I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out
to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we
weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed.
#
With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had
more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around
the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly
at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated
Florida air. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion,
and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she
could watch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience.
It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput
without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave
off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through
and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got
to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people
would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my
notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence
by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from
the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose
the guests to all the scenes more quickly.
I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and
invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out.
It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had
enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an
off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshow area,
waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and
assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.
The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her
eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave
us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, "Master Gracey requests more
bodies."
As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to
give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and
saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on
my lips.
The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there
-- some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make
of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in
the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this
the best show I knew how.
It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil
had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number
two, the most recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I
tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of
subtle attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly
remastered soundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at
the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the
direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights
snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling,
noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the
UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the
noose at its neck.
The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom
Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our
way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant
later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.
He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his
sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelier
and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes watched us. Two years
before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to
the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly
throughput cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led
to all the other seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of
the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one
another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I
felt that it was cold and sweaty.
He was nervous! _He_ was nervous. What did _he_ have to be nervous
about? I was the one who'd been murdered -- maybe he was nervous because
he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him,
trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom
Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy
behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his
cochlea and subvocalized: "Get ready to jump out on my signal." Anyone
leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride
system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of
explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's
crony.
We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where
monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the
hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it -- if
I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to
do it? The attic staircase-- the next sequence -- seemed like a good
bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom
of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the
graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I were
staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was. I
swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.
He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring
at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the
staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the
cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the
quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled.
I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride system
shuddered to a stop.
"Jules?" came Dan's voice in my cochlea. "You all right?"
He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the
Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of
surprise and pity.
"It's all right, it's all right. False alarm." I paged Lil and
subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all
right.
I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes
fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd
been running. The demo was a debacle -- instead of shaving off three
seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry.
#
I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning
heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head
swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked.
And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it cost
me? A few days of "unconsciousness" while they decanted my backup into
my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backup
terminal up until my death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death
_seriously_. It wasn't like they'd done something _permanent_.
In the meantime, I _had_ done something permanent: I'd dug Lil's grave a
little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion.
I'd acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger,
and swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.
I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me
what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing
the elf.
He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running
a language module. "Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted
to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung."
I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the
close heat of the Florida night. "Julius," I said, startled at how much
like a bark it sounded. _Careful_, I thought, _no need to escalate the
hostilities._ "It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have
done with the Pirates."
He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been given
high praise from one of his heroes. "Really? I think it's pretty good --
the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really
clarify the vision. Beijing -- well, it was exciting, but it was rushed,
you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was
another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used
to send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep our
Whuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have the
opportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show."
I knew about this, of course -- Beijing had been a real struggle for the
ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over.
Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a
series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was
faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for
pursuing expedience.
"I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure," I said,
and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look
embarrassed, then horrified.
"We would _never_ touch the Mansion," he said. "It's _perfect_!"
Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked
concerned -- now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed incredibly
concerned about me since the day I was revived.
Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support.
They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through
me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in
mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively.
She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls
whose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.
"Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war
stories from the Pirates project in Beijing."
Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. "That was some hard work," Dan
said.
It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an
instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented.
I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered
from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I
didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent
extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high --
higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect
from the elf -- _Tim_, I had to remember to call him Tim -- would carry
a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.
Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile.
He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously
backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had
accorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had
scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance
in front of their wondrous Pirates.
I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that got
me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start,
realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I
could have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist of
the conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it.
"So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?" I asked
Tim.
Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs,
that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention
to the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-
natured cooperation -- that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking
for excuses to pounce on her work.
Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth,
pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. "We're doing good
stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the
old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with
broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives:
newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers.
It'll be like having each President _inside_ you, core-dumped in a few
seconds. Debra said we're going to _flash-bake_ the Presidents on your
mind!" His eyes glittered in the twilight.
Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim's
description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling
around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It
made the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in
along with it perversely appealing.
"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 stink of an ad-hoc pulling
an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and
a couple of days to tear down.
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 because it was one that afforded
boundless reserves of energy.
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?"