2. That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a
play for the Haunted Mansion,
3. That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike
against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.
Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the
Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless cooperation
born of the adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to
team, making suggestions with body language as much as with words,
leaving bursts of inspired activity in her wake.
It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this
tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell,
call them what they were: an army.
Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished
at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra.
The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around,
as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The
Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your
experience on each successive ride.
Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride
as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public
directory, and, gingerly, I executed it.
God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules
and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed
against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through,
there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was
gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and
spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolness
seemed to threaten my own personality, and, just as it was about to
overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of endorphin and
adrenaline that made me want to jump.
"Tim," I gasped. "Tim! That was. . ." Words failed me. I wanted to hug
him. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly
imprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes;
the thick, deaf ears.
Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne. "You
liked it?" Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat
where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat.
Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire.
How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and expense that
had given us the Disney rides -- rides that had entertained the world
for two centuries and more -- could never compete head to head with what
they were working on.
My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't they do
this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved to
realize this? They could build this tech anywhere -- they could
distribute it online and people could access it from their living rooms!
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 monument to the Imagineers who
anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.
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 just had these plans lying around and
moved on them when they could."
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.