#
My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating,
announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that
worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers
in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run
would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteed continued
support while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them. There
were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachment to
the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra's people came up with would
have to answer their longing.
"I'm going to do it during the demo," I told Dan, while I piloted the
runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to
gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.
"I'm not going to tell Lil," I continued. "It's better that she doesn't
know -- plausible deniability."
"And me?" he said. "Don't I need plausible deniability?"
"No," I said. "No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the case
that you were working on your own -- gone rogue." I knew it wasn't fair.
Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my
dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, but
I didn't care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. "It's
good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to
stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own
experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through
our senses. What Debra's people are building -- it's hive-mind shit.
Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's
brainwashing! You gotta know that." I was pleading, arguing with myself
as much as with him.
I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined
with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking
thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my
tension dissipated. He was thinking about it -- I'd gotten through to
him.
"Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas." My chest tightened, and he
patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when
he was telling me that I was an idiot. "Even if Debra was behind your
assassination -- and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even if
that's the case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving the
Mansion, competing with her head to head, that's smart. Give it a little
while and we can come back at her, take over the Hall -- even the
Pirates, that'd really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was
behind the assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is
not going to do you any good. You've got lots of other options."
"But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally
satisfying. This way has some goddamn _balls_."
We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and
stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I
heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind.
We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that
my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timing
of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my
traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made a
point of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, and of
dawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delay between my
arrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be
discrepant.
Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged
the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park,
when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic
waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up
in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still
whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to the
dump on the property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes
were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated
experiences of the Park lost their luster.
I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. "If they hadn't
killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't be
flexible enough to fit in," I hissed at Dan. "Ironic, huh?"
I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my
way under the Hall of Presidents.
#
My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn't
occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held
before me and legs angled back like a swimmer's.
How was I going to reach into my pockets?
Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back
pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the
crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a
directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the
Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded
electronics on the premises. I'd gotten the germ of the idea during
Tim's first demo, when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread out
backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.
"Dan," I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls.
"Yeah?" he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his
painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only
indicator of his presence.
"Can you reach my back pocket?"
"Oh, shit," he said.
"Goddamn it," I said, "keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you
reach it or not?"
I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his
hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the
tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my ass.
"I can reach it," he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too
happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an
apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his
slow burn.
He fumbled the gun -- a narrow cylinder as long as my palm -- out of my
pocket. "Now what?" he said.
"Can you pass it up?" I asked.
Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met
my glutes. "I can't get any further," he said.
"Fine," I said. "You'll have to fire it, then." I held my breath. Would
he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author
of the destruction.
"Aw, Jules," he said.
"A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you." I was
boiling with anger -- at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn
thing.
"Fine," he said.
"Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up."
I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and
then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated from
a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue.
"Hang on to it," I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning
bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next
service hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical
change of clothes for both of us.
#
We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's ad-hocs
were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a
collection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the
pre-show area to capacity.
Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind
the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled
back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in
flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the
auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh
electronics.
We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while
Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short
speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now,
something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst.
Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of
applause, and they started the demo.
Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as
nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my
public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make
some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open,
her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in
the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a
diagnostic HUD.
Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.
Nothing.