PART III

Sammy had filled a cooler and stuck it in the back-seat of his car the

night before, programmed his coffee-maker, and when his alarm roused

him at 3AM, he hit the road. First he guzzled his thermos of lethal

coffee, then reached around in back for bottles of icy distilled

water. He kept the windows rolled down and breathed in the swampy,

cool morning air, the most promising air of the Florida day, before it

all turned to steam and sizzle.

He didn't bother looking for truck-stops when he needed to piss, just

pulled over on the turnpike's side and let fly. Why not? At that hour,

it was just him and the truckers and the tourists with morning

flights.

He reached Miami ahead of schedule and had a diner-breakfast big

enough to kill a lesser man, a real fatkins affair. He got back on the

road groaning from the chow and made it to the old Wal-Mart just as

the merchants were setting up their market on the roadside.

When he'd done the Boston ride, he'd been discouraged that they'd kept

on with their Who-ville Xmas even though he'd grinched away all their

fun, but this time he was expecting something like this. Watching

these guys sell souvenirs at the funeral for the ride made him feel

pretty good this time around: their disloyalty had to be a real

morale-killer for those ride-operators.

The cops were getting twitchy, which made him grin. Twitchy cops were

a key ingredient for bad trouble. He reached behind him and pulled an

iced coffee from the cooler and cracked it, listening to the hiss as

the embedded CO2 cartridge forced bubbles through it.

Now here came a suit. He looked like a genuine mighty morphin' power

broker, which made Sammy worry, because a guy like that hadn't figured

into his plans, but look at that; he was having a huge fight with the

eyebrow guy and now the eyebrow guy was running away from him.

Getting the lawyers to agree to spring the budget to file in every

location where there was a ride had been tricky. Sammy had had to

fudge a little on his research, claim that they were bringing in real

money, tie it to the drop in numbers in Florida, and generally do a

song and dance, but it was all worth it. These guys clearly didn't

know whether to shit or go blind.

Now eyebrow man was headed for the cop-cars and the entrance, and

there, oh yes, there it was. Five cars' worth of goths, lugging bags

full of some kind of home-made or scavenged horror-memorabilia,

pulling up short at the entrance.

They piled out of their cars and started milling around, asking

questions. Some approached the cops, who seemed in no mood to

chat. The body-language could be read at 150 feet:

Goth: But officer, I wanna get on this riiiiiide.

Cop: You sicken me.

Goth: All around me is gloom, gloom. Why can't I go on my riiiiiide?

Cop: I would like to arrest you and lock you up for being a weird,

sexually ambiguous melodramatic who's dumb enough to hang around out

of doors, all in black, in *Florida*.

Goth: Can I take your picture? I'm gonna put it on my blog and then

everyone will know what a meanie you are.

Cop: Yap yap yap, little bitch. You go on photographing me and

mouthing off, see how long it is before you're in cuffs in the back of

this car.

Scumbag street-vendors: Ha ha ha, look at these goth kids mouthing off

to the law, that cop must have minuscule testicles!

Cop: Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Eyebrow guy: Um, can everyone just be nice? I'd prefer that this all

not go up in flames.

Scumbags, goths: Hurr hurr hurr, shuttup, look at those dumb cops,

ahahaha.

Cops: Grrrr.

Eyebrow: Oh, shit.

Four more cars pulled up. Now the shoulder was getting really crowded

and freeway traffic was slowing to a crawl.

More goths piled out. Family cars approached the snarl, slowed, then

sped up again, not wanting to risk the craziness. Maybe some of them

would get on the fucking turnpike and drive up to Orlando, where the

real fun was.

The four-lane road was down to about a lane and a half, and milling

crowds from the shantytown and the arriving cars were clogging what

remained of the thoroughfare. Now goths were parking their cars way

back at the intersection and walking over, carrying the objects they'd

planned to sacrifice to the ride and smoking clove cigarettes.

Sammy saw Death Waits before Death Waits turned his head, and so Sammy

had time to duck down before he was spotted. He giggled to himself and

chugged his coffee, crouched down below the window.

The situation was heating up now. Lots of people were asking questions

of the cops. People trying to drive through got shouted at by the

people in the road. Sometimes a goth would slam a fist down on a hood

and there'd be a little bit of back and forth. It was a powder-keg,

and Sammy decided to touch it off.

He swung his car out into the road and hit the horn and revved his

engine, driving through the crowd just a hair faster than was

safe. People slapped his car as it went by and he just leaned on the

horn, ploughing through, scattering people who knocked over vendors'

tables and stepped on their wares.

In his rear-view, he saw the chaos begin. Someone threw a punch,

someone slipped, someone knocked over a table of infringing

merch. Wa-hoo! Party time!

He hit the next left, then pointed his car at the freeway. He reached

back and snagged another can of coffee and went to work on it. As the

can hissed open, he couldn't help himself: he chuckled. Then he

laughed -- a full, loud belly-laugh.

#

Perry watched it happen as though it were all a dream: The crowds

thickening. The cops getting out of their cars and putting their hands

on their belts. A distant siren. More people milling around, hanging

out in the middle of the road, like idiots, *idiots*. Then that jerk

in the car -- what the hell was he thinking, he was going to kill

someone!

And then it all exploded. There was a knot of fighting bodies over by

the tables, and the knot was getting bigger. The cops were running for

them, batons out, pepper-spray out. Perry shouted something, but he

couldn't hear himself. In a second the crowd noises had gone from

friendly to an angry roar.

Perry spotted Suzanne watching it all through the viewfinder on her

phone, presumably streaming it live, then shouted again, an unheard

warning, as a combatant behind her swung wide and clocked her in the

head. She went down and he charged for her.

He'd just reached her when a noise went off that dropped him to his

knees. It was their antipersonnel sound-cannon, which meant that

Lester was around here somewhere. The sound was a physical thing, it

made his bowels loose and made his head ring like a gong. Thought was

impossible. Everything was impossible except curling up and wrapping

your hands around your head.

Painfully, he raised his head and opened his eyes. All around him,

people were on their knees. The cops, though, had put giant industrial

earmuffs on, the kind of thing you saw jackhammer operators

wearing. They were moving rapidly toward... Lester who was in a pickup

truck with the AP horn stuck in the cargo bed, wired into the

cigarette lighter. They had guns drawn and Lester was looking at them

wide-eyed, hands in the air.

Their mouths were moving, but whatever they were saying was

inaudible. Perry took his phone out of his pocket and aimed it at

them. He couldn't move without spooking them and possibly knocking

himself out from the sound, but he could rodneyking them as they

advanced on Lester. He could practically read Lester's thoughts: *If I

move to switch this off, they'll shoot me dead.*

The cops closed on Lester and then the sour old male cop was up in the

bed and he had Lester by the collar, throwing him to the ground,

pointing his gun. His partner moved quickly and efficiently around the

bed, eventually figuring out how to unplug the horn. The silence rang

in his head. He couldn't hear anything except a dog-whistle whine from

his abused eardrums. Around him, people moved sluggishly, painfully.

He got to his feet as quick as he could and drunk-walked to the

truck. Lester was already in plastic cuffs and leg-restraints, and the

big, dead-eyed cop was watching an armored police bus roll toward them

in the eerie silence of their collective deafness.

Perry managed to switch his phone over to streaming, so that it was

uploading everything instead of recording it locally. He faded back

behind some of the cars for cover and kept rolling as the riot bus

disgorged a flying squadron of helmeted cops who began to methodically

and savagely grab, cuff, and toss the groaning crowd lying flat on the

ground. He wanted to add narration, but he didn't trust himself to

whisper, since he couldn't hear his own voice.

A hand came down on his shoulder and he jumped, squeaked, and fell

into a defensive pose, waiting for the truncheon to hit him, but it

was Suzanne, grim faced, pointing her own phone. She had a laminated

press-pass out in her free hand and was holding it up beside her head

like a talisman. She pointed off down the road, where some of the goth

kids who'd just been arriving when things went down were more

ambulatory, having been somewhat shielded from the noise. They were

running and being chased by cops. She made a little scooting gesture

and Perry understood that she meant he should be following them,

getting the video. He sucked in a big breath and nodded once and set

off. She gave his hand a firm squeeze and he felt that her palms were

slick with sweat.

He kept low and moved slow, keeping the viewfinder up so that he could

keep the melee in shot. He hoped like hell that someone watching this

online would spring for his bail.

Miraculously, he reached the outlier skirmish without being

spotted. He recorded the cops taking the goths down, cuffing them, and

hooding one kid who was thrashing like a fish on a hook. It seemed

that he would never be spotted. He crept forward, slowly, slowly,

trying to feel invisible and unnoticed, trying to project it.

It worked. He was getting incredible footage. He was practically on

top of the cops before anyone noticed him. Then there was a shout and

a hand grabbed for his phone and the spell was broken. Suddenly his

heart was thundering, his pulse pounding in his ears.

He turned on his heel and ran. A mad giggle welled up in his

chest. His phone was still streaming, presumably showing wild,

nauseous shots of the landscape swinging past as he pumped his arm. He

was headed for the ride, for the rear entrance, where he knew he could

take cover. He felt the footsteps thud behind him, dimly heard the

shouts -- but his temporary deafness drowned out the words.

He had his fob out before he reached the doors and he badged in,

banging the fob over the touch-plate an instant before slamming into

the crash-bar and the doors swung open. He waited in agitation for the

doors to hiss shut slowly after him and then it was the gloom of the

inside of the ride, dark in his sun-adjusted eyesight.

It was only when the doors shivered behind him that he realized what

he'd just done. They'd break in and come and get him, and in the

process, they'd destroy the ride, for spite. His eyes were adjusting

to the gloom now and he made out the familiar/unfamiliar shapes of the

dioramas, now black and lacy with goth memorabilia. This place gave

him calm and joy. He would keep them from destroying it.

He set his phone down on the floor, propped against a plaster skull so

that the doorway was in the shot. He walked to the door and shouted as

loud as he could, his voice inaudible in his own ears. "I'm coming out

now!" he shouted. "I'm opening the doors!"

He waited for a two-count, then reached for the lock. He turned it and

let the door crash open as two cops in riot-visors came through,

pepper-spray at the fore. He was down on the ground, writhing and

clawing at his face in an instant, and the phone caught it all.

#

All Perry wanted was for someone to cut the plastic cuffs off so he

could scrub at his eyes, though he knew that would only make it

worse. The riot-bus sounded like an orgy, moaning and groaning with

dozens of voices every time the bus jounced over a pothole.

Perry was on the floor of the bus, next to a kid -- judging from the

voice -- who cursed steadily the whole way along. One hard jounce made

their heads connect and they both cussed, then apologized to one

another, then laughed a little.

"My name's Perry." His voice sounded like he was underwater, but he

could hear. The pepper spray seemed to have cleared out his sinuses

and given him back some of his hearing.

"I'm Death Waits." He said it without any drama. Perry wasn't sure if

he'd heard right. He supposed he had. Goth kids.

"Nice to meet you."

"Likewise." Their heads were banged together again. They laughed and

cursed.

"Christ my face hurts," Perry said.

"I'm not surprised. You look like a tomato."

"You can see?"

"Lucky me, yup. I got a pretty good couple of whacks on the back and

shoulders once I was down, but no gas."

"Lucky you all right."

"I'm more pissed that I lost the tombstone I brought down. It was a

real rarity, and it was hard to get, too. I bet it got tromped."

"Tombstone, huh?"

"From the Graveyard Walk at Disney. They tore it down last week."

"And you were bringing it to add it to the ride?"

"Sure -- that's where it belongs."

Perry's face still burned, but the pain was lessening. Before it had

been like his face was on fire. Now it was like a million fire ants

biting him. He tried to put it out of his mind by concentrating on the

pain in his wrists where the plastic straps were cutting into him.

"Why?"

There was a long silence. "Has to go somewhere. Better there than in a

vault or in the trash."

"How about selling it to a collector?"

"You know, it never occurred to me. It means too much to go to a

collector."

"The tombstone means too much?"

"I know it sounds stupid, but it's true. You heard that Disney's

tearing out all the goth stuff? Fantasyland meant a lot to some of

us."

"You didn't feel like it was, what, co-opting you?"

"Dude, you can buy goth clothes at a chain of mall-stores. We're all

over the mainstream/non-mainstream fight. If Disney wants to put

together a goth homeland, that's all right with me. And that ride, it

was the best place to remember it. You know that it got copied over

every night to other rides around the country? So all the people who

loved the old Disney could be part of the memorial, even if they

couldn't come to Florida. We had the idea last week and everyone loved

it."

"So you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?"

"Your ride?"

"Well, I built it."

"No fucking way."

"Way." He smiled and that made his face hurt.

"Dude, that is the coolest thing ever. You built that? How did -- How

do you become the kind of person who can build one of those things?

I'm out of work and trying to figure out what to do next."

"Well, you could join one of the co-ops that's building the other

rides."

"Sure, I guess. But I want to be the kind of person who invents the

idea of making something like that. Did you get an electrical

engineering degree or something?"

"Just picked it up as I went along. You could do the same, I'm

sure. But hang on a sec -- you were putting stuff from Disney rides

into my ride?"

"Well, yeah. But it was stuff they'd torn down."

Perry's eyes streamed. This couldn't be a coincidence, stuff from

Disney rides showing up in his ride and the cops turning up to enforce

a court order Disney got. But he couldn't blame this kid, who sounded

like a real puppy-dog.

"Wait, you don't think the cops were there because --"

"Probably. No hard feelings though. I might have done the same in your

shoes."

"Oh shit, I am *so sorry*. I didn't think it through at *all*, I can

see that now. Of course they'd come after you. They must totally hate

you. I used to work there, they just hate anything that takes a

Florida tourist dollar. It's why they built the monorail extension to

Orlando airport -- to make sure that from the moment you get off the

plane, you don't spend a nickel on anything that they don't sell

you. I used to think it was cool, because they built such great stuff,

but then they went after the new Fantasyland --"

"You can't be a citizen of a themepark," Perry said.

The kid barked a laugh. "Man, how true is *that*? You've nailed it,

pal."

Perry managed to crack an eye, painfully, and catch a blurry look at

the kid: a black Edward Scissorhands dandelion clock of hair,

eyeliner, frock-coat -- but a baby-face with cheeks you could probably

see from the back of his head. About as threatening as a Smurf. Perry

felt a sudden, delayed rush of anger. How *dare* they beat up kids

like this "Death Waits" -- all he wanted to do was ride a goddamned

ride! He wasn't a criminal, wasn't out rolling old ladies or releasing

malicious bioorganisms on the beach!

The bus turned a sharp corner and their heads banged together

again. They groaned and then the doors were being opened and Perry

squeezed his eyes shut again.

Rough hands seized him and marched him into the station house. The

crowd susurrations were liquid in his screwed-up ears. He couldn't

smell or see, either. He felt like he was in some kind of terrible

sensory deprivation nightmare, and it made him jerky, so whenever a

hand took him and guided him to another station in the check-in

process (his wallet lifted from his pocket, his cheek swabbed, his

fingers pressed against a fingerprint scanner) he flinched

involuntarily. The hands grew rougher and more insistent. At one

point, someone peeled open his swollen eyelid, a feeling like being

stabbed in the eye, and his retina was scanned. He screamed and heard

laughter, distant through his throbbing eardrums.

It galvanized him. He forced his eyes open, glaring at the cops around

him. Mostly they were Florida crackers, middle-aged guys with

dead-eyed expressions of impersonal malevolence. There was a tiny

smattering of brown faces and women's faces, but they were but a

sprinkling when compared to the dominant somatype of Florida law.

The next time someone grabbed him to shove him towards the next

station on this quest, he jerked his arm away and sat down. He'd seen

protestors do this before, and knew that it was hard to move a sitting

man expeditiously or with dignity. Hands seized him by the arms, and

he flailed until he was free, remaining firmly seated. The laughter

was turning to anger now. Beside him, someone else sat. Death Waits,

looking white-faced and round-eyed. More people hit the floor. A

billy-club was shoved under his arm, which was then twisted into an

agonizing position. He was suddenly ready to give up the fight and go

along, but he couldn't get to his feet fast enough. With a sickening

*crack*, his arm broke. He had a moment's lucid awareness that a bone

had broken in his body, and then the pain was on him and he choked out

a shout, then a louder one, and then everything went dark.

#

As it turned out, his prison infirmary time didn't last long at

all. Kettlewell had faded fast from the riot, headed back to the

guesthouse and got the lawyers on the phone. He'd shown them the

stream off of Perry's phone and they were in front of a judge before

Perry reached the jail.

Perry was led out of the infirmary with his arm in a sling. His face

was still painfully swollen, and he'd managed to turn an ankle as

well. At least his hearing was coming back.

Kettlewell took Perry's good arm and gave him a soulful hug that

embarrassed him. Kettlewell led him outside, to where a big cab was

waiting. In it were the family Kettlewell, Lester, and Suzanne. Lester

had a couple bandages taped to his face and when Suzanne smiled, he

saw her lips were stained red and one of her front teeth had been

knocked out.

He managed a brave smile. "Looks like you guys got the full treatment,

huh?"

Suzanne squeezed his hand. "Nothing that can't be fixed." Ada and

Pascal looked goggle-eyed at them. Ada was popping Korean lotus-bean

walnut cakes into her mouth from a greasy paper bag, and she offered

them silently to Perry, who took one just to be polite, but found

after the first bite that he wasn't really hungry after all.

Kettlewell and Perry fought about what to do next, but Kettlewell

prevailed. He took them to a private doctor who photographed them and

examined them and x-rayed them, documenting everything while Ada

Kettlewell played camera-woman with her phone, videoing it all.

"I don't think suing the police is going to help, Landon," Perry

said. Suzanne nodded vigorously. The three victims were in paper

examining gowns, and the Kettlewells were still in street clothes,

which gave them a real advantage in the self-confidence department.

"It'll help if we cash out a big settlement -- it'll bankroll our

defense against the Disney trademark claims. IP lawyers charge more

than God per hour. I got the injunction lifted, but we're still going

to have to go to court, and that's not going to be cheap."

It needled Perry -- he didn't like the idea of being embroiled in the

legal system in the first place, and while he could grudgingly admit a

certain elegance in using cash settlements from the law to fund their

defense in court, the whole business made him squirm.

Eva sat down beside him. "I can tell this sucks for you, Perry." Ada

whispered the word *sucks* and giggled, and Eva rolled her eyes. "But

there's fifty people we *didn't* bail out in there, who are all of

them going to have to figure out their own way through the legal

system. You can't run a business if your customers risk a solid

beating and jail time just for showing up."

*I don't want to run a business,* he thought, but he knew that was

petulant. He was the man with the roll of bills down his

pants. "There are fifty people still in the slam?"

Kettlewell nodded. Suzanne had her camera out and she was

recording. It had been a long time since Perry had really felt the

camera's eye on him. It was one thing to be recorded by some friends

for remembrance, but now Suzanne's camera seemed like the gaze of

posterity. He needed to rise to it, he knew.

"Let's get them out. All of them."

Kettlewell raised his eyebrows. "And how do you plan on doing that?"

"We'll charge it to the business," Perry said. Lester chuckled and

gave him a thump on the back. "It's a legit expense -- these are our

*customers* after all."

Kettlewell shook his head at all of them, then he left the doctor's

office. He already had his phone stuck to his head and was talking

with the lawyer before he got out of earshot.

Perry and Lester and Suzanne and Eva exchanged mischievous glances,

grinning with unexpected delight. Pascal, riding on Eva's hip, woke up

and started crying and Eva handed him to Lester while she went for the

diaper bag.

"Here we go again," Lester said, wrinkling his nose and holding the

wailing Pascal at arm's length.

Suzanne got it all with her phone, then she flipped it shut and gave

Lester a hard kiss on the cheek.

"Fatherhood would suit you," she said.

He went bright red. "Don't you get any ideas," he said. Suzanne

laughed and skipped away, looking all of ten.

Perry felt huge. Larger than life. The adventure was beginning anew,

with these good people whom he loved like family. He had the work and

the people, and who needed anything more.

It was a feeling that lasted all the way back to the ride.

But then he surveyed the ride itself and found it in utter ruins, far

worse than it had been left when he'd been dragged out of it. Every

single exhibit was smashed, strewn here and there.

He couldn't believe it. He brought up the clean-up lights, flooding

the place, and then he saw what he'd missed at first: the smashed

exhibits were not smashed exhibits -- they were *replicas* of smashed

exhibits. At every ride in the country, police had gone in smashing,

and every other ride in the country had faithfully reproduced the

damage, dutiful printers churning out replica detritus and dutiful

robots placing it with micrometer precision.

He began to laugh and couldn't stop. Lester came in and immediately

got the joke and laughed along with him. They managed to stop laughing

just long enough to explain it to Suzanne and Kettlewell, who didn't

find it nearly as funny as they did. Suzanne took pictures.

Finally he got down to business, opening the change-log and rolling

the ride back through the "revisions" to its unsmashed state. It would

take the robots a long time to set everything right again, but at

least he didn't have to oversee it.

Instead, he tracked down as many of the market-stall vendors as he

could locate in the shantytown and made sure they were all right --

they were, though they'd lost some inventory. He comped them all a

month's rent and made sure they knew that steps were being taken to

keep it from happening again. He knew that they could make nearly as

much money selling from a roadside or online, and he wanted to keep

them happy. Besides, it wasn't their fault.

He was exhausted and his arm was really starting to gripe him. He

found himself stopping in the street every few steps to rub his eyes

and force himself on. Francis came on him when he was like that,

leaning against the prefab concrete wall of one of the tall, twisty

shanties, and he took Perry's car-keys away and drove him home. Perry

was in too much of a state by the time he got there to think about how

Francis would get back -- he was already lying in bed before it

occurred to him that the old man with the gimpy leg probably walked

the ten miles home.

He woke up later that night to sex noises from Lester's room and he

recognized Suzanne's voice. Later, he woke again to hear the tail end

of another argument between Lester and Suzanne, and then Suzanne

storming out of the apartment. *Oh, goody*, he thought. He lay on his

back, trying to find sleep again -- the clock said 3AM -- and found

thoughts of Hilda drifting unbidden into his mind.

It was silly -- they'd only spent one night together, and he had to

admit that as great as the sex had been, he'd had better with the

fatkins gymnasts you could pick up down on South Beach. She was too

young for him. She lived in *Wisconsin*. But there were touches in the

ride that had originated with her instantiation -- he looked over the

logs every now and then -- and he found himself contemplating them

with sentimental smiles.

He fell asleep again and only woke when he rolled over on his bad arm

and yelped himself awake. The smell of waffles, bacon and eggs was

strong in the apartment. He couldn't be bothered to figure out how to

shower with his cast on, so he pulled on a pair of shorts and let

himself into the living room.

Lester was at the stove, cooking up half a pig and pouring maple

batter into the waffle-iron. He waved a spatula at him and pointed out

at the terrace. Perry stepped out and saw Suzanne and Tjan and Tjan's

little kids -- what were their names? Lyenitchka and the little boy?

Man, the whole family was here.

"Your arm is broken," Lyenitchka said, pointing at him.

Perry nodded gravely. "That's true. Want to sign my cast?" He was

pretty sure that he had a grease-pencil that would mark the surface,

though the hospital had sworn that it would shed dirt, ink and

anything else he threw at it.

She nodded vigorously. Tjan looked him over and gave a little wave,

then Perry went back into the living room and asked his computer to

find the grease-pencil.

"Thought you'd be busy in Boston," he said, while Lyenitchka

painstakingly spelled out her name, going over the letters to get them

to show up dark -- the cast surface really didn't want to suck up any

tint.

"Boston came out OK. We had lawyers on tap at the start and the vibe

was cool. I incorporated there, so it was easier than you guys had

it. But some of the others were hit bad, like San Francisco and

Madison."

"*Madison*?" Perry was alarmed by how alarmed he sounded.

"Mass arrests. The cops there are real hard-cases, with all this

antipersonnel gear left over from the stem-cell riots."

Perry jerked and spoiled Lyenitchka's writing. He patted her head and

set his arm back down where she could get at it. He groaned.

"They're mostly still in. We're trying to get them bailed out, but the

judge at the arraignment set bail pretty high."

"I'll post it," Perry said. "I can put up my savings or something..."

Tjan looked uncomfortable. "Perry, there are 250 people in the lockup

in Wisconsin. Some of them are going to skip out, it's nearly a

certainty. If you bail them all out, you'll go broke. I mean, it's

good to see you and I'm sorry you got hurt and all respect, but don't

be an idiot."

Perry felt himself go belligerent. His hands went into fists and his

broken wing protested. That brought him back to reality. He forced

himself to smile.

"There's a girl in Madison, I want to make sure she's OK."

Tjan and Suzanne stared at him for a second. Then Lester clapped him

across the back from behind him, startling him and making him

squeak. "Big fella!" he crowed. "I should have known."

Perry gave him a mock glare. "*You* have no right to say *anything* on

this score." He darted a glance at Suzanne and saw that she was

blushing. Tjan took this in and nodded, as though his suspicions had

just been confirmed.

"Fair enough," Tjan said. "Let's make some inquiries about the young

lady. What's her name?"

"Hilda Hammersen."

Tjan's eyebrows shot up. "Hilda *Hammersen*? From the mailing lists?

*That* Hilda?"

Hilda was the queen of the mailing lists -- brash, quick, and

argumentative, but never the kind of person who started

flamewars. Hilda's arguments were hot and fast, and she always

won. Perry had watched her admiringly from the sidelines, only

weighing in occasionally, but he seemed to remember now that she'd

taken Tjan to the cleaners once on an issue of protocol resolution.

"That's the one," Perry said.

"I always pictured her as being about fifty, with a machete between

her teeth," Lester said. "No offense."

"Lyenitchka, go get my phone from my bed-stand," Perry said, patting

the girl on the shoulder. When she got back he went through his photos

of Hilda with them.

Lester made a wolf-whistle and Suzanne punched him in the shoulder and

took the phone away.

"She's very pretty," Suzanne said, disapprovingly. "And very young."

"Oh yes, dating younger people is *so* sleazy," Lester said with a

chuckle. Suzanne squirmed and even Perry had to laugh.

"Guys, here it is. I need to spring Hilda, and we need to do something

about all those customers and supporters and so on who went to jail

today. We need to fight all the injunctions -- all of them -- and

prevent them from recurring."

"And we need to eat breakfast, which is ready," Lester said, gesturing

at the table behind him, which was stacked high with waffles,

sausages, eggs, toast, and pitchers of juice and carafes of coffee.

Lyenitchka and Sasha looked at each other and ran to the table, taking

seats next to one another. The adults followed and soon they were

eating. Perry managed a waffle and a sausage, but then he went off to

his room. Hilda was in the slam in Madison, and who the hell knew what

the antipersonnel stuff the Madison cops used had done to her. He just

wanted to get on a fucking plane and *go there*.

Halfway through his shower, he knew that that was what he was going to

do. He packed a shoulder-bag, took a couple more painkillers, and

walked out into the living room.

"Guys, I'm going to Madison. I'll be back in a day or two. We'll work

everything out over the phone, OK?"

Lester and Suzanne came over to him. "You going to be OK, buddy?"

Lester said.

"I'll be fine," he said.

"We can spring her from here," Tjan said. "We have the Internet, you

know."

"I know," Perry said. "You do that, OK? And tell her I'll be there as

soon as I can."

The security at the airport went bonkers over him. The perfect storm:

a fresh arrest, a suspicious cast, and a ticket bought with cash. He

missed the first two flights to Chicago, but by mid-afternoon he was

landing at O'Hare and submitting to an interim screening procedure

before boarding for Madison. His phone rang in the middle of the

screening, and the wrinkly old TSA goon-lady primly informed him that

he might as well get that since once the phone rings, they have to

start the procedure over again.

"Tjan," he said.

"They can't spring her today. Tomorrow, though."

He closed his eyes and shut out the TSA goon. She had a huge bouffant

of copper hair, and a midwesterner's sense of proportionality when it

came to eye-shadow and rouge. She was the kind of woman who could call

you "honey" and make it sound like "Islamofascist faggot."

"Why not, Tjan?"

There was a pause. "She's in the infirmary and they won't release her

until tomorrow."

"Infirmary."

"Nothing serious -- she took a knock on the head and they want to hold

her for observation."

He pictured a copper's electrified billy-club coming down on shining

blond hair and felt like throwing up.

"Perry? Buddy. She's OK, really. I had our lawyer visit her in the

prison infirmary and she swears she looks great. The lawyer's name is

Candice -- take a cab to her office from the airport. OK?"

"Why is she in the prison infirmary, Tjan? Why can't she be moved to a

real hospital?"

"It's just a liability thing. The police don't want to risk the suit

if she goes complicated on them between hospitals."

"Jesus."

"Seriously, she's fine. We've got a good lawyer on the scene."

But Perry had a bad feeling. The TSA goon picked up on it and gave him

a little bit of extra attention. Acting nervous or agitated in an

airport was a one-way ticket to a cavity search.

But then he was lifting off and headed for Madison, and though the

time crawled on the one-hour flight, it was, after all, only an

hour. He even napped briefly, though a sky marshall woke him shortly

after for a random bag-search. His fellow passengers -- badly dressed

midwesterners and a couple of hipster students -- all turned their

bags out in the cramped cabin and then got back in their seats for the

landing.

Perry had meant to phone in a car reservation at O'Hare, but the extra

search had eaten up the time he'd allocated for it, and now all the

rental counters were sold out. Reluctantly, he got into a taxi and

asked the driver to take him to the office of the lawyers that Tjan

had hired.

The cabbie was a young African kid with a shaved head. He had a dent

in one temple and more dents in one of his wrists, visible as he let

his long hands drape over the steering wheel.

"I know where it is," he said when Perry gave him the address. "That

lawyer, she is very good. She helped me with the Homeland Security."

The kid was young, 21 or 22, with a studious air, despite his old

injuries. He reminded Perry of the shantytowners, people who didn't

always get medical attention for their ailments, people who were often

missing a tooth or two, who had mysterious lumps from badly-set bones

or scars or funny eyebrows like his. The midwesterners on the plane

had been flawless as action-figures, but Perry's friends and this

African kid looked like something carved out of coal and chalk.

Perry was one big jitter from the trip and the coffee and the pills

for his arm, but he found himself drawn into conversation as they

whizzed past the fields and malls, the factories and office-parks.

"I'm from Gulu, in Uganda. There has been civil war there for thirty

five years. I studied chemical engineering through the African Virtual

University wiki-program, and qualified for a Chavez scholarship here

in Madison." His accent was light but exotic, the African rolling of

the Rs, the British-sounding vowel-shifts. "But the Homeland Security

didn't want to renew my visa last year. They said I had financial

irregularities. I was paypalling to a friend in Kampala who withdrew

it in shillings and sent it to my family in giros. Homeland Security

said that I was *money laundering*. I thought I'd be sent away or put

in prison, but Ms Candice wrote them a letter and they vanished." He

snapped his long, knuckly fingers for emphasis.

"Jesus. Well, that's good. She's going to help me get my girlfriend

out of jail." Perry realized he'd just called Hilda his girlfriend,

which would be news to her, but there it was.

"You don't need to worry. She'll get your friend free."

Perry nodded and tried to close his eyes and relax. He couldn't. What

the hell had happened to the world. It had seemed so exciting when his

father was bringing home new shapes he'd spun off his CAD/CAM

rig. When Perry had started to trade designs with people, to

effortlessly find people on the net who wanted to collaborate with him

and vice-versa. When Perry had started a business making cool art out

of free junk and selling it off an Internet connection that was

likewise free.

Free, free, free. No need to talk to a government, or grovel for a

curator, or put up with an agent or a boss. He'd just assumed all

along that he'd end up living in a world where all those parasites and

bullies and middlemen would just blow away in the wind.

But they'd all found jobs in the new world. They weren't needed

anymore, but that didn't mean that they went away. Now they were

wanding him in airports and suing him for trademark infringement and

busting his girlfriend and breaking his arm and giving hassle to this

poor African kid who'd taught himself to be an engineer with a

ferchrissakes *wiki*.

He dry-swallowed another pain-killer and then remembered that taking

the pills meant he wouldn't be able to get a drink, which he could

sure as shit use.

"My name's Perry," he said.

"Richard," the driver said. "We're almost there, Perry. I wish you the

very best of luck."

"You too," he said. The driver shook his hand warmly after getting his

luggage out of the trunk, a limp handshake by North American

standards, but gentle and friendly nonetheless. His dented wrist

flexed oddly as the half-knit bones there moved.

The lawyer's office was not what Perry was expecting. It looked like

someone's living room, with a couple of overstuffed sofas, a dozing

cat, and the lawyer, Candice, who was a young-looking woman in her

mid-twenties. She dressed in jeans and an oversized UW sweatshirt,

with a laptop perched on one knee. She had a friendly, open face,

framed with lots of curly brown hair.

"You must be Perry," she said, setting the laptop down and giving him

an unexpected hug. "That was from Hilda. I saw her a couple hours

ago. She was very adamant that I pass it on to you."

"Nice to meet you, he said, accepting a cup of tea from an insulated

jug on a cardboard side-board. "Hilda is all right?"

"Sit down," the lawyer said.

Perry's stomach turned a somersault. "Hilda's all right?"

"Sit."

Perry sat.

"She was gassed with a neurotoxin that has given her a temporary but

severe form of Parkinson's disease. Normally it just renders people

immobile, but one in a million has a reaction like this. It's just bad

luck that Hilda was one of them."

"She was *gassed*?"

"They all were. There was a hell of a fight, as I understand it. It

really looks like it was the cops' fault. Someone told them that there

were printed guns in the ride-location and they used extreme and

disproportionate force."

"I see," Perry said. His blood whooshed in his ears. Printed guns? No

frigging way. Sure, ray-guns in some of the exhibits. But nothing that

fired anything. He felt tears begin to stream down his face. The

lawyer moved to his sofa and put her arm around his shoulders.

"She's going to be fine," Candice said. "The Parkinson's is rare, but

it goes away in 100 percent of the the cases where it occurs. What

this means is that we've got an amazing chance of taking a huge bite

out of the local law that we can use to fund future defense. Tjan told

me that that's the strategy and I think it's sound. Plus the harder we

hit the law today, the more reluctant they'll be to rush off

half-cocked the next time someone trumps up a BS trademark claim. It

could be much worse, Perry. There's a kid who lost an eye to a rubber

bullet."

Perry fisted the tears away. "Let's go get her," he said.

"They say she shouldn't be moved," Candice said.

"What does our doctor say?"

"I phoned a couple MDs this afternoon and got conflicting

stories. Everyone agrees that not moving her is safer than moving her,

though. The only disagreement is about how dangerous it would be to

move her."

"Let's go see her, then."

"That we can do."

Perry had trouble with the search at the prison hospital. His cast and

their scanners didn't get along and they couldn't be satisfied with a

hand search. For a couple minutes it looked like he was going to be

kept out, but Candice -- who had changed into a power-suit before they

left the office -- put on a stern voice and demanded to speak to the

duty sergeant, and then to his commanding officer, and in ten minutes,

they were on the hospital ward, where the metal-railed beds had

prisoners handcuffed to them.

"Hilda?" She looked sunken and sick, her face slack and her jaw

askew. Her eyes opened and rolled crazily, they focused on him. Her

body shook through two waves of tremors before she was able to raise a

shaking hand toward him, trailing IV tubes. She was trying to say his

name, but it wouldn't come out, just a series of plosive Ps.

But then he took her hand and felt its fine warmth, the calluses he

remembered from all those months ago, and he felt better. Actually

better. Felt some peace for the first time in a long time.

"Hello, Hilda," he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt,

and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and

running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like

a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands,

burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She

shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move

on his.

They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact

that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss

broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but

they hadn't taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed

wasn't the right place to make pronouncements of love.

"I love you," he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. "I love

you, Hilda."

She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he

dared. Candice came back and stood by them.

"They think that she'll be better in the morning. She's already much

better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep's the only

thing for it. They've got her mildly sedated, too."

Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo

and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their

night together, and he stroked her cheek.

"I'll stay here," he said.

"I don't think that they're going to let you do that, Perry. This is a

prison, not a hospital."

"I'll stay here," he said again. "Just make it happen, OK? We're going

to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That's got to give us some

leverage. I'll stay here."

She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn't take his

eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of

painkillers. They'd have painkillers here.

Candice went away, and then, a while later, she came back. "Stay

here," she said. "I'll come and get you in the morning."

"Thanks," he said. Then he thought that he should say something more,

and he turned around, but the lawyer had gone.

He fell asleep holding Hilda's hand with his good hand, and woke up

with an unbelievable pain in his broken arm and couldn't find a

nurse. He bit down on the pain and spent a long watch that night

staring at Hilda, thinking of all she meant to him and how weird it

was that she meant so much when they'd had so brief a moment

together. They hadn't let him bring his phone in, or he'd have taken a

thousand pictures of her face in repose. He nodded off again.

He woke when she did, stirring in her bed. Her movements were still

weak and feeble, but they lacked the uncontrolled tremors of the night

before. He leaned in for a kiss, not caring about his sour breath or

hers.

"Good morning," he said.

"Morning, gorgeous," she said, and took him in a soft, sleepy hug.

Candice sprung them and took them across town to her doctor, a young

man who took great care in examining Hilda, explaining patiently which

fluids he was drawing and which tests he planned on running on

them. Perry had noticed that midwesterners came in two flavors: big

Scandinavian Aryans with giant shoulders and easy smiles, and exchange

students and immigrants in varying shades of brown, who looked hurt

and bent alongside of the natives -- looked like the people he knew

from back home, people who didn't have ready access to medical care or

good nutrition in their formative years.

The doctor was Vietnamese, but he was at least a couple generations

in, judging by his accent, and he had the same midwestern smile and

seemed big and bulky compared with the Vietnamese people Perry knew in

Florida. He watched the man peer intently at a screen after taping

some electrodes to Hilda's head, and felt like he'd come to some land

of Norse giants.

The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised

she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice's car and

cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn't until Perry got back with

her to her apartment -- every stick of furniture made from clever

cardboard -- and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch

his phone on again.

He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with sexy cowgirls

printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers,

lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent

bleats.

"Shit," he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back

and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded

at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left

hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it

for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going

on.

A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the

injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a

source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco

the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that

had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San

Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with

overreacting cops.

Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down.

"Right, what's the game-plan?"

"How should I know?" Perry said. He could hear the whine in his

voice. "I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we

can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal

defenses, but Disney's denial-of-service attacking us in the

courtroom. They're also getting all this destruction dealt to us by

the cops."

"You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's break

this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them,

then call up the troops and let them know what's going on. I'll get a

conference call set up while we chat."

She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put

down her laptop and rest, but she wasn't having any of it.

And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces:

incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word

out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together

scrapbooks of the carnage wrought.

It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component

parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and

Kettlewell in.

"Perry, do you think it's a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan

to respond to them?"

Hilda shook her head and put a hand on Perry's good arm to calm him

down before he answered Kettlewell. "That's how we do it over on our

side. Their side is all about secrecy. Our side trades the advantage

of surprise for the advantage of openness. You watch -- by tonight

we'll have by-laws drafted, press-releases, exhaustive

documentation. You watch."

On the screen, Lester's face suddenly hove into view, fish-eye

distorted by his proximity to the lens. Hilda gave an amused squeak

and pulled back.

"So that's Yoko, huh?" Lester said, grinning. "Cute! Listen guys,

don't let these suits talk you out of what you're doing. This is the

right thing. I'm on all the message boards and stuff and they're all

champing to do something for real."

"Yoko?" Hilda said. She raised an adorable eyebrow.

"Just a figure of speech," Lester said. "I'm Lester. You must be

Hilda. Perry's told us practically nothing about you, which is

probably a sign of something or other."

Hilda regarded Perry with mock coolness. "Oh really?"

"Lester," Perry said. "I love you like a brother. Shut the fuck up

already."

Lester made a little whipping motion. Suddenly he was gone from the

picture, and they saw Suzanne pulling him away by one ear. Hilda

snorted. "I like her," she said. Suzanne gave them a wave and Tjan and

Kettlewell came back into frame.

They made their goodbyes and hung up. Now Hilda and Perry were alone,

together, in her bedroom, laptops shut, day done -- though it was

hardly gone noon -- and the silence stretched.

"Thanks for coming, Perry," she said.

"I --" He broke off. He didn't know what to say. They had only known

each other for a day, only had a one-night stand. She probably thought

that he was a giant creep. "I was worried." he said. "Um. You should

probably rest up some more, right?"

He got up and headed for the door.

"Where do you think you're going?" she said.

"Figured I'd let you rest," he said with a half-shrug.

"Get in this bed this instant, young man," she said, slapping the bed

beside her. "And get those stinky clothes off before you do -- I won't

have you getting my sheets all covered in your travel-grime."

He felt the foolish grin spread across his face and he skinned out of

his clothes as fast as he could with his cast on.

#

They didn't leave the house until suppertime, freshly showered (she'd

been a delightful help in scrubbing those spots where the cast impeded

access) and changed. Perry took a painkiller after the shower, which

kicked in as they went out the door, and the autumn evening was crisp

and sharp.

They got as far as the corner before the man approached them. "Perry

Gibbons, isn't it?" He had an English accent, and a little pot-belly,

and a big white bubble-jacket and a scarf wound round his throat.

"That's right," Perry said. He looked at the guy. "Do I know you?"

"No, I don't think so. But I've followed you in the press. Quite

remarkable."

"Thanks," Perry said. Being recognized -- how weird was that. Cool

that it happened in front of Hilda. "This is Hilda," he said. She took

the man's hand, and he grinned, showing two long rat-like front teeth.

"Fred," he said. "What an absolute delight running into you out here

of all places. What are you doing in town?"

"Just visiting with friends," Perry said.

"Wasn't there some kind of dust-up at your place in Florida? I saw

what they did to the ride here, what a bloody mess."

"Yeah," Perry said. He pointed at his casted arm. "Seemed like a good

time to get out of Dodge."

Hilda said, "We're getting some dinner, if you'd like to come along."

"I wouldn't want to intrude."

"No, it's no sweat, we've got a whole bunch of people associated with

the ride meeting us. You'd be more than welcome."

"Goodness, that *is* hospitable of you. How can I refuse?"

Luke and Ernie were there with their girlfriends, and there were more

kids, midwestern and healthy even if they weren't necessarily all

Scandic, some Vietnamese kids, some Hmong, some desis descended from

the H1B diaspora. They had a gigantic meal in a student place that was

heavy on the potatoes and beers the size of your head, which Perry

resisted for a couple hours until he figured that he'd metabolized

most of the painkiller and then started in, getting just short of

roaring drunk. He told them war stories, told them about Death Waits,

told them about the co-op and the plan to fight back.

"That just doesn't sound right to me," said a friend of Luke's, a

law-school grad student who had been bending Perry's ear all night

with stories from his law-clinic work defending university students

from music-industry lawsuits. "I mean, sure, go after the cops because

they roughed you guys up, but how much money do the cops have? You

gotta target some fat cash, and for that you want to go after

Disney. Abuse of trademark, abuse of process, something like that. The

standard's pretty high, but if you can get a judgement, the money is

incredible. You could take them to the cleaners."

Perry looked blearily at him. He was young, like all of them, but he

had a good rhetorical style that Perry recognized as something born of

real confidence. He knew his stuff, or thought he did. He had a

strawberry mark on his high forehead that looked like a map of a

distant island, and Perry thought that the mark probably threw off the

kid's opponents. "So we sue Disney and five years from now we cash in

-- how does that help us now?"

The kid nodded. "I hoped you'd ask me that. I've been thinking about

this a lot lately. Here's what you need to do, dude, here's the

fucking thing." The room had grown silent. Everyone leaned

closer. Fred poured Perry another beer from the pitcher in the middle

of the table. "Here's how you do it. You raise investment capital for

it. There's a ton of money in this, a ton. Disney's got deep pockets

and you've got a great case.

"But like you say, it'll take ten, fifteen years to get the money out

of them. And it'll cost a mil in legal fees on the way. So what you do

is, you create an investment syndicate. You can maybe get thirty

million out of Disney, plus whatever the jury awards in punitives, and

if you keep half of it, you can deliver a fifteen-x return on

investment. So go find a millionaire and borrow sixteen million, and

turn the defense over to him."

Perry was dumbstruck. "You're joking. How can that possibly work?"

"It's how patent lawsuits work! Some dickhead engineer gets a bogus

patent for his doomed startup, and as they're sinking into the mud,

some venture capitalist comes and buys the company up just so it can

go around and threaten other companies with real businesses for

violating the patent. They ask for sums just below what it would cost

to get the US Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate the patent,

and everyone ponies up. Venture capitalism is the major source of

funding for commercial lawsuits these days."

Fred laughed and clapped. "Brilliant! Perry, that's just

brilliant. Are you going to do it?"

Perry looked at the table, doodling in the puddles of beer with a

fingertip. "I just want to get back to making stuff, you know. This is

nuts. Devoting ten years of my life to suing someone?"

"You don't have to do the suing. That's the point. You outsource

that. You get the money; someone else does the business stuff." Hilda

put her arm around his shoulders. "Give the suits something to occupy

themselves with -- otherwise they get antsy and stir up trouble."

Perry and Hilda laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever

heard. Fred and the others joined in, and Perry scrawled a drunken

note to Tjan and Kettlewell with the info. The party broke up not long

after, amid much chortling and snorting, and they staggered home. Fred

gave Perry a warm handshake and treated Hilda to a lingering, sloppy

hug until she pushed him off, laughing even harder.

"All right then," Perry said, "home again home again."

Hilda gave his groin a friendly honk and then made a dash for it, and

he gave chase.

#

PHOTO: A Drunken Perry Gibbons Gets a How's Your Father From

Ride-Bride Hilda Hammersen

MADISON, WI: Say you managed to inspire some kind of "movement" of

techno-utopians who built a network of amusement park rides that guide

their visitors through an illustrated history of the last dotcom

bubble.

Say that your merry band of unwashed polyamorous info-hippies was

overtaken by jackbooted thugs from one of the dinosauric media empires

of yesteryear, whose legal machinations resulted in nationwide raids,

beatings, gassings, and the total shutdown of your "movement."

What would you do? Sue? Call a press-conference? Bail your loyal

followers out of the slam?

Get laid, get shitfaced, and let a bunch of students spitball bullshit

ideas for fighting back?

If you picked the latter, you're in good company. Last night, Perry

Gibbons, soi-disant "founder" of the rideafarian religious cult, was

spotted out for drinks and cuddles with a group of twentysomething

students in the backwater town of Madison, WI, a place better known

for its cheddar than its activism.

While Gibbons regaled the impressionable post-adolescents with tales

of his derring-do, he avidly noted their strategic suggestions for

solving his legal, paramilitary, and technical problems.

One suggestion that drew Gibbons's attention and admiration was to

approach venture capitalists and beg them for the capital to sue

Disney and then use the settlements from the suits to pay back the

VCs.

This mind-croggling Ponzi scheme is the closest thing to a business

model we've yet heard of from the chip-addled techno-hippies of the

New Work and its post-boom incarnation.

One can only imagine how our Ms Church will cover this in her

fan-blog: breathless admiration for Mr Gibbons's cunning in soliciting

yet more "way out of the box" thinking from the Junior Guevaras of the

Great Midwest, no doubt.

Perhaps Gibbons can be afforded a little sympathy, though. His latest

encounter with Florida law left him with a broken arm and it may be

that the pain medication is primarily responsible for Gibbons's fancy

thinking. If that's the case, we can only hope that his young, blond

Scandie nursie will carefully minister him back to health (while his

comrades rot in gaol around the country).

This organization needs to die before it gets someone killed.

Comments? Write to Freddy at honestfred@techstink.co.uk

#

Lester interrupted Suzanne's phone-call to break in and announce that

he'd run Rat-Toothed Freddy to ground: the reporter had caught the

first flight from Madison to Chicago and then gone west to San

Jose. The TSA had flagged him as a person-of-interest and were

watching his movements, and a little digging on its website could

cause it to disclose Freddy's every airborne movement.

Suzanne relayed this to Perry.

"Don't you go there," she said. "He's gunning for the San Francisco

crew, and he's hoping for a confrontation or a denunciation so that he

can print it. He gets idees fixes that he worries at like a terrier,

going for more bile."

"Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?"

"I think that he thinks that technology hasn't lived up to its promise

and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him,

that means that anyone who actually *likes* technology is the enemy,

the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its

true potential."

"Fuck, that is so twisted."

"And given the kind of vile crap he writes, the only readers he has

are nut-cases who get off on seeing people who are actually creating

stuff flayed alive for their failures. They egg him on -- ever see one

of his letters columns? If he changed to actual reportage, telling the

balanced stories of what was going on in the world, they'd jump ship

for some other hate-monger. He's a lightning-rod for assholes -- he's

the king of the trolls."

Perry looked away. "What do I do?"

"You could try to starve him. If you don't show your head, he can't

report on you, except by making stuff up -- and made-up stuff gets

boring, even for the kinds of losers who read his stuff."

"But I've got work to do."

"Yeah, yeah you do. Maybe you've just got to take your lumps. Every

complex ecosystem has parasites after all. Maybe you just call up San

Francisco and brief them on what to expect from this guy and take it

from there."

Once they were off the line, Lester came up behind her and hugged her

at the waist, squeezing the little love-handles there, reminding her

of how long it had been since she'd made it to yoga.

"You think that'll work?"

"Maybe. I've been talking to the *New Journalism Review* about writing

a piece on moral responsibility and paid journalism, and if I can bang

it out this aft, I bet they'll publish it tomorrow."

"What's that going to do?"

"Well, it'll distract him from Perry, maybe. It might get his employer

to take a hard look at what he's writing -- I mean that piece is just

lies, mischaracterizations, and editorial masquerading as reportage."

She put her lid down and paced around the condo, looking at the leaves

floating in the pool. "It'll give me some satisfaction."

Lester gave her a hug, and it smelled of the old days and the old

Lester, the giant, barrel-chested pre-fatkins Lester. It took her back

to a simpler time, when they'd had to worry about commercial

competition, not police raids.

She hugged him back. He was all hard muscle and zero body-fat

underneath his tight shirt. She'd never dated anyone that fit, not

even back in high-school. It was a little disorienting, and it made

her feel especially old and saggy sometimes, though he never seemed to

notice.

Speaking of which, she felt his erection pressing against her midriff,

and tried to hide her grin. "Gimme a couple hours, all right?"

She dialed the NJR editor's number as she slid into her chair and

pulled up a text-editor. She knew what she planned on writing, but it

would help to be able to share an outline with the NJR if she was

going to get this out in good time. Working with editors was a pain

after years of writing for the blog, but sometimes you wanted someone

else's imprimatur on your work.

Five hours later, the copy was filed. She rocked back in her chair and

stretched her arms high over her head, listening to the crackle of her

spine. She'd been half-frozen by the air conditioning, so she'd turned

it off and opened a window, and now the condo was hot and muggy. She

stripped down to her underwear and headed for the shower, but before

she could make it, she was intercepted by Lester.

He fell on her like a dog on dinner, and hours slipped by as they made

the apartment even muggier. Lester's athleticism in the sack was

flattering, but sometimes boundless to the point of irritation. She

was rescued from it this time by the doorbell.

Lester put on a bathrobe and answered the door, and she heard the

sounds of the family Kettlewell spilling in, the kids' little

footfalls pounding up and down the corridors. Hurriedly, Suzanne threw

on a robe and ducked across the corridor into the bathroom, but not

before catching sight of Eva and Landon. Eva's expression was grimly

satisfied; Landon looked stricken. Fuck it, anyway. She'd never given

him any reason to hope, and he had no business hoping.

Halfway through her shower, she heard someone moving around in the

bathroom, and thinking it was Lester, she stuck her head around the

curtain, only to find Ada on the pot, little jeans around her

ankles. "I hadda make," Ada said, with a shrug.

Christ. What was she doing back here, anyway? She'd missed it all so

much from Petersburg. But she hadn't really bargained for this. It was

only a matter of time until Tjan showed up too, surely they'd be

wanting a council of war after Freddy's opening salvo.

She waited for the little girl to flush (ouch! hot water!) and got

dressed as discreetly as possible.

By the time she got to the balcony where the council of war was under

way, the two little girls, Lyenitchka and Ada, had gotten Pascal up on

the sofa and were playing dress up with him, hot-gluing Barbie heads

to his cheeks and arms and chubby knees, like vacantly staring warts.

"Do you like him?"

"I think he looks wonderful, girls. Is that glue OK for him, though?"

Ada nodded vigorously. "I've been gluing things to my brother with

that stuff forever. Dad says it's OK so long as I don't put it in his

eyes."

"Your dad's a smart man."

"He's in love with you," Lyenitchka said, and giggled. Ada slugged her

in the arm.

"That's supposed to be a secret, stupid," Ada said.

Flustered, Suzanne ducked out onto the patio and shut the door behind

her. Eva and Tjan and Kettlewell all turned to look at her.

"Suzanne!" Tjan said. "Nice article."

"Is it up already?"

"Yeah, just a couple minutes ago." Tjan held up his phone. "I've got a

watch-list for anything to do with Freddy that gets a lot of link-love

in a short period. Your piece rang the cherries."

She took the phone from him and looked at the list of links that had

been found to the *NJR* piece. Three of the diggdots had picked up the

story, since they loved to report on anything that made fun of Freddy

-- he was a frequent savager of their readers' cherished beliefs,

after all -- and thence it had wormed its way all around the net. In

the time she'd needed to take a shower, her story had been read by

about three million people. She felt a twinge of regret for not

publishing it on her blog -- that would have been some serious

advertising coin.

"Well, there you have it."

"What do you suppose he'll come back with?" Kettlewell said, then

looked uncomfortably at Eva. She pretended not to notice, and

continued to stare at the grimy Hollywood palms, swimming pools and

freeways.

"Something nasty and full of lies, no doubt."

#

Nerd Groupie Church Finds Fatkins Love with Ride Sidekick

Sources close to the Hollywood, Florida ride-cult have revealed that

Suzanne Church, the celebrity blogger who helped inflate the New Work

stock bubble, is in the midst of a romantic entanglement with one of

the cult's co-founders.

Church recently came out of retirement in St Petersburg, where she has

been producing PR^H^H journalistic accounts of the new generation of

Russian experimental plastic surgery butchers.

Church was lured back by the promise of a story about the ride-network

that was founded by her old pals from the New Work pump-and-dump,

Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons. Now on the scene are more familiar

faces: Landon Kettlewell, the disgraced former CEO of Kodacell, and

Tjan Tang, the former business manager of the Banks/Gibbons scam.

But not long after arriving on the scene, Church fell in with Banks,

an early fatkins and stalwart of the New Work movement, a technologist

who entranced his fellow engineers with his accounts of the New Work's

many "inventions" -- prompting one message-board commenter to

characterize him as "a cross between Steve Wozniak and the Reverend

Sun Myung Moon."

Now, eyewitness accounts have them going at it like shagging marmots,

as the bio-enhanced Banks falls on Church's wrinkly carcass half a

dozen times a day, apparently consummating a romance that blossomed

while Banks was, to put it bluntly, a giant fat bastard. It seems that

radical weight-loss has put Banks into the category of "blokes that

Suzanne Church is willing to play hide the sausage with."

All this would be mere sordid gossip but for the fact that Church is

once again glowingly chronicling the adventures of the Florida

cultists, playing journalist, without a shred of impartiality or

disclosure.

One can only imagine when the other, financial shoe will drop. For

wherever Church goes, money isn't far behind: surely there's a

financial aspect to this business with the ride.

UPDATE:

Indeed there is: further anonymous tipsterism reveals that papers have

been filed to create a "co-operative" structured like a classic Ponzi

scheme, in which franchise operators of the ride are expected to pay

membership dues further up the ladder. All the romance of Church's

accounts will certainly find a fresh batch of suckers -- if there's

one thing we know about Suzanne Church, it's that she knows how to

separate a mark from his money.

#

Lester ran the ride basically on his own that week, missing his

workshop and his tinkering, thinking of Suzanne, wishing that Perry

was back already. He wasn't exactly a people person, and there were a

*lot* of people.

"I brought some stuff," the goth kid said as he paid for his ticket,

hefting two huge duffel bags. "That's still OK, right?"

Was it? Damned if Lester knew. The kid had a huge bruise covering half

of his face, and Lester thought he recognized him from the showdown --

Death Waits, that's what Perry had said.

"Sure, it's fine."

"You're Lester, right?"

Christ, another one.

"Yes, that's me."

"Honest Fred is full of shit. I've been reading your posts since

forever. That guy is just jealous because your girlfriend outed him

for being such a lying asshole."

"Yeah." Death Waits wasn't the first one to say words to this effect

-- Suzanne had had that honor -- and he wouldn't be the last. But

Lester wanted to forget it. He'd liked the moments of fame he'd gained

from Suzanne's writing, from his work on the message boards. He'd even

had a couple of fanboys show up to do a little interview for their

podcast about his mechanical computer. That had been nice. But "blokes

that Suzanne Church is willing to play hide the sausage with" -- ugh.

Suzanne was holding it together as far as he could tell. But she

didn't seem as willing to stick her neck out to broker little peaces

between Tjan and Kettlewell anymore, and those two were going at it

hammer and tongs now, each convinced that he was in charge. Tjan

reasoned that since he actually ran one of the most-developed rides in

the network that he should be the executive, with Kettlewell as a

trusted adviser. Kettlewell clearly felt that he deserved the crown

because he'd actually run global businesses, as opposed to Tjan, who

was little more than a middle manager.

Neither had said exactly that, but that was only because whenever they

headed down that path, Suzanne interposed herself and distracted them.

No one asked Lester or Perry, even though they were the ones who'd

invented it all. It was all so fucked up. Why couldn't he just make

stuff and do stuff? Why did it always have to turn into a plan for

world domination? In Lester's experience, most world-domination plans

went sour, while a hefty proportion of modest plans to Make Something

Cool actually worked out pretty well, paid the bills, and put food on

the table.

The goth kid looked expectantly at him. "I'm a huge fan, you know. I

used to work for Disney, and I was always watching what you did to get

ideas for new stuff we should do. That's why it's so totally suckballs

that they're accusing you of ripping them off -- we rip you off all

the time."

Lester felt like he was expected to do something with that information

-- maybe deliver it to some lawyer or whatever. But would it make a

difference? He couldn't get any spit in his mouth over legal

fights. Christ -- legal fights!

"Thanks. You're Death Waits, right? Perry told me about you."

The kid visibly swelled. "Yeah. I could help around here if you

wanted, you know. I know a lot about ride-operating. I used to train

the ride-runners at Disney, and I could work any position. If you

wanted."

"We're not really hiring --" Lester began.

"I'm not looking for a job. I could just, you know, help. I don't have

a job or anything right now."

Lester needed to pee. And he was sick of sitting here taking people's

money. And he wanted to go play with his mechanical computer, anyway.

"Lester? Who's the kid taking ticket money?" Suzanne's hug was sweaty

and smelled good.

"Look at this," Lester said. He flipped up his magnifying goggles and

handed her the soda can. He'd cut away a panel covering the whole

front of the can, and inside he'd painstakingly assembled sixty-four

flip-flops. He turned the crank on the back of the can slowly, and the

correct combination of rods extended from the back of the can,

indicating the values represented on the flip-flops within. "It's a

sixty-four bit register. We could build a shitkicking Pentium out of a

couple million of these."

He turned the crank again. The can smelled of solder and it had a

pleasant weight in his hand. The mill beside him hummed, and on his

screen, the parts he'd CADded up rotated in wireframe. Suzanne was at

his side and he'd just built something completely teh awesome. He'd

taken his shirt off somewhere along the afternoon's lazy, warm way and

his skin prickled with a breeze.

He turned to take Suzanne in his arms. God he loved her. He'd been in

love with her for years now and she was his.

"Look at how cool this thing is, just look." He used a tweezer to

change the registers again and gave it a little crank. "I got the idea

from the old Princeton Institute Electronic Computer Project. All

these geniuses, von Neumann and Dyson, they brought in their kids for

the summer to wind all the cores they'd need for their RAM. Millions

of these things, wound by the kids of the smartest people in the

universe. What a cool way to spend your summer.

"So I thought I'd prototype the next generation of these, a 64-bit

version that you could build out of garbage. Get a couple hundred of

the local kids in for the summer and get them working. Get them to

understand just how these things work -- that's the problem with

integrated circuits, you can't take them apart and see how they

work. How are we going to get another generation of tinkerers unless

we get kids interested in how stuff works?"

"Who's the kid taking ticket money?"

"He's a fan, that kid that Perry met in jail. Death Waits. The one who

brought in the Disney stuff."

He gradually became aware that Suzanne was rigid and shaking in his

arms.

"What's wrong?"

Her face was purple now, her hands clenched into fists. "What's wrong?

Lester, what's wrong? You've left a total stranger, who, by his own

admission, is a recently terminated employee of a company that is

trying to bankrupt you and put you in jail. You've left him in charge

of an expensive, important capital investment, and given him the

authority to collect money on your behalf. Do you really need to ask

me what's wrong?"

He tried to smile. "It's OK, it's OK, he's only --"

"Only what? Only your possible doom? Christ, Perry, you don't even

have fucking *insurance* on that business."

Did she just call him Perry? He carefully set down the Coke can and

looked at her.

"I'm down here busting my *ass* for you two, fighting cops, letting

that shit Freddy smear my name all over the net, and what the hell are

you doing to save yourself? You're in here playing with Coke cans!"

She picked it up and shook it. He heard the works inside rattling and

flinched towards it. She jerked it out of his reach and threw it,

*threw it* hard at the wall. Hundreds of little gears and ratchets and

rods spilled out of it.

"Fine, Lester, fine. You go on being an emotional ten-year-old. But

stop roping other people into this. You've got people all over the

country depending on you and you are just *abdicating* your

responsibility to them. I won't be a part of it." She was crying

now. Lester had no idea what to say now.

"It's not enough that Perry's off chasing pussy, you've got to pick

this moment to take French leave to play with your toys. Christ, the

whole bunch of you deserve each other."

Lester knew that he was on the verge of shouting at her, really

tearing into her, saying unforgivable things. He'd been there before

with other friends, and no good ever came of it. He wanted to tell her

that he'd never asked for the responsibility, that he'd lived up to it

anyway, that no one had asked her to put her neck on the line and it

wasn't fair to blame him for the shit that Freddy was putting her

through. He wanted to tell her that if she was in love with Perry, she

should be sleeping with Perry, and not him. He wanted to tell her that

she had no business reaming him out for doing what he'd always done:

sit in his workshop.

He wanted to tell her that she had never once seen him as a sexual

being when he was big and fat, but that he had no trouble seeing her

as one now that she was getting old and a little saggy, and so where

did she get off criticizing his emotional maturity?

He wanted to say all of this, and he wanted to take back his 64-bit

register and nurse it back to health. He'd been in a luminous creative

fog when he'd built that can, and who knew if he'd be able to

reconstruct it?

He wanted to cry, to blubber at her for the monumental unfairness of

it all. He stood stiffly up from his workbench and turned on his heel

and walked out. He expected Suzanne to call out to him, but she

didn't. He didn't care, or at least he didn't want to.

#

Sammy skipped three consecutive Theme-Leaders' meetings, despite

increasingly desperate requests for his presence. The legal team was

eating every spare moment he had, and he hadn't been able to get

audience research to get busy on his fatkins project. Now he was

behind schedule -- not surprising, given that he'd pulled his schedule

out of his ass to shut up Wiener and co -- and dealing with lawyers

was making him crazy.

And to top it all off, the goddamned rides were back up and running.

So the last thing he wanted was a visit from Wiener.

"They're suing us, you know. They raised *venture capital* to sue us,

because we have such deep pockets. You know that, Sammy?"

"I know it, Wiener. People sue us all the time. Venture capitalists

have deep pockets, too, you know -- when we win, we'll take them to

the cleaners. Christ, why am I having this conversation with you?

Don't you have something productive to do? Is Tomorrowland so fucking

*perfect* that you've come around to help me with my little projects?"

"Someone's a little touchy today," Wiener said, wagging a finger. "I

just wanted to see if you wanted some help coming up with a strategy

for getting out of this catastrophe, but since you mention it, I *do*

have work I could be doing. I'll see you at the next Theme-Leaders'

meeting, Sam. Missing three is grounds for disciplinary action, you

know."

Sammy sat back in his chair and looked coolly at Wiener. Threats

now. Disciplinary action. He kept on his best poker face, looking past

Wiener's shoulder (a favorite trick for staring down adversaries --

just don't meet their eyes). In his peripheral vision, he saw Wiener

wilt, look away and then turn and leave the room.

He waited until the door had shut, then slumped in his seat and put

his face in his hands. God, and shit, and damn. How did it all go so

crapola? How did he end up with a theme-area that was half-shut,

record absenteeism, and even a goddamned *union organizer* just the

day before, whom he'd had to have security remove. Florida laws being

what they were, it was a rare organizer brave enough to try to come on

an employer's actual premises to do his dirty work, no one wanted a

two-year rap without parole for criminal trespass and interference

with trade. The kid had been young, about the same age as Death Waits

and the castmembers, and had clearly been desperate to collect his

bounty from SEIU. He'd gone hard, struggling and kicking, shouting

slogans at the wide-eyed castmembers and few guests who watched him go

away.

Having him taken away had given Sammy a sick feeling. They hadn't had

one of those vultures on the premises in three years, and never on

Sammy's turf.

What next, what next? How much worse could it get?

"Hi, Sammy." Hackelberg wasn't the head of the legal department, but

he was as high up in the shadowy organization as Sammy ever hoped to

meet. He was old and leathery, the way that natives to the Sunbelt

could be. He loved to affect ice-cream suits and had even been known

to carry a cane. When he was in casual conversation, he talked

"normal" -- like a Yankee newscaster. But the more serious he got, the

deeper and thicker his drawl got. Sammy never once believed that this

was accidental. Hackelberg was as premeditated as they came.

"I was just about to come over and see you," Sammy lied. Whatever

problem had brought Hackelberg down to his office, it would be better

to seem as though he was already on top of it.

"I expect you were." *Were* came out *Wuh* -- when the drawl got that

far into the swamps that quickly, disaster was on the

horizon. Hackelberg let the phrase hang there.

Sammy sweated. He was good at this game, but Hackelberg was

better. Entertainment lawyers were like fucking vampires, evil

embodied. He looked down at his desk.

"Sammy. They're coming back after us --" *They-ah comin' back aft-ah

us*. "Those ride people. They did what we thought they'd do,

incorporating into a single entity that we can sue once and kill for

good, but then they did something else. Do you know what they did,

Sammy?"

Sammy nodded. "They're countersuing. We knew they'd do that, right?"

"We didn't expect they'd raise a war-chest like the one they've pulled

together. They have a *business-plan* built around suing us for the

next fifteen years, Sammy. They're practically ready to float an

IPO. Have you seen this?" He handed Sammy a hardcopy of a chic little

investment newsletter that was so expensive to subscribe to that he'd

suspected until now that it might just be a rumor.

HOW DO YOU GET RID(E) OF A BILLION?

The Kodacell experiment recognized one fundamental truth: it's easy to

turn ten thousand into two hundred thousand, but much harder to turn

ten million into two hundred million. Scaling an investment up to

gigascale is so hard, it's nearly impossible.

But a new paradigm in investment that's unfolding around us that might

actually solve the problem: venture-financed litigation. Twenty or

thirty million sunk into litigation can bankrupt a twenty

billion-dollar firm, transferring to the investors whatever assets

remain after legal fees.

It sounds crazy, and only time will tell whether it proves to be

sustainable. But the founder of the strategy, Landon Kettlewell, has

struck gold for his investors more than once -- witness the legendary

rise and fall of Kodacell, the entity that emerged from the merger of

Kodak and Duracell. Investors in the first two rounds and the IPO on

Kodacell brought home 30X returns in three years (of course, investors

who stayed in too long came away with nothing).

Meanwhile, Kettlewell's bid to take down Disney Parks looks good --

the legal analysis of the vexatious litigation and unfair competition

charges have legal scholars arguing and adding up the zeros. Most

damning is the number of former Disney Parks employees (or

"castmembers" in the treacly dialect of the Magic Kingdom) who've

posted information about the company's long-term plan to sabotage

Kettlewell's clients.

Likewise fascinating is the question of whether the jury will be able

to distinguish between Disney Parks, whose corporate citizenship is

actually pretty good, from Disney Products, whose record has been

tainted by a string of disastrous child-labor, safety, and design

flaws (astute readers will be thinking of the "flammable pajamas" flap

of last year, and CEO Robert Montague's memorable words, "Parents who

can't keep their kids away from matches have no business complaining

about *our* irresponsibility"). Punitive jury awards are a wild-card

in this kind of litigation, but given the trends in recent years,

things look bad for Disney Parks.

Bottom line: should your portfolio include a litigation-investment

component? Yes, unequivocally. While risky and slow to mature,

litigation-investments promise a staggering return on investment not

seen in decades. A million or two carefully placed with the right

litigation fund could pay off enough to make it all worthwhile. This

is creative destruction at its finest: the old dinosaurs like Disney

Parks are like rich seams of locked-away capital begging to be

liquidated and put to work at nimbler firms.

How can you tell if you've got the right fund? Come back next week,

when we'll have a Q&A with a litigation specialist at Credit

Suisse/First Boston.

#

"There's litigation specialists at Credit Suisse?"

He was big, Hackelberg, though he often gave the impression of being

smaller through his habitual slouch. But when he pulled himself up, it

was like a string in the center of the top of his head was holding him

erect, like he was hovering off the ground, like he was about to leap

across the desk and go for your throat. His lower jaw rocked from side

to side.

"They do now, Sammy. Every investment bank has one, including the one

that the chairman of our board is a majority shareholder in."

Sammy swallowed. "But they've got just as deep pockets as we do --

can't we just fight these battles out and take the money off of them

when we win?"

"If we win."

Sammy saw his opportunity to shift the blame. "If we've been acting on

good legal advice, why wouldn't we win?"

Hackelberg inhaled slowly, his chest filling and filling until his

ice-cream suit looked like it might pop. His jaw clicked from side to

side. But he didn't say anything. Sammy tried to meet that cool gaze,

but he couldn't out-stare the man. The silence stretched. Sammy got

the message: this was not a problem that originated in the legal

department. This was a problem that originated with him.

He looked away. "How do we solve this?"

"We need to raise the cost of litigation, Samuel. The only reason this

is viable is that it's cost-effective to sue us. When we raise the

cost of litigation, we reduce its profitability."

"How do we raise the cost of litigation?"

"You have a fertile imagination, Sammy. I have no doubt that you will

be able to conceive of innumerable means of accomplishing this goal."

"I see."

"I hope you do. I really hope you do. Because we have an alternative

to raising the cost of litigation."

"Yes?"

"We could sacrifice an employee or two."

Sammy picked up his water-glass and discovered that it was empty. He

turned away from his desk to refill it from his filter and when he

turned back, the lawyer had gone. His mouth was dry as cotton and his

hands were shaking.

Raise the cost of litigation, huh?

He grabbed his laptop. There were ways to establish anonymous email

accounts, but he didn't know them. Figuring that out would take up the

rest of the afternoon, he realized, as he called up a couple of FAQs.

In the course of a career as varied and ambitious as Sammy's, it was

often the case that you ran across an email address for someone you

never planned on contacting, but you never knew, and a wise planner

makes space for lots of outlier contingencies.

Sammy hadn't written down these email addresses. He'd committed them

to memory.

#

Death Waits was living the dream. He took people's money and directed

them to the ride's entrance, making them feel welcome, talking ride

trivia. Some of his pals spotted him at the desk and enviously

demanded to know how he came to be sitting on the other side of the

wicket, and he told them the incredible story of the fatkins who'd

simply handed over the reins.

This, this was how you ran a ride. None of that artificial gloopy

sweetness that defined the Disney experience: instead, you got a

personal, informal, human-scale experience. Chat people up, find out

their hopes and dreams, make admiring noises at the artifacts they'd

brought to add to the ride, kibbitz about where they might place

them....

Around him, the bark of the vendors. One of them, an old lady in a

blinding white sun-dress, came by to ask him if he wanted anything

from the coffee-cart.

There had been a time, those first days when they'd rebuilt

Fantasyland, when he'd really felt like he was part of the magic. No,

The Magic, with capital letters. Something about the shared experience

of going to a place with people and having an experience with them,

that was special. It must be why people went to church. Not that

Disney had been a religion for him, exactly. But when he watched the

park he'd grown up attending take on the trappings that adorned his

favorite clubs, his favorite movies and games -- man, it had been a

piece of magic.

And to be a part of it. To be an altar boy, if not a priest, in that

magical cathedral they'd all built together in Orlando!

But it hadn't been real. He could see that now.

At Disney, Death Waits had been a customer, and then an employee

("castmember" -- he corrected himself reflexively). What he wanted,

though, was to be a *citizen*. A citizen of The Magic -- which wasn't

a Magic Kingdom, since kingdoms didn't have citizens, they had

subjects.

He started to worry about whether he was going to get a lunch break by

about two, and by three he was starving. Luckily that's when Lester

came back. He thanked Death profusely, which was nice, but he didn't

ask Death to come back the next day.

"Um, when can I come back and do this some more?"

"You *want* to do this?"

"I told you that this morning -- I love it. I'm good at it, too."

Lester appeared to think it over. "I don't know, man. I kind of put

you in the hot-seat today, but I don't really have the authority to do

it. I could get into trouble --"

Death waved him off. "Don't sweat it, then," he said with as much

chirp as he could muster, which was precious fucking little. He felt

like his heart was breaking. It was worse than when he'd finally asked

out a co-worker who'd worked the Pinocchio Village Haus and she had

her looked so horrified that he'd made a joke out of it, worried about

a sexual harassment complaint.

Lester clearly caught some of that, for he thought some more and then

waved his hands. "Screw her anyway. Meet me here at ten

tomorrow. You're in."

Death wasn't sure he'd heard him right. "You're kidding."

"No man, you want it, you got it. You're good at it, like you said."

"Holy -- thanks. Thank you so much. I mean it. Thank you!" He made

himself stop blithering. "Nice to meet you," he said finally. "Have a

great evening!" Yowch. He was speaking castmemberese. *Nice one,

Darren*.

He'd saved enough out of his wages from his first year at Disney to

buy a little Shell electric two-seater, and then he'd gone way into

debt buying kits to mod it to look like a Big Daddy Roth

coffin-dragster. The car sat alone at the edge of the lot. Around him,

a slow procession of stall-operators, with their arms full, headed for

the freeway and across to the shantytown.

Meanwhile, he nursed his embarrassment and tried to take comfort in

the attention that his gleaming, modded car evinced. He loved the

decorative spoilers, the huge rear tires, the shining muffler-pipes

running alongside the bulging running-boards. He stepped in and

gripped the bat-shaped gearshift, adjusted the headstone-shaped

headrest, and got rolling. It was a long drive back home to Melbourne,

and he was reeling from the day's events. He wished he'd gotten

someone to snap a pic of him at the counter. Shit.

He pulled off at a filling station after a couple hours. He needed a

piss and something with guarana if he was going to make it the rest of

the way home. It was all shut down, but the automat was still open. He

stood before the giant, wall-sized glassed-in refrigerator and

dithered over the energy-drinks. There were chocolate ones, salty

ones, colas and cream sodas, but a friend had texted him a picture of

a semi-legal yogurt smoothie with taurine and modafinil that sounded

really good.

He spotted it and reached to tap on the glass and order it just as the

fat guy came up beside him. Fat guys were rare in the era of fatkins,

it was practically a fashion-statement to be chunky, but this guy

wasn't fashionable. He had onion-breath that Death could smell even

before he opened his mouth, and he was wearing a greasy windbreaker

and baggy jeans. He had a comb-over and needed a shave.

"What the hell are you supposed to be?"

"I'm not anything," Death Waits said. He was used to shit-kickers and

tourists gawping at his shock of black hair with its viridian green

highlights, his white face-paint and eyeliner, his contact lenses that

made his whole eyes into zombie-white cue-balls. You just had to

ignore them.

"You don't look like nothing to me. You look like something. Something

you'd dress up a six year old as for Halloween. I mean, what the

fuck?" He was talking quietly and without rancor, but he had a vibe

like a basher. He must have arrived at the deserted rest-stop while

Death Waits was having a piss.

Death Waits looked around for a security cam. These rest-stops always

had a license-plate cam at the entrance and a couple of anti-stickup

cams around the cashier. He spotted the camera. Someone had hung a

baseball hat over its lens.

He felt his balls draw up toward his abdomen and his breathing

quicken. This guy was going to fucking mug him. Shit shit shit. Maybe

take his *car*.

"OK," Death said, "nice talking to you." He tried to step around the

guy, but he side-stepped to block Death's path, then put a hand on

Death's shoulder -- it was strong. Death had been mugged once before,

but the guy hadn't touched him; he'd just told him, fast and mean, to

hand over his wallet and phone and then had split.

"I'm not done," the guy said.

"Look, take my wallet, I don't want any trouble." Apart from two

glorious sucker-punches at Sammy, Death had never thrown a punch, not

since he'd flunked out of karate lessons at the local strip-mall when

he was twelve. He liked to dance and he could run a couple miles

without getting winded, but he'd seen enough real fights to know that

it was better to get away than to try to strike out if you didn't know

what you were doing.

"You don't want any trouble, huh?"

Death held out his wallet. He could cancel the cards. Losing the cash

would hurt now that he didn't have a day-job, but it was better than

losing his teeth.

The guy smiled. His onion breath was terrible.

"*I* want trouble." Without any pre-amble or wind-up, the guy took

hold of the earring that Death wore in his tragus, the little knob of

cartilage on the inside of his ear, and briskly tore it out of Death's

head.

It was so sudden, the pain didn't come at once. What came first was a

numb feeling, the blood draining out of his cheeks and the color

draining out of the world, and his brain double- and triple-checking

what had just happened. *Did someone just tear a piece out of my ear?

Tear? Ear?*

Then the pain roared in, all of his senses leaping to keen awareness

before maxing out completely. He heard a crashing sound like the surf,

smelled something burning, a light appeared before his eyes, an acrid

taste flooded his mouth and his ear felt like there was a hot coal

nestled in it, charring the flesh.

With pain came the plan: *get the fuck out of there*. He took a step

back and turned to run, but there was something tangled in his feet --

the guy had bridged the distance between them quickly, very quickly,

and had hooked a foot around his ankle. He was going to fall over. He

landed in a runner's crouch and tried to start running, but a boot

caught him in the butt, like an old-timey comedy moment, and he went

sprawling, his chin smacking into the pavement, his teeth clacking

together with a sound that echoed in his head.

"Get the fuck up," the guy said. He was panting a little, sounding

excited. That sound was the scariest thing so far. This guy wanted to

kill him. He could hear that. He was some kind of truck-stop murderer.

Death's fingers were encrusted in heavy silver rings -- stylized

skulls, a staring eyeball, a coffin-shaped poisoner's ring that he

sometimes kept artificial sweetener in, an ankh, an alien head with

insectile eyes -- and he balled his hands into fists, thinking of

everything he'd ever read about throwing a punch without breaking your

knuckles. *Get close. Keep your fist tight, thumb outside. Don't wind

up or he'll see it coming.*

He slowly turned over. The guy's eyes were in shadow. His belly heaved

with each excited pant. From this angle, Death could see the guy had a

gigantic boner. The thought of what that might bode sent him into

overdrive. He couldn't afford to let this guy beat him up.

He backed up to the rail that lined the walkway and pulled himself

upright. He cowered in on himself as much as he could, hoping that the

guy would close with him, so he could get in one good punch. He

muttered indistinctly, softly, hoping to make the man lean in. His

ring-encrusted hands gripped the railings.

The guy took a step toward him. His lips were wet, his eyes shone. He

had a hand in his pocket and Death realized that getting his attacker

close in wouldn't be smart if he had a knife.

The hand came out. It was pudgy and stub-fingered, and the fingernails

were all gnawed down to the quick. Death looked at

it. Spray-can. Pepper-spray? Mace? He didn't wait to find out. He

launched himself off the railing at the fat man, going for his wet,

whistling cave of a mouth.

The man nodded as he came for him and let him paste one on

him. Death's rings drew blood on the fat cheek and rocked the guy's

head back a bit. The man stepped back and armed away the blood with

his sleeve. Death was running for his car, hand digging into his

pocket for his phone. He managed to get the phone out and his hand on

the door handle before the fat man caught up, breathing heavily, air

whistling through his nose.

He punched Death in the mouth in a vastly superior rendition of

Death's sole brave blow, a punch so hard Death's neck made a crackling

sound as his head rocked away, slamming off the car's frame, ringing

like a gong. Death began to slide down the car's door, and only

managed to turn his face slightly when the man sprayed him with his

little aerosol can.

Mace. Death's breath stopped in his lungs and his face felt as if he'd

plunged it into boiling oil. His eyes felt worse, like dirty fingers

were sandpapering over his eyeballs. He choked and fell over and heard

the man laugh.

Then a boot caught him in the stomach and while he was doubled over,

it came down again on his skinny shin. The sound of the bone breaking

was loud enough to be heard over the roaring of the blood in his

ears. He managed to suck in a lungful of air and scream it out, and

the boot connected with his mouth, kicking him hard and making him

bite his tongue. Blood filled his mouth.

A rough hand seized him by the hair and the rasping breath was in his

ears.

"You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking

Internet, you know that, kid?"

The man slammed his head against the pavement.

"Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up." Bang, bang, bang. Death thought he'd lose

consciousness soon -- he'd had no idea that pain could be this

intense. But he didn't lose consciousness for a long, long time. And

the pain could be a lot more intense, as it turned out.

#

Sammy didn't want the writer meeting him at his office. His

organization had lots of people who'd been loyal to the old gothy park

and even to Death Waits. They plotted against him. They wrote about

him on the fucking Internet, reporting on what he'd eaten for lunch

and who'd shouted at him in his office and how the numbers were

declining and how none of the design crews wanted to work on his new

rides.

The writer couldn't come to the office -- couldn't come within miles

of the park. In fact, if Sammy had had his way, they would have done

this all by phone, but when he'd emailed the writer, he'd said that he

was in Florida already and would be happy to come and meet up.

Of course he was in Florida -- he was covering the ride.

The trick was to find a place where no one, but no one, from work

would go. That meant going as touristy as possible -- something

overpriced and kitschy.

Camelot was just the place. It had once been a demolition derby

stadium, and then had done turns as a skate-park, a dance-club and a

discount wicker furniture outlet. Now it was Orlando's number two

Arthurian-themed dining experience, catering to package-holiday

consolidators who needed somewhere to fill the gullets of their

busloads of tourists. Watching men in armor joust at low speed on

glue-factory nags took care of an evening's worth of entertainment,

too.

Sammy parked between two giant air-conditioned tour coaches, then made

his way to the entrance. He'd told the guy what he looked like, and

the guy had responded with an obvious publicity shot that made him

look like Puck from a boys'-school performance of *A Midsummer Night's

Dream* -- unruly hair, mischievous grin.

When he turned up, though, he was ten years older, a cigarette jammed

in the yellowing crooked stumps of his teeth. He needed a shower and

there was egg on the front of his denim jacket.

"I'm Sammy," Sammy said. "You must be Freddy."

Freddy spat the cigarette to one side and shook with him. The writer's

palms were clammy and wet.

"Pleasure to meet you," Freddy said. "Camelot, huh?"

"Taste of home for you, I expect," Sammy said. "Tally ho. Pip pip."

Freddy scrunched his face up in an elaborate sneer. "You are joking,

right?"

"I'm joking. If I wanted to give you a taste of home, I'd have invited

you to the Rose and Crown Pub in Epcot: 'Have a jolly ol' good time at

the Rose and Crown!'"

"Still joking, I trust?"

"Still joking," Sammy said. "This place does a decent roast beef, and

it's private enough."

"Private in the sense of full of screaming stupid tourists stuffing

their faces?"

"Exactly." Sammy took a step toward the automatic doors.

"Before we go in, though," Freddy said. "Before we go in. Why are you

talking to me at all, Mr Disney Parks Executive?"

He was ready for this one. "I figured that sooner or later you'd want

to know more about this end of the story that you've been covering. I

figured it was in my employer's best interest to see to it that you

got my version."

The reporter's grin was wet and mean. "I thought it was something like

that. You understand that I'm going to write this the way I see it,

not the way you spin it, right?"

Sammy put a hand on his heart. "Of course. I never would have asked

anything less of you."

The reporter nodded and stepped inside the air-conditioned,

horsey-smelling depths of Camelot. The greeter had acne and a pair of

tights that showed off his skinny knock-knees. He took off his great

peaked cap with its long plume and made a stiff little

bow. "Greetings, milords, to Camelot. Yon feast awaits, and our brave

knights stand ready to do battle for their honor and your amusement."

Freddy rolled his eyes at Sammy, but Sammy made a little scooting

gesture and handed the greeter their tickets, which were ringside. If

he was going to go to a place like Camelot, he could at least get the

best seats in the house.

They settled in and let the serving wench -- whose fancy contact

lenses, piercings, and electric blue pony-tails were seriously

off-theme -- take their roast beef orders and serve them gigantic

pewter tankards of "ale"; Bud Light, and the logo was stamped into the

sides of the tankards.

"Tell me your story, then," Freddy said. The tourists around them were

noisy and already a little drunk, their conversation loud to be heard

over the looping soundtrack of ren faire polka music.

"Well, I don't know how much you know about the new Disney Parks

organization. A lot of people think of us as being just another

subsidiary of the Mouse, like back in the old days. But since the IPO,

we're our own company. We license some trademarks from Disney and

operate rides based on them, but we also aggressively license from

other parties -- Warners, Universal, Nintendo. Even the French

comic-book publisher responsible for Asterix. That means that we get a

lot of people coming in and out of the organization, contractors or

consultants working on designing a single ride or show.

"That creates a lot of opportunities for corporate espionage. Knowing

what properties we're considering licensing gives the competition a

chance to get there ahead of us, to land an exclusive deal that sets

us back on square one. It's ugly stuff -- they call it 'competitive

intelligence' but it's just spying, plain old spying.

"All of our employees have been contacted, one time or another, by

someone with an offer -- get me a uniform, or a pic of the design

roughs, or a recording of the soundtrack, or a copy of the contracts,

and I'll make it worth your while. From street-sweepers to senior

execs, the money is just sitting there, waiting for us to pick it up."

The wench brought them their gigantic pewter plates of roast-beef,

Yorkshire pudding, parsnips, and a mountain of french fries,

presumably to appease the middle-American appetites of the more

unadventurous diners.

Freddy sliced off a throat-plugging lump of beef and skewered it on

his fork.

"You're going to tell me that the temptation overwhelmed one of your

employees, yes?" He shoved the entire lump into his mouth and began to

masticate it, cheeks pouched out, looking like a kid with a mouthful

of bubble-gum.

"Precisely. Our competitors don't want to compete with us on a level

playing field. They are, more than anything, imitators. They take the

stuff that we carefully build, based on extensive research, design and

testing, and they clone it for parking-lot amusement rides. There's no

attention to detail. There's no attention to safety! It's all cowboys

and gypsies."

Freddy kept chewing, but he dug in the pockets of his sports-coat and

came up with a small stubby notebook and a ball-point. He jotted some

notes, shielding the pad with his body.

"And these crass imitators enter into our story how?" Freddy asked

around his beef.

"You know about these New Work people -- they call themselves

're-mixers' but that's just a smokescreen. They like to cloak

themselves in some post-modern, 'Creative Commons' legitimacy, but

when it comes down to it, they made their fortune off the intellectual

property of others, uncompensated use of designs and technologies that

others had invested in and created.

"So when they made a ride, it wasn't much of much. Like some kind of

dusty Commie museum, old trophies from their last campaign. But

somewhere along the way, they hooked up with one of these brokers who

specializes in sneaking our secrets out of the park and into the hands

of our competitors and quick as that, they were profitable --

nationally franchised, even." He stopped to quaff his Bud Light and

surreptitiously checked out the journalist to see how much of this he

was buying. Impossible to say. He was still masticating a cheekful of

rare roast, juice overflowing the corners of his mouth. But his hand

moved over his pad and he made an impatient go-on gesture with his

head, swallowing some of his payload.

"We fired some of the people responsible for the breaches, but there

will be more. With 50,000 castmembers --" The writer snorted a laugh

at the Disney-speak and choked a little, washing down the last of his

mouthful with a chug of beer. "-- 50,000 *employees* it's inevitable

that they'll find more. These ex-employees, meanwhile, have moved to

the last refuge of the scoundrel: Internet message boards, petulant

tweets, and whiny blogs, where they're busily running us down. We

can't win, but at least we can stanch the bleeding. That's why we've

brought our lawsuits, and why we'll bring the next round."

The journalist's hand moved some more, then he turned a fresh page. "I

see, I see. Yes, all fascinating, really. But what about these

countersuits?"

"More posturing. Pirates love to put on aggrieved airs. These guys

ripped us off and got caught at it, and now they want to sue us for

their trouble. You know how counter-suits work: they're just a bid to

get a fast settlement: 'Well, I did something bad but so did you, why

don't we shake hands and call it a day?'"

"Uh huh. So you're telling me that these intellectual property pirates

made a fortune knocking off your rides and that they're only

counter-suing you to get a settlement out of you, huh?"

"That's it in a nutshell. I wanted to sit down with you, on

background, and just give you our side of things, the story you won't

get from the press-releases. I know you're the only one trying to

really get at the story behind the story with these people."

Freddy had finished his entire roast and was working his way through

the fries and limp Yorkshire pudding. He waved vigorously at their

serving wench and hollered, "More here, love!" and quaffed his beer.

Sammy dug into his cold dinner and speared up a forkful, waiting for

Freddy to finish swallowing.

"Well, that's a very neat little story, Mr Disney Executive off the

record on background." Sammy felt a vivid twinge of anxiety. Freddy's

eyes glittered in the torchlight. "Very neat indeed.

"Let me tell you one of my own. When I was a young man, before I took

up the pen, I worked a series of completely rubbish jobs. I cleaned

toilets, I drove a taxi, I stocked grocery shelves. You may ask how

this qualified me to write about the technology industry. Lots of

people have, in fact, asked that.

"I'll tell you why it qualifies me. It qualifies me because unlike all

the ivory-tower bloggers, rich and comfortable geeks whose

masturbatory rants about Apple not honoring their warranties are what

passes for corporate criticism online, I've been there. I'm not from a

rich family, I didn't get to go to the best schools, no one put a PC

in my bedroom when I was six. I worked for an honest living before I

gave up honest work to write.

"As much as the Internet circle-jerk disgusts me, it's not a patch on

the businesses themselves. You Disney people with your minimum wage

and all the sexual harassment you can eat labor policies in your nice

right-to-work state, you get away with murder. Anyone who criticizes

you does so on your own terms: Is Disney exploiting its workers too

much? Is it being too aggressive in policing its intellectual

property? Should it be nicer about it?

"I'm the writer who doesn't watch your corporations on your own

terms. I don't care if another business is unfairly competing with

your business. I care that your business is unfair to the world. That

it aggressively exploits children to get their parents to spend money

they don't have on junk they don't need. I care that your workers

can't unionize, make shit wages, and get fired when they complain or

when you need to flex your power a little.

"I grew up without any power at all. When I was working for a living,

I had no say at all in my destiny. It didn't matter how much shit a

boss wanted to shovel on me, all I could do was stand and take it. Now

I've got some power, and I plan on using it to setting things to

rights."

Sammy chewed his roast long past the point that it was ready to

swallow. The fact that he'd made an error was readily apparent from

the start of Freddy's little speech, but with each passing minute, the

depth of his error grew. He'd really fucked up. He felt like throwing

up. This guy was going to fuck him, he could tell.

Freddy smiled and quaffed and wiped at his beard with the embroidered

napkin. "Oh, look -- the jousting's about to start," he said. Knights

in armor on horseback circled the arena, lances held high. The crowd

applauded and an announcer came on the PA to tell them each knight's

name, referring them to a program printed on their placemats. Sammy

pretended to be interested while Freddy cheered them on, that same

look of unholy glee plain on his face.

The knights formed up around the ring and their pimply squires came

out of the gate and tended to them. There was a squire and knight

right in front of them, and the squire tipped his hat to them. Freddy

handed the kid a ten-dollar bill. Sammy never tipped live performers;

he hated buskers and panhandlers. It all reminded him of stuffing a

stripper's G-string. He liked his media a little more impersonal than

that. But Freddy was looking at him, so with a weak little smile, he

handed the squire the smallest thing in his wallet -- a twenty.

The jousting began. It was terrible. The "knights" couldn't ride worth

a damn, their "lances" missed one another by farcical margins, and

their "falls" were so obviously staged that even the chubby ten year

old beside him was clearly unimpressed.

"Got to go to the bathroom," he said into Freddy's ear. In leaning

over, he contrived to get a look at the reporter's notebook. It was

covered in obscene doodles of Mickey Mouse with a huge erection,

Minnie dangling from a noose. There wasn't a single word written on

it. What little blood was left in Sammy's head drained into his feet,

which were leaden and uncoordinated on the long trip to the filthy

toilets.

He splashed cold water on his face in the sink, and then headed back

toward his seat. He never made it. From the top of the stairs leading

down to ringside, he saw Freddy quaffing more ale and flirting with

the wench. The thunder of horse-hooves and the soundtrack of cinematic

music drowned out all sounds, but nothing masked the stink of the

manure falling from the horses, half of which were panicking (the

other half appeared to be drugged).

This was a mistake. He thought Freddy was a gossip reporter who liked

juicy stories. Turned out he was also one of those tedious

anti-corporate types who would happily hang Sammy out to dry. Time to

cut his losses.

He turned on his heel and headed for the door. The doorman was having

a cigarette with a guy in a sports-coat who was wearing a manager

badge on his lapel.

"Leaving so soon? The show's only just getting started!" The manager

was sweating under his sports-coat. He had a thin mustache and badly

died chestnut hair cut like a Lego character's.

"Not interested," Sammy said. "All the off-theme stuff distracted

me. Nose-rings. Blue hair. Cigarettes." The doorman guiltily flicked

his cigarette into the parking lot. Sammy felt a little better.

"I'm sorry to hear that, sir," the manager said. He was prematurely

grey under the dye-job, for he couldn't have been more than

thirty-five. Thirty-five years old and working a dead-end job like

this -- Sammy was thirty-five. This is where he might end up if his

screw-ups came back to haunt him. "Would you like a comment-card?"

"No," Sammy said. "Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and

decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice." The doorman

flushed and looked away, but the manager's smile stayed fixed and

calm. Maybe he was drugged, like the horses. It bothered

Sammy. "Christ, how long until this place gets turned into a

roller-derby again?"

"Would you like a refund, sir?" the manager asked. He looked out at

the parking lot. Sammy followed his gaze, looking above the cars, and

realized, suddenly, that he was standing in a cool tropical

evening. The sky had gone the color of a ripe plum, with proud palms

silhouetted against it. The wind made them sway. A few clouds scudded

across the moon's luminous face, and the smell of citrus and the hum

of insects and the calls of night birds were vivid on the evening air.

He'd been about to say something cutting to the manager, one last

attempt to make the man miserable, but he couldn't be bothered. He had

a nice screened-in porch behind his house, with a hammock. He'd sat in

it on nights like this, years ago. Now all he wanted to do was sit in

it again.

"Good night," he said, and headed for his car.

#

Perry's cast *stank*. It had started to go a little skunky on the

second day, but after a week it was like he had a dead animal stuck to

his shoulder. A rotting dead animal. A rotting, itchy dead animal.

"I don't think you're supposed to be doing this on your own," Hilda

said, as he sawed awkwardly at it with the utility knife. It was made

of something a lot tougher than the fiberglass one he'd had when he

broke his leg falling off the roof as a kid (he'd been up there

scouting out glider possibilities).

"So you do it," he said, handing her the knife. He couldn't stand the

smell for one second longer.

"Uh-uh, not me, pal. No way that thing is supposed to come off anytime

soon. If you're going to cripple yourself, you're going to have to do

it on your own."

He made a rude sound. "Fuck hospitals, fuck doctors, and fuck this

fucking cast. My arm barely hurts these days. We can splint it once I

get this off, that'll immobilize it. They told me I'd need this for

*six weeks*. I can't wear this for six weeks. I'll go nuts."

"You'll go lame if you take it off. Your poor mother, you must have

driven her nuts."

He slipped and cut himself and winced, but tried not to let her know,

because that's exactly what she'd predicted would happen. After a

couple days together, she'd become an expert at predicting exactly

which of his escapades would end in disaster. It was a little spooky.

Blood oozed out from under the cast and slicked his hand.

"Right, off to the hospital. I told you you'd get this thing wet if

you got in the shower. I told you that it would stink and rot and itch

if you did. I told you to let me give you a sponge bath."

"I'm not insured."

"We'll go to the free clinic."

Defeated, he let her lead him to her car.

She helped him buckle in, wrinkling her nose. "What's wrong, baby?"

she said, looking at his face. "What are you moping about?"

"It's just the cast," he said, looking away.

She grabbed him by the chin and turned him to face her. "Look, don't

do that. Do *not* do that. If something's bothering you, we're going

to talk about it. I didn't sign up to fall in love with the strong

silent type. You've been sulking all day, now what's it about?"

He smiled in spite of himself. "All right, I give in. I miss

home. They're all in the middle of it, running the ride and stuff, and

I'm here." He felt a moment's worry that she'd be offended. "Not that

I don't love being here with you, but I'm feeling guilty --"

"OK, I get it. Of course you feel guilty. It's your project, it's in

trouble, and you're not taking care of it. Christ, Perry, is that all?

I would have been disappointed if this wasn't worrying you. Let's go

to Florida then."

"What?"

She kissed the tip of his nose. "Take me to Florida, let's meet your

friends."

"But..." Were they moving in together or something? He was totally

smitten with this girl, but that was *fast*. Even for Perry. "Don't

you need to be here?"

"They can live without me. It's not like I'm proposing to move in with

you. I'll come back here after a while. But I'm only doing two classes

this term and they're both offered by distance-ed. Let's just go."

"When?"

"After the hospital. You need a new cast, stinkmeister. Roll down your

window a little, OK? Whew!"

The doctors warned him to let the new cast set overnight before

subjecting it to the rigors of a TSA examination, so they spent one

more night at Hilda's place. Perry spent it going over the mailing

list traffic and blog posts, confirming the plane tickets, ordering a

car to meet them at the Miami airport. He finally managed to collapse

into bed at 3AM, and Hilda grabbed him, dragged him to her, and

spooned him tightly.

"Don't worry, baby. Your friends and I will get along great."

He hadn't realized that he'd been worrying about this, but once she

pointed it out, it was obvious. "You're not worried?"

She ran her hands over his furry chest and tummy. "No, of course

not. Your friends will love me or I'll have them killed. More to the

point, they'll love me because you love me and I love you and they

love you, too."

"What does Ernie think of me?" he said, thinking of her brother for

the first time since they'd hooked up all those months ago.

"Oh, hum," she said. He stiffened. "No, it's OK," she said, rubbing

his tummy some more. It tickled. "He's glad I'm with someone I care

about, and he loves the ride. He's just, you know. Protective of his

big sister."

"What's he worried about?"

"Just what you'd expect. We live thousands of miles apart. You're ten

years older than me. You've been getting into the kind of trouble that

attracts armed cops. Wouldn't you be protective if you were my bro?"

"I was an only child, but sure, OK, I see that."

"It's nothing," she said. "Really. Bring him a nice souvenir from

Florida when we come back to Madison, take him out for a couple beers

and it'll all be great."

"So we're cool? All the families are in agreement? All the stars are

in alignment? Everything is hunky and/or dory?"

"Perry Gibbons, I love you dearly. You love me. We've got a cause to

fight for, and it's a just one with many brave comrades fighting

alongside of us. What could possibly go wrong?"

"What could possibly go wrong?" Perry said. He drew in a breath to

start talking.

"It was rhetorical, goofball. It's also three in the morning. Sleep,

for tomorrow we fly."

#

Lester didn't want to open the ride, but someone had to. Someone had

to, and it wasn't Perry, who was off with his midwestern honey. Lester

would have loved to sleep in and spend the day in his workshop

rebuilding his 64-bit registers -- he'd had some good ideas for

improving on the initial design, and he still had the CAD files, which

were the hard part anyway.

He walked slowly across the parking lot, the sunrise in his eyes, a

cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He'd almost gone to the fatkins

bars the night before -- he'd almost gone ten, fifteen times, every

time he thought of Suzanne storming out of his lab, but he'd stayed

home with the TV and waited for her to turn up or call or post

something to her blog or turn up on IM, and when none of those things

had happened by 4AM, he tumbled into bed and slept for three hours

until his alarm went off again.

Blearily, he sat himself down behind the counter, greeted some of the

hawkers coming across the road, and readied his ticket-roll.

The first customers arrived just before nine -- an East Indian family

driving a car with Texas plates. Dad wore khaki board-shorts and a

tank-top and leather sandals, Mom was in a beautiful silk sari, and

the kids looked like mall-bangbangers in designer versions of the

stuff the wild kids in the shantytown went around in.

They came out of the ride ten minutes later and asked for their money

back.

"There's nothing in there," the dad said, almost apologetically. "It's

empty. I don't think it's supposed to be empty, is it?"

Lester put the roll of tickets into his pocket and stepped into the

Wal-Mart. His eyes took a second to adjust to the dark after the

brightness of the rising Florida sun. When they were fully adjusted,

though, he could see that the tourist was right. Busy robots had torn

down all the exhibits and scenes, leaving nothing behind but swarming

crowds of bots on the floor, dragging things offstage. The smell of

the printers was hot and thick.

Lester gave the man his money back.

"Sorry, man, I don't know what's going on. This kind of thing should

be impossible. It was all there last night."

The man patted him on the shoulder. "It's all right. I'm an engineer

-- I know all about crashes. It just needs some debugging, I'm sure."

Lester got out a computer and started picking through the logs. This

kind of failure really should be impossible. Without manual oversight,

the bots weren't supposed to change more than five percent of the ride

in response to another ride's changes. If all the other rides had torn

themselves down, it might have happened, but they hadn't, had they?

No, they hadn't. A quick check of the logs showed that none of the

changes had come from Madison, or San Francisco, or Boston, or

Westchester, or any of the other ride-sites.

Either his robots had crashed or someone had hacked the system. He

rebooted the system and rolled it back to the state from the night

before and watched the robots begin to bring the props back from

offstage.

How the hell could it have happened? He dumped the logs and began to

sift through them. He kept getting interrupted by riders who wanted to

know when the ride would come back up, but he didn't know, the robots'

estimates were oscillating wildly between ten minutes and ten

hours. He finally broke off to write up a little quarter-page flier

about it and printed out a couple hundred of them on some neon yellow

paper stock he had lying around, along with a jumbo version that he

taped over the price-list.