It wasn't enough. Belligerent riders who'd traveled for hours to see

the ride wanted a human explanation, and they pestered him

ceaselessly. All the hawkers felt like they deserved more information

than the rubes, and they pestered him even more. All he wanted to do

was write some regexps that would help him figure out what was wrong

so he could fix it.

He wished that Death kid would show up already. He was supposed to be

helping out from now on and he seemed like the kind of person who

would happily jaw with the marks until the end of time.

Eventually he gave up. He set the sign explaining what had happened

(or rather, not explaining, since he didn't fucking know yet) down in

the middle of the counter, bolted it down with a couple of lock-bolts,

and retreated to the ride's interior and locked the smoked-glass doors

behind him.

Once he had some peace and quiet, it took only him a few minutes to

see where the changes had originated. He verified the info three

times, not because he wasn't sure, but because he couldn't tell if

this was good news or bad news. He read some blogs and discovered lots

of other ride-operators were chasing this down but none of them had

figured it out yet.

Grinning hugely, he composed a hasty post and CCed it to a bunch of

mailing lists, then went out to find Kettlebelly and Tjan.

He found them in the guesthouse, sitting down to a working breakfast,

with Eva and the kids at the end of the table. Tjan's little girl was

trying to feed Pascal, but not doing a great job of it; Tjan's son sat

on his lap, picking at his clown-face pancakes.

"Morning guys!"

Suzanne narrowed her eyes and looked away. The table fell quiet --

even the kids sensed that something was up. "Who's watching the ride,

Lester?" Tjan asked, quietly.

"It's shut," he said cheerfully.

"*Shut*?" Tjan spoke loudly enough that everyone jumped a

little. Lyenitchka accidentally stabbed Pascal with the spoon and he

started to wail. Suzanne stood up from the table and walked quickly

out of the guesthouse, holding on to her phone as a kind of thin

pretense of having to take a call. Lester chose to ignore her.

Lester held his hands out placatingly. "It's OK -- it's just down for

a couple hours. I had to reset it after what happened last night."

Lester waited.

"All right," Eva said, "I'll bite. What happened last night?"

"Brazil came online!" Lester said. "Like twenty rides opened

there. But they got their protocol implementation a little wrong so

when I showed up, the whole ride had been zeroed out. I'm sure I can

help them get it right; in the meantime I've got the ride resetting

itself and I've blackholed their changes temporarily." He grinned

sunnily. "How fucking cool is that? Brazil!"

They smiled weakly back. "I don't think I understand, Lester,"

Kettlewell said. "Brazil? We don't have any agreements with anyone in

Brazil."

"We have agreements with everyone in Brazil!" Lester said. "We've got

an open protocol and a server that anyone can connect to. That's an

agreement, that's all a protocol is."

Kettlewell shook his head. "You're saying that all anyone needed to do

to reprogram our ride --"

"-- was to connect to it and send some changes. Trust is assumed in

the system."

"Trust is *assumed*? You haven't changed this?"

Lester took a step back. "No, I haven't changed it. The whole system

is open -- that's the point. We can't just start requiring logins to

get on the network. The whole thing would collapse -- it'd be like

putting locks on the bathroom and then taking the only key for

yourself. We just can't do it."

Kettlewell looked like he was going to explode. Tjan put a hand on his

arm. Slowly, Kettlewell sat back down. Tjan took a sip of his coffee.

"Lester, can you walk me through this one more time?"

Lester rocked back and forth a little. They were all watching him now,

except for Suzanne, who was fuming somewhere or getting ready to go

home to Russia, or something.

"We have a published protocol for describing changes to the ride --

it's built on Git3D's system for marking up and syncing three-d models

of objects; it's what we used all through the Kodacell days for

collaboration. The way you get a ride online is to sync up with our

version-server and then instantiate a copy. Then any changes you make

get synced back and we instantiate them. Everyone stays in sync, give

or take a couple hours."

"But you had passwords on the Subversion server for objects, right?"

"Yeah, but we didn't design this one to take passwords. It's a lot

more ad-hoc -- we wanted to be sure that people we didn't know could

get in and play."

Kettlewell put his face in his hands and groaned.

Tjan rolled his eyes. "I think what Kettlewell's trying to say is that

things have changed since those carefree days -- we're in a spot now

where if Disney or someone else who hated us wanted to attack us, this

would be a prime way of doing it."

Lester nodded. "Yeah, I figured that. Openness always costs

something. But we get a lot of benefits out of openness too. The way

it works now is that no one ride can change more than five percent of

the status quo within 24 hours without a manual approval. The problem

was that the Brazilians opened, like, *fifty* rides at the same time,

and each of them zeroed out and tried to sync that and between them

they did way more than 100 percent. It'd be pretty easy to set things

up so that no more than five percent can be changed, period, within a

24-hour period, without manual approval."

"If you can do that, why not set every change to require approval?"

Kettlewell said.

"Well, for starters because we'd end up spending all our time clicking

OK for five-centimeter adjustments to prop-positioning. But more

importantly, it's because the system is all about community -- we're

not in charge, we're just part of the network."

Kettlewell made a sour face and muttered something. Tjan patted his

arm again. "You guys *are* in charge, as much as you'd like not to

be. You're the ones facing the legal hassles, you're the ones who

invented it."

"We didn't, really," Lester said. "This was a real standing on the

shoulders of giants project. We made use of a bunch of stuff that was

on the shelf already, put it together, and then other people helped us

refine it and get it working well. We're just part of the group, like

I keep saying." He had a thought. "Besides, if we were in charge,

Brazil wouldn't have been able to zero us out.

"You guys are being really weird and suit-y about this, you know? I've

fixed the problem: no one can take us down like this again. It just

won't happen. I've put the fix on the version-server for the codebase,

so everyone else can deploy it if they want to. The problem's

solved. We'll be shut for an hour or two, but who cares? You're

missing the big picture: Brazil opened fifty rides *yesterday*! I

mean, it sucks that we didn't notice until it screwed us up, but

Brazil's got it all online. Who's next? China? India?"

"Russia?" Kettlewell said, looking at the door that Suzanne had left

by. He was clearly trying to needle Lester.

Lester ignored him. "I'd love to go to Brazil and check out how

they've done it. I speak a little Portuguese even -- enough to say,

'Are you 18 yet?' anyway."

"You're *weird*," Lyenitchka said. Ada giggled and said, "Weird!"

Eva shook her head. "The kids have got a point," she said. "You people

are all a little weird. Why are you fighting? Tjan, Landon, you came

here to manage the business side of things, and that's what you're

doing. Lester, you're in charge of the creative and technical stuff

and that's what you're doing. Without Lester, you two wouldn't have

any business to run. Without these guys, you'd be in jail or something

by now. Make peace, because you're on the same side. I've got enough

children to look after here."

Kettlewell snapped a nod at her. "Right as ever, darling. OK, I

apologize, all right?"

"Me too," Lester said. "I was kidding about going to Brazil -- at

least while Perry's still away."

"He's coming home," Tjan said. "He called me this morning. He's

bringing the girl, too."

"Yoko!" Lester said, and grinned. "OK, someone should get online and

find out how all the other rides are coping with this. I'm sure

they're going nutso out there."

"You do that," Kettlewell said. "We've got another call with the

lawyers in ten minutes."

"How's all that going?"

"Let me put it this way," Kettlewell said, and for a second he was

back in his glory days, slick and formidable, a shark. "I liquidated

my shares in Disney this morning. They're down fifty points since the

NYSE opened. You wait until Tokyo wakes up, they're going to bail and

bail and bail."

Lester smiled back. "OK, well that's good, then."

He hunkered down with a laptop and got his homebrew wireless rig up

and running -- a card would have been cheaper, but his rig gave him

lots of robustness against malicious interference, multi-path and

plain old attenuation -- and got his headline reader running.

He set to reading the posts and dispelling the popups that tried to

call his attention to this or that. His filters had lots to tell him

about, and the areas of his screen designated for different interests

were starting to pinken as they accumulated greater urgency.

He waved them away and concentrated on getting through to all the

ride-maintainers who had questions about his patches. But there was

one pink area that wouldn't go. It was his serendipity zone, where

things that didn't match his filters but had lots of interestingness

-- comments and reposts from people he paid attention to -- and some

confluence with his keywords turned up.

Impatiently, he waved it up, and a page made of bits of LiveJournals

and news reports and photo-streams assembled itself.

His eye fell first on the photos. But for the shock of black and neon

green hair, he wouldn't have recognized the kid in the pictures as

Death Waits. His face was a ruin. His nose was a bloody rose, his eyes

were both swollen shut. One ear was ruined -- apparently he'd been

dragged some distance with that side of his head on the ground. His

cheeks were pulpy and bruised. Then he clicked through to the photos

from where they'd found Death, before they'd cleaned him up in the

ambulance, and he had to turn his head away and breathe deeply. Both

legs and both arms were clearly broken, with at least one compound

fracture. His crotch -- Jesus. Lester looked away again, then quickly

closed the window.

He switched to text accounts from Death's friends who'd been to see

him in the hospital. He would live, but he might not walk again. He

was lucid, and he was telling stories about the man who'd beaten him

--

*You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking

Internet, you know that, kid?*

Lester got up and went to find Kettlewell and Tjan and Suzanne -- oh,

especially Suzanne -- again. He didn't think for one second that Death

would have invented that. In fact, it was just the sort of brave thing

that the gutsy little kid might have had the balls to report on.

Every step he took, he saw that ruin of a face, the compound fracture,

the luminous blood around his groin. He made it halfway to the

guesthouse before he found himself leaning against a shanty, throwing

up. Tears and bile streaming down his face, chest heaving, Lester

decided that this wasn't about fun anymore. Lester came to understand

what it meant to be responsible for people's lives. When he stood up

and wiped his face on the tail of his tight, glittering shirt, he was

a different person.

#

Sweating in the suffocating afternoon heat, his re-casted arm on fire,

Hilda had shown him the article about Death Waits while they were

being screened for their connection at O'Hare. The TSA guy was

swabbing his cast with a black-powder residue detector, and as Perry

read it, he let out an involuntary yelp and a jump that sent him back

for a full round of tertiary screening. No date with Dr. Jellyfinger,

though it was a close thing.

Hilda was deep in her own phone, probing ferociously at it,

occasionally picking it up and talking into it, then poking at it some

more. Neither of them looked out the windows much, though in his mind,

Perry had rehearsed this homecoming as a kind of tour of his

territory, picking out which absurd landmarks he'd point out, which

funny stories he'd tell, pausing to nuzzle Hilda's throat.

But by the time he'd absorbed the mailing-list traffic and done a

couple phoners with the people back in Madison -- particularly Ernie,

who was freaking about Death Waits and calling for tight physical

security for all their people -- they were pulling in at the ride. The

cabbie, a Turk, wasn't very cool about the neighborhood, and he kept

slowing down on the side of the road and offering to let them out

there, and Perry kept insisting that he take them all the way.

"No, you can't just drop me here, man. For the tenth time, I've got a

fucking *cast* on my *broken arm*. I'm not carrying my suitcase a mile

from here. I live there. It's safe. God, it's not like I'm asking you

to take me to a war-zone."

He didn't want to tip the guy, but he did. The cabbie was just trying

to play it safe. Lots of people tried to play it safe. It didn't make

them assholes, even if it did make them ineffectual and useless.

While Perry tipped him, Hilda pulled the suitcase out of the cab's

trunk and she'd barely had time to shut the lid when the driver roared

off like he was trying to outrun a sniper.

Perry grimaced. This was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. He

was supposed to be showing off his toys, all he'd wrought, to this

girl. The town was all around them and they were about to charge in

without even pausing to consider its Dr Seuss wonderment.

"Wait a sec," Perry said. He took her hand. "See that? That was the

first shanty they built. Five stories now." The building was made of

prefab concrete for the first couple stories, then successively

lighter materials, with the roof-shack made of bamboo. "The designs

are experimental, from the Army Corps of Engineers mostly, but they

say they'll stand a force-five hurricane." He grimaced

again. "Probably not the bamboo one, of course."

"Of course," Hilda said. "What's that one?" She'd picked up on his

mood, she knew he wanted to show her around before they ended up

embroiled in ride-politics and work again.

"You've got a good eye, my dear. That's the finest BBQ on the

continent. See how the walls are a little sooty looking? That's

carbonized ambrosia, a mix of fat and spice and hickory that you could

scrape off and bottle as perfume."

"Eww."

"You haven't tried Lemarr's ribs yet," he said, and goosed her. She

squeaked and punched him in the shoulder. He showed her the

tuck-shops, the kids playing, the tutor's place, the day-care center,

the workshops, taking her on a grand-circle tour of this place he'd

help conjure into existence.

"Now there's someone I haven't seen in far too long," Francis

said. He'd aged something fierce in the last year, booze making his

face subside into a mess of wrinkles and pouches and broken

blood-vessels. He gave Perry a hard hug that smelled of booze, and it

wasn't even lunchtime.

"Francis, meet Hilda Hammersen; Hilda, meet Francis Clammer: aerospace

engineer and gentleman of leisure."

He took her hand and feinted a kiss at it, and Hilda good-naturedly

rolled her eyes at this.

"What do you think of our lovely little settlement, then, Ms

Hammersen?"

"It's like something out of a fairy-tale," she said. "You hear stories

about Christiania and how good and peaceful it all was, but whenever

you see squatters on TV, it's always crack houses and

drive-bys. You've really got something here."

Francis nodded. "We get a bad rap, but we're no different really from

any other place where people take pride in what they own. I built my

place, with my two hands. If Jimmy Carter had been there with Habitat

for Humanity, we would have gotten no end of good press. Because we

did it without a dead ex-president on the scene, we're crooks. Perry

tell you about what the law does around here?'

Perry nodded. "Yeah. She knows."

Francis patted his cast. "Nice hardware, buddy. So when some

Bible-thumping do-gooder gives you a leg up, you're a folk-hero. Help

yourself, you're a CHUD. It's the same with you people and your

ride. If you had the backing of a giant corporation with claws sunk

deep into kids' brains, you'd be every package-tour operator's wet

dream. Build it yourself in the guts of a dead shopping center, and

you're some kind of slimy underclass."

"Maybe that's true," said Hilda. "But it's not necessarily true. Back

in Madison, the locals love us, they think we do great stuff. After

the law came after us, they came by with food and money and helped us

rebuild. Scrappy activists get a lot of love in this country, too. Not

everyone wants a big corporation to spoon-feed them."

"Off in hippie college-towns you'll always find people with enough

brains to realize that their neighbors aren't the boogieman. But there

ain't so many hippie college towns these days. I wish you two luck,

but I think you'd be nuts to walk out the door in the morning

expecting anything better than a kick in the teeth."

That made Perry think of Death Waits, and the sense of urgency came

back to him. "OK, we have to go now," he said. "Thanks, Francis."

"Nice to meet you, young woman," he said, and when he smiled, it was a

painful thing, all pouches and wrinkles and sags, and he gimped away

with his limp more pronounced than ever.

They tracked down the crew at the tea-house's big table. Everyone

roared greetings at them when they came through the door, a proper

homecoming, but when Perry counted heads, he realized that there was

no one watching the ride.

"Guys, who's running the ride?"

They told him about Brazil then, and Hilda listened with her head

cocked, her face animated with surprise, dismay, then delight. "You

say there are *fifty* rides open?"

"All at once," Lester said. "All in one go."

"Holy mother of poo," Hilda breathed. Perry couldn't even bring

himself to say *anything*. He couldn't even imagine Brazil in his head

-- jungles? beaches? He knew nothing about the country. They'd built

*fifty* rides, without even making contact with him. He and Lester had

designed the protocol to be open because they thought it would make it

easier for others to copy what they'd done, but he'd never thought --

It was like vertigo, that feeling.

"So you're Yoko, huh?" Lester said finally. It made everyone smile,

but the tension was still there. Something big had just happened,

bigger than any of them, bigger than the beating that had been laid on

Death Waits, bigger than anything Perry had ever done. From his mind

to a nation on another continent --

"You're the sidekick, huh?" Hilda said.

Lester laughed. "Touche. It's very nice to meet you and thank you for

bringing him back home. We were starting to miss him, though God alone

knows why."

"I plan on keeping him," she said, giving his bicep a squeeze. It

brought Perry back to them. The little girls were staring at Hilda

with saucer eyes. It made him realize that except for Suzanne and Eva,

their whole little band was boys, all boys.

"Well, I'm home now," he said. He knelt down and showed the girls his

cast. "I got a new one," he said. "They had to throw the old one

out. So I need your help decorating this. Do you think you could do

the job?"

Lyenitchka looked critically at the surface. "I think we could do the

gig," she said. "What do you think, partner?"

Tjan snorted out his nose, but she was so solemn that the rest kept

quiet. Ada matched Lyenitchka's critical posture and then nodded

authoritatively. "Sure thing, partner."

"It's a date," Perry said. "We're gonna head home and put down our

suitcases and come back and open the ride if it's ready. It's time

Lester got some time off. I'm sure Suzanne will appreciate having him

back again."

Another silence fell over the group, tense as a piano wire. Perry

looked from Lester to Suzanne and saw in a second what was up. He had

time to notice that his first emotional response was to be intrigued,

not sorry or scared. Only after a moment did he have the reaction he

thought he should have -- a mixture of sadness for his friend and

irritation that they had yet another thing to deal with in the middle

of a hundred other crises.

Hilda broke the tension -- "It was great to meet you all. Dinner

tonight, right?"

"Absolutely," Kettlewell said, seizing on this. "Leave it to us --

we'll book someplace just great and have a great dinner to welcome you

guys back."

Eva took his arm. "That's right," she said. "I'll get the girls to

pick it out." The little girls jumped up and down with excitement at

this, and the baby brothers caught their excitement and made happy

kid-screeches that got everyone smiling again.

Perry gave Lester a solemn, supportive hug, kissed Suzanne and Eva on

the cheeks (Suzanne smelled good, something like sandalwood), shook

hands with Tjan and Kettlewell and tousled all four kids before

lighting out for the ride, gasping out a breath as they stepped into

the open air.

#

Death Waits regained consciousness several times over the next week,

aware each time that he was waking up in a hospital bed on a crowded

ward, that he'd woken here before, and that he hurt and couldn't

remember much after the beating had started.

But after a week or so, he found himself awake and aware -- he still

hurt all over, a dull and distant stoned ache that he could tell was

being kept at bay by powerful painkillers. There was someone waiting

for him.

"Hello, Darren," the man said. "I'm an attorney working for your

friends at the ride. My name is Tom Levine. We're suing Disney and we

wanted to gather some evidence from you."

Death didn't like being called Darren, and he didn't want to talk to

this dork. He'd woken up with a profound sense of anger, remembering

the dead-eyed guy shouting about Disney while bouncing his head off

the ground, knowing that Sammy had done this, wanting nothing more

than to get ahold of Sammy and, and... That's where he ran out of

imagination. He was perfectly happy drawing medieval-style torture

chambers and vampires in his sketch book, but he didn't actually have

much stomach for, you know, *violence*.

Per se.

"Can we do this some other time?" His mouth hurt. He'd lost four teeth

and had bitten his tongue hard enough to need stitches. He could

barely understand his own words.

"I wish we could, but time is of the essence here. You've heard that

we're bringing a suit against Disney, right?"

"No," Death said.

"Must have come up while you were out. Anyway, we are, for unfair

competition. We've got a shot at cleaning them out, taking them for

every cent. We're going through the pre-trial motions now and there's

been a motion to summarily exclude any evidence related to your

beating from the proceedings. We think that's BS. It's clear from what

you've told your friends that they wanted to shut you up because you

were making them look bad. So what we need is more information from

you about what this guy said to you, and what you'd posted before, and

anything anyone at Disney said to you while you were working there."

"You know that that guy said he was beating me up because I talked

about this stuff in the first place?"

The lawyer waved a hand. "There's no way they'll come after you

now. They look like total assholes for doing this. They're scared

stupid. Now, I'm going to want to formally depose you later, but this

is a pre-deposition interview just to get clear on everything."

The guy leaned forward and suddenly Death Waits had a bone-deep

conviction that the guy was about to punch him. He gave a little

squeak and shrank away, then cried out again as every inch of his body

awoke in hot agony, a feeling like grating bones beneath his skin.

"Woah, take it easy there, champ," the lawyer said.

Death Waits held back tears. The guy wasn't going to hit him, but just

the movement in his direction had scared him like he'd leapt out

holding an axe. The magnitude of his own brokenness began to sink in

and now he could barely hold back the tears.

"Look, the guys who run the ride have told me that I have to get this

from you as soon as I can. If we're going to keep the ride safe and

nail the bastards who did this to you, I need to do this. If I had my

way, I wouldn't bug you, but I've got my orders, OK?"

Death snuffled back the tears. The back of his throat felt like it had

been sanded with a rusty file. "Water," he croaked.

The lawyer shook his head. "Sorry buddy, just the IV, I'm afraid. The

nurses were very specific. Let's start, OK, and then we'll be done

before you know it."

Defeated, Death closed his eyes. "Start," he said, his voice like

something made from soft tar left too long in the sun.

#

Sammy knew he was a dead man. The only thing keeping him alive was

legal's reluctance to read the net. Hackelberg had a couple of juniors

who kept watch-lists running on hot subjects, but they liked to print

them out and mark them up, and that meant that they lagged a day or

two behind the blogosphere.

The Death Waits thing was a freaking disaster. The guy was just

supposed to put a scare into him, not cripple him for life. Every time

Sammy thought about what would happen when the Death Waits thing

percolated up to him, he got gooseflesh.

Damn that idiot thug anyway. Sammy had been very clear. The guy who

knew the guy who knew the guy had been reassuring on the phone when

Sammy put in the order -- sure, sure, nothing too rough, just a little

shoving around.

And what's worse is the idiot kid hadn't gotten the hint. Sammy didn't

get it. If a stranger beat him half to death and told him to stop

hanging out in message-boards, well, the message-boards would

go. Damned right they would.

And with Freddy, there was a shoe waiting to drop. Freddy wouldn't

report on their interview, he was pretty sure of that. "Off the

record" means something, even to "journalists" like Honest Freddy. But

Freddy wasn't going to be nice to him in follow-ups, that much was

sure. And if -- when! -- Freddy got wind of the Death Waits

situation...

He began to hyperventilate.

"I'm going to go check on the construction," he said to his personal

assistant, a new girl they'd sent up when his last one had defected to

work for Wiener (Wiener!) after Sammy'd shouted at her for putting

through a press-call from some blogger who wanted to know when

Fantasyland would be re-opening.

It had been a mistake to shut down Fantasyland just to get the other

managers off his back. Sure the rides were sick dogs, but there had

been life in them still. Construction sites don't bring in visitors,

and the numbers for the park were down and everyone was looking at

him. Never mind that the only reason the numbers had been as high as

they were was that Sammy had saved everyone's ass when he'd done the

goth rehab. Never mind that the real reason that numbers were down was

that no one else in management had the guts to keep the park moving

and improving.

He slowed his step on Main Street, USA, and forced himself to pay

attention to his surroundings. The stores on Main Street had been

co-opted into helping him dump all the superfluous goth merchandise,

and it was in their windows and visible through their doors. The

fatkins pizza-stands and ice-cream wagons were doing a brisk trade

around the castle roundabout. The crowd was predominantly veering to

the left, toward Adventureland and Frontierland and Liberty Square,

while the right side of the plaza, which held the gateways to

Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, was conspicuously sparse. He'd known

that his numbers were down, but standing in the crowd's flow, he could

feel it.

He cleared the castle and stood for a moment at the brink of

Fantasyland. It should be impossible to stand here at one in the

afternoon -- there should be busy rushes of people pushing past to get

on the rides and to eat and to buy stuff, but now there were just a

few kids in eyeliner puffing cloves in smokeless hookahs and a

wasteland of hoardings painted a shade Imagineering called "go-away

green" for its ability to make the eye slide right past it.

He'd left the two big coasters open, and they had decent queues, but

that was it. No one was in the stores, and no one was bothering with

the zombie maze. Clouds of dust and loud destruction noises rose over

the hoardings, and he slipped into a staff door and threaded his way

onto one of the sites, pausing to pick up a safety helmet with

mouse-ears.

At least these crews were efficient. He'd long ago impressed on the

department that hired construction contractors the necessity of

decommissioning old rides with extreme care so as to preserve as much

of the collectible value of the finishings and trim as possible. It

was a little weird -- Disney customers howled like stuck pigs when you

shut down their rides, then fought for the chance to spend fortunes

buying up the dismembered corpses of their favored amusements.

He watched some Cuban kids carefully melting the hot glue that had

held the skull trim-elements to the pillar of the Dia de los Muertos

facade, setting them atop a large pile of other trim -- scythes,

hooded figures, tombstones -- with a layer of aerogel beneath to keep

the garriture from scratching. The whole area behind the hoardings was

like this -- rides in pieces, towers of fiberglass detritus sandwiched

between layers of aerogel.

They'd done this before, when he'd taken Fantasyland down, and he'd

fretted every moment about how long the tear-down was taking. There

were exciting new plans lurking in the wings then, waiting to leap

onstage and take shape. He'd had some of the ride components

fabricated by a contractor in Kissimmee, but large chunks of the

construction had to take place onsite. The advantage had been his:

cheap fabricators, new materials, easy collaboration between remote

contractors and his people on-site. No one had ever executed new rides

as fast and as well as he had. The things had basically built

themselves.

Now the competition was using the same tech and it was a fucking

disaster for him. Worse and worse: he had no plans for what was to

come afterward. He'd thought that he'd just grab some of the audience

research people, throw together a fatkins focus group or two, and give

Imagineering two weeks to come up with some designs they could put up

fast. He knew from past experience that design expanded to fill the

time available to it, and that the best stuff usually emerged in the

first ten days anyway, and after that it was all committee

group-think.

But no one from audience research wanted to return his calls, no one

from Imagineering was willing to work for him, and no one wanted to

visit a section of the park that was dominated by construction

hoardings and demolition dust.

What the hell was happening at the Miami ride, anyway? He could follow

it online, run the three-d flythroughs of the ride as it stood, even

download and print his own versions of the ride objects, but none of

that told him what it *felt like* to get on the ride, to be in its

clanking bowels, surrounded by other riders, pointing and marveling

and laughing at the scenes and motion.

Rides were things that you had to ride to understand. Describing a

ride was like talking about a movie -- so abstract and remote. Like

talking about sex versus having sex.

Sammy loved rides. Or he used to, anyway. So much more than films, so

much more than books -- so immersive and human, and the whole crowd

thing, all the other people waiting to ride it or just getting off

it. It had started with coasters -- doesn't every kid love coasters?

-- but he'd ended up a connoisseur, a gourmand who loved every species

of ride, from thrill-rides to monorails, carousels to dark-rides.

There'd been a time when he'd ridden every ride in the park once a

week, and every ride in every nearby park once a month. That had been

years before. Now he sat in an office and made important decisions and

he was lucky if he made it onto a ride once a week.

Not that it mattered anymore. He'd screwed up so bad that it was only

a matter of time until he ended up on the bread-line. Or in jail.

He realized he was staring glumly at the demolition, and pulled

himself upright, sucked in a few breaths, mentally kicked himself in

the ass and told himself to stop feeling sorry for himself.

A young woman pried loose another resin skull finial and added it to

the pile, placed another sheet of aerogel on top of it.

People loved these little tchotchkes. They had a relationship with

Disney Parks that made them want to come again and again, to own a

piece of the place. They came for visits and then they visited in

their hearts and they came back to bring their hearts home. It was an

extremely profitable dynamic.

That's what those ride people up in the Wal-Mart were making their hay

on -- anyone could replicate the ride in their back-yard. You didn't

have to fly from Madison to Orlando to have a little refresher

experience. It was right there, at the end of the road.

If only there was some way to put his rides, his park, right there in

the riders' homes, in their literal back-yards. Being able to look at

the webcams and take a three-d fly-through was one thing, but it

wasn't the physical, visceral experience of being there.

The maintenance crew had finished all the trim and now they were going

after the props and animatronics. They never used to sell these off,

because manufacturing the guts of a robot was too finicky to do any

more than you had to -- it was far better to repurpose them, like the

America Sings geese that had all their skin removed and found a new

home as smart-talking robots in the pre-show for the old Star Tours.

But now it all could be printed to order, fabbed and shipped in. They

weren't even doing their own machining at Imagineering anymore -- that

was all mail-order fulfillment. Just email a three-d drawing to a shop

and you'd have as many as you wanted the next day, FedEx

guaranteed. Sammy's lips drew back from his teeth as he considered the

possibility that the Wal-Mart ride people had ordered their parts from

the same suppliers. Christ on a bike, what a mess.

And there, in the pit of despair, at the bottom of his downward arc,

Sammy was hit by a bolt of inspiration:

Put Disney into people's living rooms! Put printers into their homes

that decorated a corner of their rooms with a replica of a different

ride every day. You could put it on a coffee table, or scale it up to

fill your basement rumpus-room. You could have a magic room that was a

piece of the park, a souvenir that never let go of Disney, there in

your home. The people who were willing to spend a fortune on printed

skull finials would cream for this! It would be like actually living

there, in the park. It would be Imagineering Eye for the Fan Guy.

He could think of a hundred ways to turn this into money. Give away

the printers and sell subscriptions to the refresh. Sell the printers

and give away the refreshes. Charge sponsors to modify the plans and

target different product placements to different users. The

possibilities were endless. Best of all, it would extend the reach of

Disney Parks further than the stupid ride could ever go -- it would be

there, on the coffee table, in the rumpus room, in your school gym or

at your summer place.

He loved it. Loved it! He actually laughed aloud. What a *great* idea!

Sure he was in trouble -- big trouble. But if he could get this thing

going -- and it would go, *fast* -- then Hackelberg would get his

back. The lawyer didn't give a shit if Sammy lived or died, but he

would do anything to protect the company's interests.

Sure, no one from Imagineering had been willing to help him design new

rides. They all had all the new ride design projects they could

use. Audience research too. But this was new, *new new*, not old new,

and new was always appealing to a certain kind of novelty junkie in

Imagineering. He'd find help for this, and then he'd pull together a

business-plan, and a timeline, and a critical path, and he'd start

executing. He wanted a prototype out the door in a week. Christ, it

couldn't be that hard -- those Wal-Mart ride assholes had published

the full schematics for their toys already. He could just rip them

off. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

#

Hilda left Perry after a couple hours working the ticket-booth

together. She wanted to go for a shower and a bit of an explore, and

it was a secret relief to both of them to get some time apart after

all that time living in each others' pockets. They were intimate

strangers still, not yet attuned to each others' moods and needs for

privacy, and a little separation was welcome.

Welcome, too, was Perry's old post there at the ticket counter, like

Lucy's lemonade stand in Peanuts. The riders came on thick, a

surprising number of them knew his name and wanted to know how his arm

was. They were all watching the drama unfold online. They knew about

the Brazilian rides coming online and the patch Lester had run. They

all felt a proprietary interest in this thing. It made him feel good,

but a little weird. He could deal with having friends, and customers,

but fans?

When he got off work, he wandered over to the shantytown with a bunch

of the vendors, to have a customary after-work beer and plate of

ribs. He was about to get his phone out and find Hilda when he spotted

her, gnawing on a greasy bone with Suzanne and Eva.

"Well, *hello*!" he said, delighted, skipping around the barbecue pit

to collect a greasy kiss from Hilda, and more chaste but equally

greasy pecks on the cheek from Suzanne and Eva. "Looks like you've

found the best place in town!"

"We thought we'd show her around," Suzanne said. She and Eva had

positioned each other on either side of Hilda, using her as a buffer,

but it was great to see that they were on something like speaking

terms. Perry had no doubt that Suzanne hadn't led Kettlewell on (they

all had crushes on her, he knew it), but that didn't mean that Eva

wouldn't resent her anyway. If their positions were reversed, he would

have had a hard time controlling his jealousy.

"They've been wonderful," Hilda said, offering him a rib. He

introduced her to the market-stall sellers who'd come over with him

and there was more greasy handshaking and hugging, and the proprietor

of the joint started handing around more ribs, more beers, and someone

brought out a set of speakers and suction-cupped their

induction-surfaces to a nearby wall, and Perry dropped one of his

earbuds into them and set it to shuffle and they had music.

Kids ran past them in shrieking hordes, playing some kind of big game

that they'd all been obsessed with. Perry saw that Ada and Lyenitchka

were with them, clutching brightly colored mobiles and trying to read

their screens while running away from another gang of kids who were

clearly "it," taking exaggerated care not to run into invisible

obstacles indicated on the screens.

"It was great to get back into the saddle," Perry said, digging into

some ribs, getting sauce on his fingers. "I had no idea how much I'd

been missing it."

Hilda nodded. "I could tell, anyway. You're a junkie for it. You're

like the ones who show up all googly-eyed about the 'story' that's

supposedly in there. You act like that's a holy box."

Suzanne nodded solemnly. "She's right. The two of you, you and Lester,

you're so into that thing, you're the biggest fanboys in the

world. You know what they call it, the fans, when they get together to

chat about the stuff they love? Drooling. As in, 'Did you see the

drool I posted this morning about the new girl's bedroom scene?' You

drool like no one's business when you talk about that thing. It's a

holy thing for you."

"You guys sound like you've been comparing notes," Perry said, making

his funny eyebrow dance.

Eva arched one of her fine, high eyebrows in response. In some ways,

she was the most beautiful of all of them, the most self-assured and

poised. "Of course we were, sonny. Your young lady here needed to know

that you aren't an axe-murderer." The women's camaraderie was almost

palpable. Suzanne and Eva had clearly patched up whatever differences

they'd had, which was probably bad news for Kettlewell.

"Where is Lester, anyway?" He hadn't planned on asking, but Suzanne's

mention of his name led him to believe he could probably get away with

it.

"He's talking to Brazil," Suzanne said. "It's all he's done, all day

long."

Talking to Brazil. Wow. Perry'd thought of Brazil as a kind of

abstract thing, fifty rogue nodes on the network that had necessitated

a hurried software patch. Not as a bunch of people. But of course,

there they were, in Brazil, real people by the dozens, maybe even

hundreds, building rides.

"He doesn't speak Spanish, though," Perry said.

"Neither do they, dork," Hilda said, giving him an elbow in the

ribs. "Portuguese."

"They all speak some English and he's using automated translation

stuff for the hard concepts."

"Does that work? I mean, any time I've tried to translate a web-page

in Japanese or Hebrew, it's kind of read like noun noun noun noun verb

noun random."

Suzanne shook her head. "That's how most of the world experiences most

of the net, Perry. Anglos are just about the only people on earth who

don't read the net in languages other than their own."

"Well, good for Lester then," he said.

Suzanne made a sour face that let him know that whatever peace

prevailed between her and Lester, it was fragile. "Good for him," she

said.

"Where are the boys?"

"Landon and Tjan have them," Eva said. "They've been holed up with

your lawyers going over strategy with them. When I walked out, they

were trying to get the firm's partners to take shares in the

corporation that owns the settlement in lieu of cash up front."

"Man that's all too weird for me," Perry said. "I wish we could just

run this thing like a business: make stuff people want to give us

money for, collect the money, and spend it."

"You are such a nerd fatalist," Suzanne said. "Getting involved in the

more abstract elements of commerce doesn't make you into a suit. If

you don't participate and take an interest, you'll always be

out-competed by those who do."

"Bull," Perry said. "They can get a court to order us to make pi equal

to three, or to ensure that other people don't make Mickey heads in

their rides, or that our riders don't think of Disney when they get

into one of our chairs, but they'll never be able to enforce it."

Suzanne suddenly whirled on him. "Perry Gibbons, you aren't that

stupid, so stop acting like you are." She touched his cast. "Look at

this thing on your arm. Your superior technology can *not* make

inferior laws irrelevant. You're assuming that the machinery of state

is unwilling to completely shut you down in order to make you comply

with some minor law. You're totally wrong. They'll come after you and

break your head."

Perry rocked back on his heels. He was suddenly furious, even if

somewhere in his heart of hearts he knew that she was right and he was

mostly angry at being shown up in front of Hilda. "I've been hearing

that all my life, Suzanne. I don't buy it. Look, it just keeps getting

cheaper and easier to make something like what we've built. To get a

printer, to get goop, to make stuff, to download stuff, to message and

IM with people who'll help you make stuff. To learn how to make

it. Look, the world is getting better because we're getting better at

routing around the bullies. We can play their game, or we can invent a

new game.

"I refuse to be sucked into playing their game. If we play their game,

we end up just like them."

Suzanne shook her head sadly. "It's a good thing you've got Tjan and

Kettlewell around then, to do the dirty work. I just hope you can

spare them a little pity from atop your moral high-ground."

She took Eva by the arm and led her away, leaving Perry, shaking, with

Hilda.

"Bitch," he said, kicking the ground. He balled his hands into fists

and then quickly relaxed them as his broken arm ground and twinged

from the sudden tensing.

Hilda took him by the arm. "You two clearly have a *lot* of history."

He took a couple deep breaths. "She was so out of line there. What the

hell, anyway? Why should I have to --" He stopped. He could tell when

he was repeating himself.

"I don't think that she would be telling you that stuff if she didn't

think you needed to hear it."

"You sound like you're on her side. I thought you were a fiery young

revolutionary. You think we should all put on suits and incorporate?"

"I think that if you've got skilled people willing to help you, you

owe it to them to value their contribution. I've heard you complain

about 'suits' twenty times in the past week. Two of those suits are on

your side. They're putting themselves on the line, just like

you. Hell, they're doing the shit-work while you get to do all the

inventing and fly around the country and get laid by hot groupies."

She kissed his cheek, trying to make a joke of it, but she'd really

hurt his feelings. He felt like weeping. It was all out of his

control. His destiny was not his to master.

"OK, let's go apologize to Kettlewell and Tjan."

She laughed, but he'd only been halfway kidding. What he really wanted

to do was have a big old dinner at home with Lester, just the two of

them in front of the TV, eating Lester's fatkins cuisine, planning a

new invention. He was tired of all these people. Even Suzanne was an

outsider. It had just been him and Lester in the old days, and those

had been the best days.

Hilda put her arm around his shoulders and nuzzled his neck. "Poor

Perry," she said. "Everyone picks on him."

He smiled in spite of himself.

"Come on, sulkypants, let's go find Lester and he can call me 'Yoko'

some more. That always cheers you up."

#

It was two weeks before Death Waits could sit up and prod at a

keyboard with his broken hands. Some of his pals brought a laptop

around and they commandeered a spare dining tray to keep it on --

Death's lap was in no shape to support anything heavy with sharp

corners.

The first day, he was reduced to tears of frustration within minutes

of starting. He couldn't use the shift key, couldn't really use the

mouse -- and the meds made it hard to concentrate and remember what

he'd done.

But there were people on the other end of that computer, human friends

whom he could communicate with if only he could re-learn to use this

tool that he'd lived with since he was old enough to sit up on his

own.

So laboriously, peck by peck, key by key, he learned to use it

again. The machine had a mode for disabled people, for *cripples*, and

once he hit on this, it went faster. The mode tried to learn from him,

learn his tremors and mis-keys, his errors and cursing, and so emerge

something that was uniquely his interface. It was a kind of a game to

watch the computer try to guess what was meant by his mashed

keystrokes and spastic pointer-movements -- he turned on the webcam

and aimed it at his eye, and switched it to retinal scanner mode,

giving it control of the pointer, then watched in amusement as the

wild leaping of the cursor every time a needle or a broken bone

shifted inside his body was becalmed into a graceful, normalized

curve.

It was humiliating to be a high-tech cripple and the better the

technology worked, the more prone it was to reducing him to tears. He

might be like this for the rest of his life. He might never walk

without a limp again. Might never dance. Might never be able to reach

for and lift objects again. He'd never find a woman, never have a

family, never have grandkids.

But this was offset by the real people with their real chatter. He

obsessively flew through the Brazilian mode, strange and wonderful but

nowhere near what he loved from "his" variation on the ride. He could

roll through all the different changes he'd made with his friends to

the ride in Florida, and he became subtly attuned to which elements

were wrong and which were right.

It was on one of these flythroughs that he encountered The Story,

leaping out of the ride so vividly that he yelped like he'd flexed his

IV into a nerve again.

There it was -- irrefutable and indefinable. When you rode through

there was an escalating tension, a sense of people who belonged to

these exhibits going through hard changes, growing up and out.

Once he'd seen it, he couldn't un-see it. When he and his pals had

started to add their own stuff to the ride, the story people had been

giant pains in the ass, accusing them of something they called

"narricide" -- destroying the fragile story that humanity had laid

bare there.

Now that he'd seen it too, he wanted to protect it. But he could see

by skimming forward and back through the change-log and trying

different flythroughs that the story wasn't being undermined by the

goth stuff they were bringing in; it was being enhanced. It was

telling the story he knew, of growing up with an indefinable need to

be *different*, to reject the mainstream and to embrace this

subculture and aesthetic.

It was the story of his tribe and sub-species and it got realer the

more he played it. God, how could he have *missed it*? It made him

want to cry, though that might have been the meds. Some of it made him

want to laugh, too.

He tried, laboriously, to compose a message-board post that expressed

what he was feeling, but every attempt came out sounding like those

story mystics he'd battled. He understood now why they'd sounded so

hippy-trippy.

So he rode the ride, virtually, again and again, spotting the

grace-notes and the sly wit and the wrenching emotion that the

collective intelligence of all those riders had created. Discovered?

It was like the story was there all along, lurking like the statue

inside a block of marble.

Oh, it was wonderful. He was ruined, maybe forever, but it was

wonderful. And he'd been a part of it.

He went back to writing that message-board post. He'd be laid in that

bed for a long time yet. He had time to rewrite.

#

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM, RIP THEM OFF

A new initiative from the troubled Disney Parks corporation shows how

a little imagination can catapult an ambitious exec to the top of the

corporate ladder.

Word has it that Samuel R.D. Page, the Vice President for Fantasyland

(I assure you, I am NOT making that up) has been kicked upstairs to

Senior Vice President for Remote Delivery of Park Experience (I'm not

making that up, either). Insiders in the company tell us that "Remote

Delivery of Park Experience" is a plan to convince us to give The

Mouse a piece of our homes which will be constantly refreshed via a

robot three-dimensional printer with miniatures of the Disney park.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It's a pale imitation of the

no-less-ridiculous (if slightly less evil) "rides" movement pioneered

by Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, previously the anti-heroes of the

New Work pump-and-dump scandal.

Imitation is meant to be the sincerest form of flattery, and if so,

Gibbons and his cultists must be blushing fire-engine red.

This is cheap irony, Disney-style. After all, it's only been a month

since the company launched ten separate lawsuits against various

incarnations of the ride for trademark violation, and it's now trying

to duck the punishing countersuits that have risen up in their wake.

Most ironic of all, word has it that Page was responsible for both

ends of this: the lawsuits against the ride and the decision to turn

his company into purveyors of cheap knockoffs of the ride.

Page is best known among Park aficionados for having had the

"foresight" to gut the children's "Fantasyland" district in Walt

Disney World and replace it with a jumped up version of Hot Topic, a

goth-themed area that drew down the nation's eyeliner supply to

dangerously low levels.

It was apparently that sort of "way-out-of-the-box" "genius" that led

Page to his latest round of disasters: the lawsuits, an abortive

rebuilding of Fantasyland, and now this "Remote Delivery" scam.

What's next? The Mouse has already shipped Disney Dollars, an abortive

home-wares line, a disastrous fine-art chain, and oversaw the collapse

of the collectible cel-art market. With "visionaries" like Page at the

helm, the company can't help but notch up more "successes."

#

Death was deep into the story now. The Brazilians had forked off their

own ride -- they'd had their own New Work culture, too, centered in

the favelas, so they had different stories to tell. Some of the ride

operators imported a few of their scenes, tentatively, and some of the

ride fans were recreating the Brazil scenes on their own passes

through the ride.

It was all in there, if you knew where to look for it, and the best

part was, no one had written it. It had written itself. The collective

judgement of people who rode through had turned chaos into coherence.

Or had it? The message-boards were rife with speculation that The

Story had been planted by someone -- maybe the ride's creators, maybe

some clan of riders -- who'd inserted it deliberately. These

discussions bordered on the metaphysical: what was an "organic" ride

decision? It made Death Waits's head swim.

The thing that was really doing his head in, though, was the Disney

stuff. Sammy -- he couldn't even think of Sammy without a sick feeling

in his stomach, crashing waves of nausea that transcended even his

narcotic haze -- Sammy was making these grotesque parodies of the

ride. He was pushing them out to the world's living rooms. Even the

deleted rides from the glory days of the goth Fantasyland, in

time-limited miniature. If he'd still been at Disney Parks, he would

have loved this idea. It was just what he loved, the knowledge that he

was sharing experience with his people around the world, part of a

tribe even if he couldn't see them.

Now, in the era of the ride, he could see how dumb this was. How thin

and shallow and commercial. Why should they have to pay some giant

evil corporation to convene their community?

He kept trying to write about The Story, kept failing. It wouldn't

come. But Sammy -- he knew what he wanted to say about Sammy. He typed

until they sedated him, and then typed some more when he woke up. He

had old emails to refer to. He pasted them in.

After three days of doing this, the lawyer came back. Tom Levine was

dressed in a stern suit with narrow lapels and a tie pierced with some

kind of frat pin. He wasn't much older than Death, but he made Death

feel like a little kid.

"I need to talk to you about your Internet activity," he said, sitting

down beside him. He'd brought along a salt-water taffy assortment

bought from the roadside, cut into double-helix molecules and other

odd biological forms -- an amoeba, a skeleton.

"OK?" Death said. They'd switched him to something new for the pain

that day, and given him a rocker-switch he could use to drizzle it

into his IV when it got bad. He'd hit it just before the lawyer came

to see him and now he couldn't concentrate much. Plus he wasn't used

to talking. Writing online was better. He could write something, save

it, go back and re-read it later and clean it up if it turned out he'd

gone off on a stoned ramble.

"You know we're engaged in some very high-stakes litigation here,

right, Darren?"

He hated it when people called him Darren.

"Death," he said. His toothless lisp was pathetic, like an old wino's.

"Death, OK. This high-stakes litigation needs a maximum of caution and

control. This is a fifteen-year journey that ends when we've broken

the back of the company that did this to you. It ends when we take

them for every cent, bankrupt their executives, take their summer

homes, freeze their accounts. You understand that?"

Death hadn't really understood that. It sounded pretty

tiring. Exhausting. Fifteen years. He was only nineteen now. He'd be

thirty-four, and that was only if the lawyer was estimating correctly.

"Oh," he said.

"Well, not that you're going to have to take part in fifteen years'

worth of this. It's likely we'll be done with your part in a year,

tops. But the point is that when you go online and post material

that's potentially harmful to this case --"

Death closed his eyes. He'd posted the wrong thing. This had been a

major deal when he was at Disney, what he was and wasn't allowed to

post about -- though in practice, he'd posted about everything,

sticking the private stuff in private discussions.

"Look, you can't write about the case, or anything involved with it,

that's what it comes down to. If you write about that stuff and you

say the wrong thing, you could blow this whole suit. They'd get away

clean."

Death shook his head. Not write about it at *all*?

"No," he said. "No."

"I'm not asking you, Death. I can get a court order if I have to. This

is serious -- it's not some funny little game. There are billions on

the line here. One wrong word, one wrong post and *pfft*, it's all

over. And nothing in email, either -- it's likely everything you write

is going to go through discovery. Don't write anything personal in any

of your mail -- nothing you wouldn't want in a court record."

"I can't do that," Death said. He sounded like a fucking retard,

between talking through his mashed mouth and talking through the

tears. "I can't. I live in email."

"Well, now you'll have a reason to go outside. This isn't up for

negotiation. When I was here last, I thought I made the seriousness of

this case clear to you. I'm frankly amazed that you were immature and

irresponsible enough to write what I've read."

"I can't --" Death said.

The lawyer purpled. He didn't look like a happy-go-lucky tanned

preppie anymore. He looked Dad-scary, like one of those fathers in

Disney who was about to seriously lose his shit and haul off and smack

a whiny kid. Death's own Pawpaw, who'd stood in for his father, had

gone red like that whenever he "mouthed off," a sin that could be

committed even without opening his mouth. He had an instinctive

curl-up-and-hide reaction to it, and the lawyer seemed to sense this,

looming over him. He felt like he was about to be eaten.

"You listen to me, *Darren* -- this is not the kind of thing you fuck

up. This isn't something *I'm* going to fuck up. I win my cases and

you're not going to change that. There's too much at stake here for

you to blow it all with your childish, selfish --"

He seemed to catch himself then, and he snorted a hot breath through

his nose that blew over Death's face. "Listen, there's a lot on the

line here. More money than you or I are worth. I'm trying to help you

out here. Whatever you write, whatever you say, it's going to be very

closely scrutinized. From now on, you should treat every piece of

information that emanates from your fingertips as likely to be covered

on the evening news and repeated to everyone you've ever met. No

matter how private you think you're being, it'll come out. It's not

pretty, and I know you didn't ask for it, but you're here, and there's

nothing you can do to change that.

He left then, embarrassed at losing his temper, embarrassed at Death's

meek silence. Death poked at his laptop some. He thought about writing

down more notes, but that was probably in the same category.

He closed his eyes and now, *now* he felt the extent of his injuries,

felt them truly for the first time since he'd woken up in this

hospital. There were deep, grinding pains in his legs -- both knees

broken, fracture in the left thigh. His ribs hurt every time he

breathed. His face was a ruin, his mouth felt like he had twisted

lumps of hamburger glued to his torn lips. His dick -- well, they'd

catheterized him, but that didn't account for the feelings down

there. He'd been kicked repeatedly and viciously, and they told him

that the reconstructive surgeries -- surgeries, plural -- would take

some time, and nothing was certain until they were done.

He'd managed to pretend that his body wasn't there for so long as he

was able to poke at the computer. Now it came back to him. He had the

painkiller rocker-switch and the pain wasn't any worse than what

passed for normal, but he had an idea that if he hit it enough times,

he'd be able to get away from his body for a while again.

He tried it.

#

Hilda and Lester sat uncomfortably on the sofa next to each

other. Perry had hoped they'd hit it off, but it was clear after

Lester tried his Yoko joke again that the chemistry wasn't there. Now

they were having a rare moment of all-look-same-screen, the TV

switched on like in an old comedy, no one looking at their own laptop.

The tension was thick, and Perry was sick of it.

He reached for his computer and asked it to find him the baseball

gloves. Two of the drawers on the living-room walls glowed pink. He

fetched the gloves down, tossed one to Lester, and picked up his ball.

"Come on," he said. "TV is historically accurate, but it's not very

social."

Lester got up from the sofa, a slow smile spreading on his face, and

Hilda followed a minute later. Outside, by the cracked pool, it was

coming on slow twilight and that magic, tropical blood-orange sky like

a swirl of sorbet.

Lester and Perry each put on their gloves. Perry'd worn his now and

again, but had never had a real game of catch with it. Lester lobbed

an easy toss to him and when it smacked his glove, it felt so *right*,

the sound and the vibration and the fine cloud of dust that rose up

from the mitt's pocket, Christ, it was like a sacrament.

He couldn't lob the ball back, because of his busted wing, so he

handed the ball to Hilda. "You're my designated right arm," he

said. She smiled and chucked the ball back to Lester.

They played until the twilight deepened to velvety warm dark and

humming bugs and starlight. Each time he caught a ball, something left

Perry, some pain long held in his chest, evanesced into the night

air. His catching arm, stiff from being twisted by the weight of the

cast on his other hand, unlimbered and became fluid. His mind was

becalmed.

None of them talked, though they sometimes laughed when a ball went

wild, and both Perry and Lester went "ooh," when Lester made a

jump-catch that nearly tumbled him into the dry pool.

Perry hadn't played a game of catch since he was a kid. Catch wasn't

his dad's strong suit, and he and his friends had liked video-games

better than tossing a ball, which was pretty dull by comparison.

But that night it was magic, and when it got to full dark and they

could barely see the ball except as a second moon hurtling white

through the air, they kept tossing it a few more times before Perry

dropped it into the pocket of his baggy shorts. "Let's get a drink,"

he said.

Lester came over and gave him a big, bearish hug. Then Hilda joined

them. "You stink," Lester said, "Seriously, dude. Like the ass of a

dead bear."

That broke them up and set them to laughing together, a giggling fit

that left them gasping, Lester on all fours. Perry's arm forgot to

hurt and he moved to kiss Hilda on the cheek and instead she turned

her head to kiss him full on the lips, a real juicy, steamy one that

made his ear-wax melt.

"Drinks," Hilda said, breaking the kiss.

They went upstairs, holding the mitts, and had a beer together on the

patio, talking softly about nothing in particular, and then Lester

hugged them good night and then they all went to bed, and Perry put

his face into the hair at the back of Hilda's neck and told her he

loved her, and Hilda snuggled up to him and they fell asleep.

#

A GAME OF CATCH

Pop-quiz: Your empire is crumbling around your ears. Your supporters

are hospitalized by jackboot thugs for sticking up for you.

The lawsuits are mounting and fly-by-night MBAs have determined to use

your non-profit, info-hippie ride project to get right by embarking on

20 years of litigation.

What do you do?

Well, if you're like Perry Gibbons, Lester Banks and Hilda Hammersen,

you go out into the backyard and throw a ball around for a while, then

you have a big cuddle and head inside.

The pictures shown here were captured by a neighbor of the cult

leaders last night, at their palatial condos in Hollywood, Florida.

The three are ring-leaders of the loose-knit organization that manages

the "rides" that dot ten cities in America and are present in fifty

cities in Brazil. Their project came to national attention when Disney

brought suit against them, securing injunctions against the rides that

resulted in riots and bloodshed.

One supporter of the group, the outspoken "Death Waits," a former

Disney employee, has been hospitalized for over a week following a

savage beating that he claims resulted from his Internet posting about

the unhealthy obsession Disney executive Samuel R.D. Page (see

previous coverage) bore for the ride.

Everyone needs to unwind now and then, but sources at the hospital

where Death Waits lies abed say that he has had no visits from the

cult leaders since he took his beating in their service.

No doubt these three have more important things to do -- like play

catch.

#

Suzanne said, "Look, you can't let crazy people set your agenda. If

you want to visit this Death kid, you should. If you don't, you

shouldn't. But don't let Freddy psy-ops you into doing something you

don't want to do. Maybe he does have a rat in your building. Maybe

he's got a rat at the hospital. Maybe, though, he just scored some

stills off a flickr stream, maybe he's watching new photos with some

face-recognition stuff."

Perry looked up from his screen, still scowling. "People do that?"

"Sure -- stalkerware! I use it myself, just to see what photos of me

are showing up online. I scour every photo-feed published for anything

that appears to be a photo of me. Most of it's from blogjects, CCTV

cameras and crap like that. You should see what it's like on days I go

to London -- you can get photographed 800 times a day there without

trying. So yeah, if I was Freddy and I wanted to screw with you, I'd

be watching every image feed for your pic, and mine, and Lester's. We

just need to assume that that's going on. But look at what he actually

reported on: you went out and played catch and then hugged after your

game. It's not like he caught you cornholing gators while smoking

spliffs rolled in C-notes."

"What does that guy have against us, anyway?"

Suzanne sighed. "Well, at first I think it was that *I* liked you, and

that you were trying to do something consistent with what he thought

everyone should be doing. After all, if anyone were to follow his

exhortations, they'd have to be dumb enough to be taking him

seriously, and for that they deserve all possible disapprobation.

"These days, though, he hates you for two reasons. The first is that

you failed, which means that you've got to have some kind of moral

deficiency. The second is that we keep pulling his pants down in

public, which makes him even angrier, since pulling down people's

pants is *his* job.

"I know it's armchair psychology, but I think that Freddy just doesn't

like himself very much. At the end of the day, people who are secure

and happy don't act like this."

Perry's scowl deepened. "I'd like to kick him in the fucking balls,"

he said. "Why can't he just let us be? We've got enough frigging

problems."

"I just want to go and visit this kid," Lester said, and they were

back where they started.

"But we know that this Freddy guy has an informant in the hospital, he

about says as much in this article. If we go there, he wins," Perry

said.

Hilda and Lester just looked at him. Finally he smiled and

relented. "OK, Freddy isn't going to run my life. If it's the right

thing to visit this kid, it's the right thing. Let's do it."

"We'll go after the ride shuts tonight," Lester said. "All of us. I'll

buy him a fruit basket and bring him a mini." The minis were Lester's

latest mechanical computers, built inside of sardine cans, made of

miniaturized, printed, high-impact alloys. They could add and subtract

numbers up to ten, using a hand crank on the side, registering their

output on a binary display of little windows that were covered and

uncovered by tiny shutters. He'd built his first the day before, using

designs supplied by some of his people in Brazil and tweaking them to

his liking.

The day was as close to a normal day on the ride as Perry could

imagine. The crowd was heavy from the moment he opened, and he had to

go back into the depths and kick things back into shape a couple

times, and one of the chairs shut down, and two of the merchants had a

dispute that degenerated into a brawl. Just another day running a

roadside attraction in Florida.

Lester spelled him off for the end of the day, then they counted the

take and said good night to the merchants and all piled into one of

Lester's cars and headed for the hospital.

"You liking Florida?" Lester called over the seat as they inched

forward in the commuter traffic on the way into Melbourne.

"It's hot; I like that," Hilda said.

"You didn't mention the awesome aesthetics," Lester said.

Suzanne rolled her eyes. "Ticky-tacky chic," she said.

"I love it here," Lester said. "That contrast between crass,

overdeveloped, cheap, nasty strip-malls and unspoiled tropical

beauty. It's gorgeous *and* it tickles my funny bone."

Hilda squinted out the window as though she were trying to see what

Lester saw, like someone staring at a random-dot stereogram in a

mall-store, trying to make the three-d image pop out.

"If you say so," she said. "I don't find much attractive about human

settlement, though. If it needs to be there, it should just be

invisible as possible. We fundamentally live in ugly boxes, and

efforts to make them pretty never do anything for me except call

attention to how ugly they are. I kinda wish that everything was built

to disappear as much as possible so we could concentrate on the

loveliness of the world."

"You get that in Madison?" Lester said.

"Nope," she said. "I've never seen any place designed the way I'd

design one. Maybe I'll do that someday."

Perry loved her just then, for that. The casual "oh, yeah, the world

isn't arranged to my satisfaction, maybe I'll rearrange it someday."

The duty-nurse was a bored Eastern European who gave them a

half-hearted hard time about having too many people visit Death Waits

all at once, but who melted when Suzanne gave her a little talk in

Russian.

"What was that all about?" Perry whispered to her as they made their

way along the sour-smelling ward.

"Told her we would keep it down -- and complimented her on her

manicure."

Lester shook his head. "I haven't been in a place like this in so

long. The fatkins places are nothing like it."

Hilda snorted. "More upscale, I take it?" Lester and Hilda hadn't

really talked about the fatkins thing, but Perry suddenly remembered

the vehemence with which Hilda had denounced the kids who were talked

into fatkins treatments in their teens and wondered if she and Lester

should be clearing the air.

"Not really -- but more functional. More about, I don't know, pursuing

your hobby. Less about showing up in an emergency."

Hilda snorted again and they were at Death's room. They walked past

his roommates, an old lady with her teeth out, sleeping with her jaw

sagging down, and a man in a body-cast hammering on a video-game

controller and staring fixedly at the screen at the foot of his bed.

Then they came upon Death Waits. Perry had only seen him briefly, and

in bad shape even then, but now he was a wreck, something from a

horror movie or an atrocity photo. Perry swallowed hard as he took in

the boy's wracked, skinny body, the casts, the sunken eyes, the shaved

head, the caved-in face and torn ears.

He was fixedly watching TV, which seemed to be showing a golf

show. His thumb was poised over a rocker-switch connected to the IV in

his arm.

Death looked at them with dull eyes at first, not recognizing them for

a moment. Then he did, and his eyes welled up with tears. They

streamed down his face and his chin and lip quivered, and then he

opened his mouth and started to bawl like a baby.

Perry was paralyzed -- transfixed by this crying wreck. Lester, too,

and Suzanne. They all took a minute step backward, but Hilda pushed

past them and took his hand and stroked his hair and went *shhh*,

*shhh*. His bawling become more uncontrolled, louder, and his two

roommates complained, calling to him to shut up, and Suzanne moved

back and drew the curtains around each of their beds. Strangely, this

silenced them.

Gradually, Death's cries became softer, and then he snuffled and

snorted and Hilda gave him a kleenex from her purse. He wiped his face

and blew his nose and squeezed the kleenex tight in his hand. He

opened his mouth, shut it, opened and shut it.

Then, in a whisper, he told them his story. The man in the parking-lot

and his erection. The hospital. Posting on the message boards.

The lawyer.

"*What*?" Perry said, loud enough that they all jumped and Death Waits

flinched pathetically in his hospital bed. Hilda squeezed his arm

hard. "Sorry, sorry," Perry muttered. "But this lawyer, what did he

say to you?"

Perry listened for a time. Death Waits spoke in a low monotone,

pausing frequently to draw in shuddering breaths that were almost

sobs.

"Fucking *bastards*," Perry said. "Evil, corporate, immoral, sleazy

--"

Hilda squeezed his arm again. "Shh," she said. "Take it easy. You're

upsetting him."

Perry was so angry he could barely see, barely think. He was

trembling, and they were all staring at him, but he couldn't

stop. Death had shrunk back into himself, squeezed his eyes shut.

"I'll be back in a minute," Perry said. He felt like he was

suffocating. He walked out of the room so fast it was practically a

jog, then pounded on the elevator buttons, waited ten seconds and gave

up and ran down ten flights of stairs. He got outside into the

coolness of the hazy night and sucked in huge lungsful of wet air, his

heart hammering in his chest.

He had his phone in his hand and he had scrolled to Kettlewell's

number, but he kept himself from dialing it. He was in no shape to

discuss this with Kettlewell. He wanted witnesses there when he did

it, to keep him from doing something stupid.

He went back inside. The security guards watched him closely, but he

forced himself to smile and act calm and they didn't stop him from

boarding the elevator.

"I'm sorry," he said to all of them. "I'm sorry," he said to Death

Waits. "Let me make something very, very clear: you are free to use

the Internet as much as you want. You are free to tell your story to

anyone you want to tell it to. Even if it screws up my case, you're

free to do that. You've given up enough for me already."

Death looked at him with watery eyes. "Really?" he said. It came out

in a hoarse whisper.

Perry moved the breakfast tray that covered Death's laptop, then

opened the laptop and positioned it where Death could reach it. "It's

all yours, buddy. Whatever you want to say, say it. Let your freak

flag fly."

Death cried again then, silent tears slipping down his hollow

cheeks. Perry got him some kleenex from the bathroom and he blew his

nose and wiped his face and grinned at them all, a toothless, wet,

ruined smile that made Perry's heart lurch. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. What

the hell was he doing? This kid -- he would never get the life he'd

had back.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," Death said.

"Please don't be grateful to me," Perry said. "We owe you the thanks

around here. Remember that. We haven't done you any favors. All the

favors around here have come from you.

"Any lawyer shows up here again representing me, I want you to email

me."

In the car back, no one said anything until they were within sight of

the shantytown. "Kettlewell isn't going to like this," Suzanne said.

"Yeah, I expect not," Perry said. "He can go fuck himself."

#

Imagineering sent the prototype up to Sammy as soon as it was ready,

the actual engineers who'd been working on it shlepping it into his

office.

He'd been careful to cultivate their friendship through the weeks of

production, taking them out for beers and delicately letting them know

that they were just the sort of people who really understood what

Disney Parks was about, not like those philistines who comprised the

rest of the management layer at Disney. He learned their kids' names

and forwarded jokes to them by email. He dropped by their break-room

and let them beat him at pinball on their gigantic, bizarre,

multi-board homebrew machine, letting them know just how cool said

machine was.

Now it was paying off. Judging from the device he was looking at, a

breadbox-sized, go-away-green round-shouldered smooth box that it took

two of them to carry in.

"Watch this," one of them said. He knocked a complicated pattern on

the box's top and a hidden hatch opened out of the side, yawning out

and forming a miniature staircase from halfway down the box's surface

to the ground. There was soft music playing inside the box: a jazzy,

uptempo futuristic version of *When You Wish upon a Star*.

A little man appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was made of

pipe-cleaners and he took the stairs in three wobbling strides. He

ignored them as he lurched around the box's perimeter until he came to

a far corner, then another hatch slid away and the little man reached

inside and tugged out the plug and the end of the power-cord. He

hugged the plug to his chest and began to wander around Sammy's desk,

clearly looking for an electrical outlet.

"It's a random-walk search algorithm," one of the Imagineers

said. "Watch this." After a couple of circuits of Sammy's desk the

little robot went to the edge and jumped, hanging on to the

power-cable, which unspooled slowly from the box like a belay-line,

gently lowering the man to the ground. A few minutes later, he had

found the electrical outlet and plugged in the box.

The music inside stilled and a fanfare began. The trumpeting reached a

joyous peak -- "It's found a network connection" -- and then subsided

into marching-band music. There was a smell like Saran-Wrap in the

microwave. A moment later, another pipe-cleaner man emerged from the

box, lugging a chunk of plastic that looked like the base of a rocket

in an old-timey science fiction movie.

The first pipe-cleaner man was shinnying up the power cable. He

crested the desktop and joined his brother in ferrying out more

parts. Each one snapped into the previous one with a Lego-like

*click*. Taking shape on the desktop in slow stages, the original,

1955 Tomorrowland, complete with the rocket to the moon, the Clock of

the World and --

"Dairy Farmers of America Present the Cow of Tomorrow?" Sammy said,

peering at the little brass plaque on the matchbox-sized diorama,

which showed a cow with an IV in her hock, watching a video of a

pasture. "You're kidding me."

"No!" one Imagineer said. "It's all for real -- the archives have all

these tight, high-rez three-d models of all the rides the Park's ever

seen. This is totally historically accurate."

The Kaiser Aluminum Hall of Fame. The Monsanto Hall of

Chemistry. Thimble Drome Flight Circle, with tiny flying miniature

airplanes.

"Holy crap," Sammy said. "People *paid* to see these things?"

"Go on," the other Imagineer said. "Take the roof off the Hall of

Chemistry."

Sammy did, and was treated to a tiny, incredibly detailed three-d

model of the Hall's interior exhibits, complete with tiny people in

1950s garb marveling at the truly crappy exhibits.

"We print to 1200 dpi with these. We can put pupils on the eyeballs at

that rez."

The pieces were still trundling out. Sammy picked up the Monsanto Hall

of Chemistry and turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the

minute detail, admiring the way all the pieces snapped together.

"It's kind of brittle," the first Imagineer said. He took it from

Sammy and gave it a squeeze and it cracked with a noise like an office

chair rolling over a sheet of bubble-wrap. The pieces fell to the

desk.

A pipe-cleaner man happened upon a shard after a moment and hugged it

to his chest, then toddled back into the box with it.

"There's a little optical scanner in there -- it'll figure out which

bit this piece came from and print another one. Total construction of

this model takes about two hours."

"You built this entire thing from scratch in three weeks?"

The Imagineers laughed. "No, no -- no way! No, almost all the code and

designs came off the net. Most of this stuff was developed by New Work

startups back in the day, or by those ride weirdos down in

Hollywood. We just shoved it all into this box and added the models

for some of our old rides from the archives. This was easy, man --

easy!"

Sammy's head swam. Easy! This thing was undeniably super-cool. He

wanted one. Everyone was going to want one!

"You can print these as big as you want, too -- if we gave it enough

time, space and feedstock, it'd run these buildings at full size."

The miniature Tomorrowland was nearly done. It was all brave, sad

white curves, like the set of a remake of Rollerball, and featured

tiny people in 1950s clothes, sun-dresses and salaryman hats,

black-rimmed glasses and scout uniforms for the boys.

Sammy goggled at it. He moved the little people around, lifted off the

lids.

"Man, I'd seen the three-d models and flythroughs, but they're nothing

compared to actually seeing it, owning it. People will want libraries

of these things. Whole rooms devoted to them."

"Umm," one of the Imagineers said. Sammy knew his name, but he'd

forgotten it. He had a whole complicated scheme for remembering

people's names by making up stories about them, but it was a lot of

work. "Well, about that. This feedstock is very fast-setting, but it

doesn't really weather well. Even if you stored it in a dark,

humidity-controlled room, it'd start to delaminate and fall to pieces

within a month or two. Leave it in the living room in direct sunlight

and it'll crumble within a couple days."

Sammy pursed his lips and thought for a while. "Please, please tell me

that there's something proprietary we can require in the feedstock

that can make us into the sole supplier of consumables for this

thing."

"Maybe? We could certainly tag the goop with something proprietary and

hunt for it when we do the build, refuse to run on anyone else's

goop. Of course, that won't be hard to defeat --"

"We'll sue anyone who tries it," Sammy said. "Oh, boys, you've outdone

yourselves. Seriously. If I could give you a raise, I would. As it is,

take something home from the architectural salvage lot and sell it on

eBay. It's as close to a bonus as this fucking company's going to pay

any of us."

They looked at him quizzically, with some alarm and he smiled and

spread his hands. "Ha ha, only serious boys. Really -- take some stuff

home. You've earned it. Try and grab something from the ride-system

itself, that's got the highest book-value."

They left behind a slim folder with production notes and estimates,

suppliers who would be likely to bid on a job like this. He'd need a

marketing plan, too -- but this was farther than he ever thought he'd

get. He could show this to legal and to the board, and yes, to Wiener

and the rest of the useless committee. He could get everyone lined up

behind this and working on it. Hell, if he spun it right they'd all be

fighting to have their pet projects instantiated with it.

He fiddled with a couple of overnight shippers' sites for a while,

trying to figure out what it would cost to sell these in the Park and

have them waiting on the marks' doorsteps when they got back

home. There were lots of little details like that, but ultimately,

this was good and clean -- it would extend the Parks' reach right into

the living rooms of their customers, giving them a new reason to think

of the Park every day.

#

Kettlewell and Tjan looked up when Perry banged through the door of

the tea-house they'd turned into their de facto headquarters.

Perry had gone through mad and back to calm on the ride home, but as

he drew closer to the tea-house, passing the people in the streets,

the people living their lives without lawyers or bullshit, his anger

came back. He'd even stopped outside the tea-house and breathed

deeply, but his heart was pounding and his hands kept balling into

fists and sometimes, man, sometimes you've just got to go for it.

He got to the table and grabbed the papers there and tossed them over

his shoulder.

"You're fired," he said. "Pack up and go, I want you out by

morning. You're done here. You don't represent the ride and you never

will. Get lost." He didn't know he was going to say it until he said

it, but it felt right. This was what he was feeling -- *his* project

had been stolen and bad things were being done in *his* name and it

was going to stop, right now.

Tjan and Kettlewell got to their feet and looked at him, faces blank

with shock. Kettlewell recovered first. "Perry, let's sit down and do

an exit interview, all right? That's traditional."

Perry was shaking with anger now. These two friends of his, they'd

fucking screwed him -- committed their dirty work in his name. But

Kettlewell was holding a chair out to him and the others in the

tea-house were staring and he thought about Eva and the kids and the

baseball gloves, and he sat down.

He squeezed his thighs hard with his clenching hands, drew in a deep

breath, and recited what Death Waits had told him in an even, wooden

voice.

"So that's it. I don't know if you instructed the lawyers to do this

or only just distanced yourself enough from them to let them do this

on their own. The point is that the way you're running this campaign

is victimizing people who believe in us, making life worse for people

who already got a shitty, shitty deal on our account. I won't have

it."

Kettlewell and Tjan looked at each other. They'd both stayed

poker-faced through Perry's accusation, and now Kettlewell made a

little go-ahead gesture at Tjan.

"There's no excuse for what that lawyer did. We didn't authorize it,

we didn't know it had happened, and we wouldn't have permitted it if

we had. In a suit like this, there are a lot of moving parts and

there's no way to keep track of all of them all of the time. You don't

know what every ride operator in the world is up to, you don't even

know where all the rides in the world *are*. That's in the nature of a

decentralized business.

"But here's the thing: the lawyer was at least partly

right. Everything that kid blogs, emails, and says will potentially

end up in the public record. Like it or not, that kid can no longer

consider himself to have a private life, not until the court case is

up. Neither can you or I, for that matter. That's in the nature of a

lawsuit -- and it's not something any of us can change at this point."

Perry heard him as from a great distance, through the whooshing of the

blood in his ears. He couldn't think of anything to say to that.

Tjan and Kettlewell looked at each other.

"So even if we're 'fired' --" Tjan said at last, making sarcastic

finger-quotes, "this problem won't go away. We've floated the

syndicate and given control of the legal case to them. If you try to

ditch it, you're going to have to contend with *their* lawsuits, too."

"I didn't --" Perry started. But he had, he'd signed all kinds of

papers: first, papers that incorporated the ride-runners' co-op; and,

second, papers that gave legal representation over to the syndicate.

"Perry, I'm the chairman of the Boston ride collective. I'm their rep

on the co-op's board. You can't fire me. You didn't hire me. They

did. So stop breathing through your nose like a locomotive and calm

down. None of us wanted that lawyer to go after that kid."

He knew they were making sense but he didn't want to care. He'd ended

up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up.

He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end

up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did

shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't

going to go there.

"Tomorrow morning," he said. "Gone. We can figure out by email how to

have a smooth transition, but no more of this. Not on my head. Not on

my account."

He stalked away, which is what he should have done in the first

place. Fuck being reasonable. Reasonable sucked.

#

Death found out about the Disney-in-a-Box printers seconds after they

were announced. He'd been tuning his feed-watchers to give him news

about the Disney Parks for nearly a decade, and this little PR item on

the Disney Parks newswire rang all the cherries on his filters,

flagging the item red and rocketing it to the top of his news

playlist, making all the icons in the sides of his screen bounce with

delight.

The announcement made him want to throw up. They were totally ripping

off the rides, and he knew for a fact that most of the three-d meshes

of the old yesterland rides and even the contemporary ones were

fan-made, so those'd be ripped off, too.

And the worst part was, he could feel himself getting excited. This

was just the kind of thing that would have given him major fanboy

drool as recently as a month ago.

He just stared angrily at his screen. Being angry made the painkillers

wear off, so the madder he got the more he hurt. He could nail the

rocker-switch and dose himself with more of whatever the painkiller

plugged into his IV was today, but since Perry and Lester and their

girlfriends (had that other one been Suzanne Church? It sure looked

like her) had told him he could use his laptop again, he'd stayed off

the juice as much as possible. The computer could make him forget he

hurt.

He looked at the clock. It was 4AM. The blinds on the ward were shut

most of the time, and he kept to his own schedule, napping and then

surfing, then nodding off and then surfing some more. The hospital

staff just left his food on the table beside him if he was asleep when

it arrived, though they woke him for his sponge baths and to stick

fresh needles in his arms, which were filled with bruisey collapsed

veins.

There was no one he could tell about this. Sure, there were chat-rooms

with 24/7 chatter from Disney freaks, but he didn't much want to chat

with them. Some of his friends would still be up and tweaking, but

Christ, who wanted to IM with a speed freak at four in the morning?

His typing was down to less than 30 wpm, and he couldn't keep it up

for long. What he really wanted was to talk to someone about this.

He really wanted to talk to Perry about this. He should send him an

email, but he had the inkling of an idea and he didn't want to put it

in writing, because it was a deliciously naughty idea.

It was dumb to even think about phoning him, he barely knew him, and

no one liked to get calls at four am. Besides -- he'd checked --

Perry's number was unlisted.

From: deathw@deathwait.er To: pgibbons@hollywood.ride Subject: What's

your phone number?

Perry, I know that it's presumptuous, but I'd really like to talk to

you v2v about something important that I'd prefer not to put in

writing. I don't have any right to impose on you, especially not after

you've already done me the kindness of coming to see me in the

hospital, but I hope you'll send me your number anyway. Alternatively,

please call me on my enum -- 1800DEATHWAITS-GGFSAH.

Your admirer,

Death Waits

It was five minutes later when his laptop rang. It was unnaturally

loud on the ward, and he heard his roommates stir when the tone

played. He didn't have a headset -- Christ, he was an idiot. Wait,

there was one, dangling from the TV. No mic, but at least he could

pair it with his laptop for sound. He stabbed at the mute button and

reached for the headset and slipped it on. Then he held the computer

close to his face and whispered "Hello?" into its little mic. His

voice was a croak, his ruined mouth distorting the word. Why had he

decided to call this guy? He was such an idiot.

"This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?"

"Yes, sorry, I don't have a mic. Can you hear me OK?"

"If I turn the volume all the way up I can."

There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin.

"What's on your mind, Death?"

"I didn't expect you to be awake at this hour."

"I had a rough night," Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was

talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the

hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied.

"What happened?"

"Nothing important," Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly

understood that Perry had had a rough night because of *him*, because

of what *he'd* told Perry. It made him want to cry.

"I'm sorry," Death said.

"What's on your mind, Death?" Perry said again.

Death told him what he'd found, about the Disney printers. He read

Perry the URLs so he could look them up.

"OK, that's interesting," Perry said. Death could tell he didn't

really think it was that interesting.

"I haven't told you my idea yet." He groped for the words. His mouth

had gone dry. "OK, so Disney's going to ship these things to tons of

people's houses, they'll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as

freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two,

there's going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country."

"Right."

"So here's my idea: what if you could get them to build non-Disney

stuff? What if you could send them plans for stuff from the rides?

What if you could just download your friends' designs? What if this

was opened wide."

Perry chuckled on the other end of the line, then laughed,

full-throated and full of merriment. "I like the way you think, kid,"

he said, once he'd caught his breath.

And then this amazing thing happened. Perry Gibbons *brainstormed*

with him about the kinds of designs they could push out to these

things. It was like some kind of awesome dream come true. Perry was

treating him like a peer, loving his ideas, keying off of them.

Then a dismal thought struck him. "Wait though, wait. They're using

their own goop for the printers. Every design we print makes them

richer."

Perry laughed again, really merry. "Oh, that kind of thing never

works. They've been trying to tie feedstock to printers since the

inkjet days. We go through that like wet kleenex."

"Isn't that illegal?"

"Who the fuck knows? It shouldn't be. I don't care about illegal

anymore. Legal gets you lawyers. Come on, dude -- what's the point of

being all into some anti-authoritarian subculture if you spend all

your time sucking up to the authorities?"

Death laughed, which actually hurt quite a bit. It was the first laugh

he'd had since he'd ended up in the hospital, maybe the first one

since he'd been fired from Disney World, and as much as it hurt, it

felt good, too, like a band being loosened from around his broken

ribs.

His roommates stirred and one of them must have pushed the nurse call

button, because shortly thereafter, the formidable Ukrainian nurse

came in and savagely told him off for disturbing the ward at five in

the morning. Perry heard and said his goodbyes, like they were old

pals who'd chatted too long, and Death Waits rang off and fell into a

light doze, grinning like a maniac.

#

Hilda eyed Perry curiously. "That sounded like an interesting

conversation," she said. She was wearing a long t-shirt of his that

didn't really cover much, and she looked delicious in it. It was all

he could do to keep from grabbing her and tossing her on the bed -- of

course, the cast meant that he couldn't really do that. And Hilda

wasn't exactly smiling, either.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up," he said.

"It wasn't the talking that did it, it was you not being there in the

first place. Gave me the toss-and-turns."

She came over to him then, the lean muscles in her legs flexing as she

crossed the living room. She took his laptop away and set it down on

the coffee-table, then took off his headset. He was wearing nothing

but boxers, and she reached down and gave his dick a companionable

honk before sitting down next to him and giving him a kiss on the

cheek, the throat and the lips.

"So, Perry," she said, looking into his eyes. "What the fuck are you

doing sitting in the living room at 5 am talking to your computer? And

why didn't you come to bed last night? I'm not going to be hanging out

in Florida for the rest of my life. I woulda thought you'd want to

maximize your Hilda-time while you've got the chance."

She smiled to let him know she was kidding around, but she was right,

of course.

"I'm an idiot, Hilda. I fired Tjan and Kettlewell, told them to get

lost."

"I don't know why you think that's such a bad idea. You need

business-people, probably, but it doesn't need to be those

guys. Sometimes you can have too much history with someone to work

with him. Besides, anything can be un-said. You can change your mind

in a week or a month. Those guys aren't doing anything special. They'd

come back to you if you asked 'em. You're Perry motherfuckin'

Gibbons. You rule, dude."

"You're a very nice person, Hilda Hammersen. But those guys are

running our legal defense, which we're going to need, because I'm

about to do something semi-illegal that's bound to get us sued again

by the same pack of assholes as last time."

"Disney?" She snorted. "Have you ever read up on the history of the

Disney Company? The old one, the one Walt founded? Walt Disney wasn't

just a racist creep, he was also a mad inventor. He kept coming up

with these cool high-tech ways of making cartoons -- sticking real

people in them, putting them in color, adding sync-sound. People loved

it all, but it drove him out of business. It was all too expensive.

"So he recruited his brother, Roy Disney, who was just a banker, to

run the business. Roy turned the business around, watching the income

and the outgo. But all this came at a price: Roy wanted to tell Walt

how to run the business. More to the point, he wanted to tell Walt

that he couldn't just spend millions from the company coffers on

weird-ass R&D projects, especially not when the company was still

figuring out how to exploit the *last* R&D project Walt had

chased. But it was Walt's company, and he'd overrule Roy, and Roy

would promise that it was going to put them in the poorhouse and then

he'd figure out how to make another million off of Walt's vision,

because that's what the money guy is supposed to do.

"Then after the war, Walt went to Roy and said, 'Give me $17 million,

I'm going to build a theme-park. And Roy said, 'You can't have it and

what's a theme-park?' Walt threatened to fire Roy, the way he always

had, and Roy pointed out that Disney was now a *public* company with

shareholders who weren't going to let Walt cowboy around and piss away

their money on his toys."

"So how'd he get Disneyland built?"

"He quit. He started his own company, WED, for Walter Elias Disney. He

poached all the geniuses away from the studios and turned them into

his 'Imagineers' and cashed in his life-insurance policy and raised

his own dough and built the park, and then made Roy buy the company

back from him. I'm guessing that that felt pretty good."

"It sounds like it must've," Perry said. He was feeling thoughtful,

and buzzed from the sleepless night, and jazzed from his conversation

with Death Waits. He had an idea that they could push designs out to

the printers that were like the Disney designs, but weird and kinky

and subversive and a little disturbing.

"I can understand why you'd be nervous about ditching your suits, but

they're just that, suits. At some level, they're all interchangeable,

mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not

someone who'll run the show. If that's not these guys, hey, that's

cool. Find a couple more suits and run them."

"Jesus, you really *are* Yoko, aren't you?" Lester was wearing his

boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room's doorway where

Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were

waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car

starting down in the parking lot.

"Good morning, Lester," Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no

offense taken, all good, all good.

"You fired who now, Perry?" Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream

out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon

that he'd designed specifically for this purpose.

"I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan," Perry said. He was blushing. "I

would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to

do it, though. I had to."

"I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we've got some of

the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our

outfit. It's their show, too. You can't just go shit-canning them. Not

just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing

and they're keeping the lawyers at bay too. They're managing all the

evil shit so we don't have to. I don't want to be in charge of the

evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn't going to be

easy. They're all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur."

"You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those

two," Hilda said. "You're experienced now, and you've founded a

movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just

need better management structure: an executive you can overrule

whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss."

Lester acted as though he hadn't heard her. "I'm being pretty mellow

about this, buddy. I'm not making a big deal out of the fact that you

did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have

been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I

might have done the same. But it's the cold light of day now and it's

time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and

Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can't afford to burn

all this to the ground and start over now."

Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how

good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be

unreasonable.

"Lester, they violated our trust. It was their responsibility to do

this thing and do it right. They didn't do that. They didn't look

closely at this thing so that they wouldn't have to put the brakes on

if it turned out to be dirty. Which do you think those two would

rather have happen: we run a cool project that everyone loves, or we

run a lawsuit that makes ten billion dollars for their investors?

They're playing a different game from us and their victory condition

isn't ours. I don't want to be reasonable. I want to do the right

thing. You and me could have sold out a thousand times over the years

and made money instead of doing good, but we didn't. We didn't because

it's better to be right than to be reasonable and rich. You say we

can't afford to get rid of those two. I say we can't afford not to."

"You need to get a good night's sleep, buddy," Lester said. He was

blowing through his nose, a sure sign that he was angry. It made

Perry's hackles go up -- he and Lester didn't fight much but when they

did, hoo-boy. "You need to mellow out and see that what you're talking

about is abandoning our friends, Kettlewell and Tjan, to make our own

egos feel a little better. You need to see that we're risking

everything, risking spending our lives in court and losing everything

we've ever built."

A Zen-like calm descended on Perry. Hilda was right. Suits were

everywhere, and you could choose your own. You didn't need to let the

Roy Disneys of the world call the shots.

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Lester. I hear everything you're saying,

but you know what, it's going to be my way. I understand that what I

want to do is risky, but there's no way I can go on doing what I'm

doing and letting things get worse and worse. Making a little

compromise here and there is how you end up selling out everything

that's important. We're going to find other business-managers and

we're going to work with them to make a smooth transition. Maybe we'll

all come out of this friends later on. They want to do something

different from what I want to do is all."

This wasn't calming Lester down at all. "Perry, this isn't your

project to do what you want with. This belongs to a lot of us. I did

most of the work in there."

"You did, buddy. I get that. If you want to stick with them, that's

how it'll go. No hard feelings. I'll go off and do my own thing, run

my own ride. People who want to connect to my network, no sweat, they

can do it. That's cool. We'll still be friends. You can work with

Kettlewell and Tjan." Perry could hardly believe these words were

coming out of his mouth. They'd been buddies forever, inseparable.

Hilda took his hand silently.

Lester looked at him with increasing incredulity. "You don't mean

that."

"Lester, if we split, it would break my heart. There wouldn't be a day

that went by from now to the end of time that I didn't regret it. But

if we keep going down this path, it's going to cost me my soul. I'd

rather be broke than evil." Oh, it felt so *good* to be saying

this. To finally affirm through deed and word that he was a good

person who would put ethics before greed, before comfort even.

Lester looked at Hilda for a moment. "Hilda, this is probably

something that Perry and I should talk about alone, if you don't

mind."

"*I* mind, Lester. There's nothing you can't say in front of her."

Lester apparently had nothing to say to that, and the silence made

Perry uncomfortable. Lester had tears in his eyes, and that hit Perry

in the chest like a spear. His friend didn't cry often.

He crossed the room and hugged Lester. Lester was wooden and

unyielding.

"Please, Lester. Please. I hate to make you choose, but you have to

choose. We're on the same side. We've always been on the same

side. Neither of us are the kind of people who send lawyers after kids

in hospital. Never. I want to make it good again. We can have the kind

of gig where we do the right thing and the cool thing. Come on,

Lester. Please."

He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into

his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he'd won. He smiled at Hilda

and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.

#

Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the

Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that

morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone -- his cellular phone,

with the call-return number blocked.

"Hello?" he said. Not many people had this number -- he didn't like

getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him

could talk to his secretary first.

"Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?" He could hear the sneer

in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer:

Freddy. Shit. He'd given the reporter his number back when they were

arranging their disastrous face-to-face.

"It's not a good time, Freddy," he said. "If you call my secretary --"

"I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story

about the ride response to your printers -- your Disney-in-a-Box

Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C."

Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride assholes would have

known about the printers. That's what press-releases were

for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some

discussion of them. He hadn't had time to look for it, though, and he

didn't want to use the Disney Parks competitive intel people on this

stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack,

he could be such a fuck-up) he didn't want to have any train of

intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.

"I'm not familiar with any response," Sammy said. "I'm afraid I can't

comment --"

"Oh, it'll only take a moment to explain it," Freddy said and then

launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They

were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had

even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had passed out last

week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on,

so that anyone's goop could print to it.

"So, what I'm looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you

condone this? Did you anticipate it? What if someone prints an AK-47

with it?"

"No one's going to print a working AK-47 with this," Sammy said. "It's

too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion

across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it --" He closed

his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. "As to the rest of it,

that would be something you'd have to speak to one of my legal

colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?"

Freddy laughed. "Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background,

no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?"

Sammy felt his face go white. "I'm sure I don't know what you're

talking about --"

"Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be

your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked

out of the organization -- no one around to call the lawyers out on

their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike."

Sammy seethed. He'd been concentrating on making new stuff, great

stuff. Competitive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for

making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as

cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old

slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made

and the world would be a more fun place once it was.

Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those

ride shit-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of

creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He'd brought his own

destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the

result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. God, he was a total

fuck-up.

Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly -- not humming like a

fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley

of magic-users' songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every

once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a

little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from

within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to hell and

back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with

cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the

versioning system, and he'd been able to choose from among them and

pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt's 1955

Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool.

"I'll just say you declined to comment, then?"

Asshole.

"You write whatever you need to write, Freddy," he said. A hatch

opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered

out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles

and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn't

fuck it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to.

"Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going

to be discharged from the hospital this week."

#

He wasn't ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn't walk

yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he

was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance

company and the hospital had concurred that he'd had all the treatment

he needed -- even if his doctor hadn't been able to look him in the

eye when this was explained -- and it was time for him to go home. Go

away. Go anywhere.

He'd put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could

remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he'd had with

Perry and the idea he'd had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn't even

know if his apartment was still there -- he hadn't been back in weeks

and the rent was overdue.

And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his

friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights -- some people

accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering

sympathy or donations (!) -- side-conversations, philosophical

arguments.

Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him

at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was

unbelievable. There was a small fortune -- half-a-year's wages at his

old job -- waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed,

there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet

him.

The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. "Your friends are here,"

she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving

look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn't have

time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation

Army underpants -- the first pair he'd worn in weeks -- and a pair of

new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years

before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent.

"You will use canes?" she asked. He'd had some physiotherapy that week

and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes?

No way.

"I can't," he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished

concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the

fall.

"Wheelchair," she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in

pushing a chair with a squeaky wheel -- though the chair itself was a

pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney,

which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it

with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag

containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at

the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as

he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where

the nurse's station, the elevators, the common area and his *fans*

were.

They weren't just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but

also a big crowd of people he'd never met, didn't recognize. There

were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were

outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly

hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a

wild cheer. The orderly stopped pushing his chair and the nurse rushed

forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There

were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two

very pretty girls -- he hadn't thought about "pretty" anything in a

long, long time -- unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery

hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS.

The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands,

but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear,

something about getting security to get rid of these people if they

were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was a

*threat* and that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced

off in a deeply Slavic huff.

And then he was among his welcoming party, and it *was* a party --

there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of

licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their

pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his

face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi

role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went

to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they'd seen the

story he'd described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was

something that was as personal as the twin language they'd developed

to communicate with one another when they were little girls.

His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery,

girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey's

makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him -- one girl had

gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly

pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it

all started.

Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the

heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells

that weren't sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he

could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist

vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs.

"Now, it's all arranged," one of the straight-looking ones told

him. He'd figured out that these were the pure story people, who'd

read his descriptions and concluded that he'd seen something more than

anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn't seem

too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old

mates. "Don't worry about a thing." Car after car appeared, taking

away more of the party. "Here you go."

Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge

cargo space. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the

story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. "My mom was in a

wheelchair for ten years before she passed," a hippie told him. He was

older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked

in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went.

They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic -- Death marveling at

buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive

white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital -- when the

English teacher dude looked shyly at Death.

"You think it's real -- the Story, I mean -- don't you?"

Death thought about this for a second. He'd been very focused on the

Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity

to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It

required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a

meditative state he'd found easy to attain with all the painkillers.

"It's real," he said.

The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a

little. "We think so too."

They pulled up to his condo -- how'd they know where he lived? -- and

parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of

fucked-up the rear bumper, but other than that, it was just as he

remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash,

too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open

his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his

building, pushing --

A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the

ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward

him, handling the curb easily, hardly a bump, and the two pretty

girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived

to brush their breasts and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as

they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that

he'd felt since before his beating.

He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone

put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a

little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator.

The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless

and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come

night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the

night talking about the story that they'd seen in the ride, where

they'd seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether

they had any business rating things now that the story had shown

itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and

it should be left to unconscious effort.

But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story,

or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who

couldn't see it or wouldn't see it.

At first Death didn't know what to make of all this talk. At first he

found it funny and more than a little weird to be taking the story

this seriously. It was beautiful, but it was an accidental beauty. The

ride was the important thing, the story was its effect.

But these people convinced him that they were right, that the story

*had* to be important. After all, it had inspired all of them, hadn't

it? The ride was just technology -- the story was what the ride was

*for*.

His head swam with it.

"We've got to protect it," he said finally, after listening to the

argument, after eating the food with which they'd filled his fridge,

after talking intensely with Tracey (or possibly Lacey) about their

parents' unthinking blandness, after letting the English teacher guy

(whose name was Jim) take him to the toilet, after letting his old

goth pals play some music some mutual friends had just mixed.

"We've got to protect it and sharpen it. The story wants to get out

and there will be those who can't see it." He didn't care that his

speech was mangled by his fucked-up face. He'd seen his face in the

mirror and Tracey and Lacey had done a nice job in making it up -- he

looked like a latter-day Marilyn Manson, his twisted mouth a ghoulish

smear. The doctors had talked about giving him another series of

surgeries to fix his lip, a set of implanted dentures to replace the

missing teeth, had even mentioned that there were specialist clinics

where he could get a new set budded and grown right out of his own

gums. That had been back when the mysterious forces of the lawsuit and

the ride were paying his bills.

Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he'd get

used to this, he'd come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would

make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one

of the weird ones, like the old-timers who'd come to Disney with their

teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths' kids were never goths, it seemed --

more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or

hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their

parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the

grave.

"We'll let everyone know about it," he said, thinking not of

*everyone* but of all the cool subculture kids he'd grown up with and

worshipped and been rejected by and dated and loved and hated -- "and

we'll make it part of *everyone*'s story. We'll protect it, guys. Of

course we'll protect it."

That settled the argument. Death hadn't expected that. Since when did

he get the last word on any subject? Since now. They were following

his lead.

And then the girls put him to bed, shyly helping him undress, each of

them leaning over him to kiss him good night. Tracey's kiss was

sisterly, on the cheek, her spicy perfume and her jet-black hair

caressing him. Lacey's kiss was anything but sisterly. She mashed her

breasts to his chest and thrust her tongue into his mouth, keeping her

silver eyes open and staring deep into his, her fingers working busily

in his hair.

She broke the kiss off with a gasp and a giggle. She traced the ruin

of his mouth with a fingertip, breathing heavily, and let it slide

lower, down his chest. He found himself actually *hard*, the first

pleasurable sensation he'd had in his dick since that fateful

night. From the corridor came an impatient cough -- Tracey, waiting

for Lacey to get going.

Lacey rolled her eyes and giggled again and then slid her hand the

rest of the way down, briefly holding his dick and then encircling his

balls with her fingers before kissing him again on the twist of his

lips and backing out of the room, whispering, "Sleep well, see you in

the morning."

Death lay awake and staring at the ceiling for a long time after they

had gone. The English teacher dude had left him with a bedpan for the

night and many of them had promised to return in rotations

indefinitely during the days, helping him out with dressing and

shopping and getting him in and out of his marvelous chair.

He stared and stared at that ceiling, and then he reached for his

laptop, there beside the bed, the same place it had lived when he was

in the hospital. He fired it up and went straight to today's

fly-throughs of the ride and ran through them from different angles --

facing backward and sideways, looking down and looking up, noting all

the elements that felt like *story* and all the ones that didn't,

wishing he had his plus-one/minus-one joystick with him to carve out

the story he was seeing.

#

Lester wouldn't work the ride anymore, so Perry took it on his

own. Hilda was in town buying groceries -- his chest-freezer of

gourmet surplus food had blown its compressor and the contents had

spoiled in a mess of venison and sour blueberry sauce and duck

pancakes -- and he stood alone. Normally he loved this, being the

carnival barker at the middle of the three-ring circus of fans,

tourists and hawkers, but today his cast itched, he hadn't slept

enough, and there were lawyers chasing him. Lots of lawyers.

A caravan of cars pulled into the lot like a Tim Burton version of a

funeral, a long train of funnycar hearses with jacked-up rear wheels

and leaning chimney-pots, gargoyles and black bunting with

super-bright black-light LEDs giving them a commercially eldritch

glow. Mixed in were some straight cars, and they came and came and

came, car on car. The hawkers got out more stuff, spread it out

further, and waited while the caravan maneuvered itself into parking

spots, spilling out into the street.

Riders got out of the cars, mostly super-skinny goths -- a line of

special low-calorie vegan versions of Victorian organ-meat delicacies

had turned a mom-and-pop cafe in Portland, Oregon, into a Fortune 500

company a few years before -- in elaborate DIY costumery. It shimmered

darkly, petticoats and toppers, bodices and big stompy boots and

trousers cut off in ribbons at the knees.

The riders converged on one of the straight cars, a beige mini-van,

and crowded around it. A moment later, they were moving toward Perry's

ticket-taking stand. The crowd parted as they approached and in Perry

saw whom they'd been clustered around. It was a skinny goth kid in a

wheelchair like the ones they kept in the ride -- they'd get that

every now and again, a guest in his own chair, just needing a little

wireless +1/-1 box. His hair was shaggy and black with green

highlights, stuck out like an anime cosplayer's. He was white as

Wonder Bread, with something funny about his mouth. His legs were in

casts that had been wrapped with black gauze, and a pair of black

pointy shoes had been slid over his toes, tipped with elaborate silver

curlicues.

The chair zipped forward and Perry recognized him in a flash: Death

Waits! He felt his mouth drop open and he shut it and came around the

stand.

"No way!" he said, and grabbed Death's hand, encrusted in chunky

silver jewelry, a different stylized animal skull on each

finger. Death's ruined mouth pulled up in a kind of smile.

"Nice to see you," he said, limply squeezing Perry's hand. "It was

very kind of you to visit me in the hospital."

Perry thought of all the things that had happened since then and

wondered how much of it, if any, Death had a right to know about. He

leaned in close, conscious of all the observers. "I'm out of the

lawsuit. We are. Me and Lester. Fired those guys." Behind his

reflective contacts, Death's eyes widened a touch.

He slumped a little. "Because of me?"

Perry thought some. "Not exactly. But in a way. It wasn't us."

Death smiled. "Thank you."

Perry straightened up. "Looks like you brought down a good crowd," he

said. "Lots of friends!"

Death nodded. "Lots of friends these days," he said. An attractive

young woman came over and squeezed his shoulder.

They were such a funny bunch in their DIY goth-frocks,

micro-manufactured customized boots, their elaborate tattoos and

implants and piercings, but for all that, cuddly and earnest with the

shadows visible of the geeks they'd been. Perry felt he was smiling so

broadly it almost hurt.

"Rides are on me, gang," he said. "In you go. Your money's no good

here. Any friend of Death Waits rides for free today."

They cheered and patted him on the back as they went through, and

Death Waits looked like he'd grown three inches in his wheelchair, and

the pretty girl kissed Perry's cheek as she went by, and Death Waits

had a smile so big you could hardly tell there was anything wrong with

his mouth.

They rode it through six times in a row, and as they came back around

for another go and another, they talked intently about the story, the

story, the story. Perry knew about the story, he'd seen it, and he and

Lester had talked it over now and again, but he was still constantly

amazed by its ability to inspire riders.

Paying customers slipped in and out, too, and seemed to catch some of

the infectious intensity of the story group. They went away in pairs,

talking about the story, and shopped the market stalls for a while

before coming back to ride again, to look for more story.

They'd never named the ride. It had always been "the ride." Not even a

capital "R." For a second, Perry wondered if they'd end up calling it

"The Story" in the end.

#

Perry got his Disney-in-a-Box through a circuitous route, getting one

of the hawkers' brothers to order it to a PO box in Miami, to which

Perry would drive down to pick it up and take it back.

Lester roused himself from the apartment when Perry told him it had

arrived. Lester and Suzanne had been AWOL for days, sleeping in until

Perry left, coming back after Perry came back, until it felt like they

were just travelers staying in the same hotel.