He hadn't heard a peep from Kettlewell or Tjan, either. He guessed

that they were off figuring things out with their money people. The

network of ride operators had taken the news with equanimity -- Hilda

had helped him write the message so that it kind of implied that

everything was under control and moving along nicely.

But when Perry emailed Lester to say he was going to drive down to the

PO box the next morning before opening the ride, Lester emailed back

in minutes volunteering to come with him.

He had coffee ready by the time Perry got out of the shower. It was

still o-dark-hundred outside, the sun not yet risen, and they hardly

spoke as they got into the car, but soon they were on the open road.

"Kettlewell and Tjan aren't going to sue you," Lester said. There it

was, all in a short sentence: *I've been talking to them. I've been

figuring out if I'm with you or with them. I've been saving your

ass. I've been deciding to be on your side.*

"Good news," Perry said. "That would have really sucked."

Perry waited for the rest of the drive for Lester to say something,

but he didn't. It was a long drive.

The whole way back, Lester talked about the Disney-in-a-Box. There'd

been some alien autopsy videos of them posted online already,

engineers taking them to bits, making guesses about and what they did

and how. Lester had watched the videos avidly and he held his own

opinions, and he was eager to get at the box and find answers for

himself. It was the size of an ice-chest, too big to fit on his lap,

but he kept looking over his shoulder at it.

The box-art, a glossy pic of two children staring goggle-eyed at a box

from which Disneoid marvels were erupting, looked a little like the

Make Your Own Monster toy Perry'd had as a boy. It actually made his

heart skip a beat the way that that old toy had. Really, wasn't that

every kid's dream? A machine that created wonders from dull feedstock?

They got back to the ride long before it was due to open and Perry

asked Lester if he wanted to get a second breakfast in the tea-room in

the shantytown, but Lester begged off, heading for his workshop to get

to grips with the Box.

So Perry alone waited for the ride to open, standing at his familiar

spot behind the counter. The hawkers came and nodded hello to him. A

customer showed up. Another. Perry took their money.

The ticket-counter smelled of sticky beverages spilled and left to

bake in the heat, a sour-sweet smell like bile. His chair was an

uncomfortable bar-stool he'd gotten from a kitchen-surplus place,

happy for the bargain. He'd logged a lot of hours in that chair. It

had wreaked havoc on his lower spine and tenderized his ass.

He and Lester had started this as a lark, but now it was a movement,

and not one that was good for his mental health. He didn't want to be

sitting on that stool. He might as well be working in a liquor store

-- the skill-set was the same.

Hilda broke his reverie by calling his phone. "Hey, gorgeous," she

said. She bounded out of bed fully formed, without any intervening

stages of pre-coffee, invertebrate, pre-shower, and Homo erectus. He

could hear that she was ready to catch the world by the ankle and chew

her way up its leg.

"Hey," he said.

"Uh oh. Mr Badvibes is back. You and Lester fight in the car?"

"Naw," he said. "That was fine. Just..." He told her about the smell

and the stool and working at a liquor store.

"Get one of those home-slices running the market stalls to take over

the counter, and take me to the beach, then. It's been weeks and I

still haven't seen the ocean. I'm beginning to think it's an urban

legend."

So that's what he did. Hilda drove up in a bikini that made his jaw

drop, and bought a pair of polarizing contacts from Jason, and Perry

turned the till over to one of the more trustworthy vendors, and they

hit the road.

Hilda nuzzled him and prodded him all the way to the beach, kissing

him at the red lights. The sky was blue and clear as far as the eye

could see in all directions, and they bought a bag of oranges, a

newspaper, beach-blankets, sun-block, a picnic lunch, and a book of

replica vintage luggage stickers from hawkers at various stop-points.

They unpacked the trunk in the parking garage and stepped out into the

bright day, and that's when they noticed the wind. It was blowing so

hard it took Hilda's sarong off as soon as she stepped out onto the

street. Perry barely had time to snatch the cloth out of the air. The

wind howled.

They looked up and saw the palm-trees bending like drawn bows, the

hot-dog vendors and shave-ice carts and the jewelry hawkers hurriedly

piling everything into their cars.

"Guess the beach is cancelled," Hilda said, pointing out over the

ocean. There, on the horizon, was a wall of black cloud, scudding

rapidly toward them in the raging wind. "Shoulda checked the weather."

The wind whipped up stinging clouds of sand and debris. It gusted hard

and actually blew Hilda into Perry. He caught her and they both

laughed nervously.

"Is this a hurricane?" she asked, joking, not joking, tension in her

voice.

"Probably not." He was thinking of Hurricane Wilma, though, the year

he'd moved to Florida. No one had predicted Wilma, which had been a

tropical storm miles off the coast until it wasn't, until it was

smashing a 50km-wide path of destruction from Key West to

Kissimmee. He'd been working a straight job as a structural engineer

for a condo developer, and he'd seen what a good blow could do to the

condos of Florida, which were built mostly from dreams, promises,

spit, and kleenex.

Wilma had left cars stuck in trees, trees stuck in houses, and it had

blown just like this when it hit. There was a crackle in the air, and

the sighing of the wind turned to groans, seeming to come from

everywhere at once -- the buildings were moaning in their bones as the

winds buffeted them.

"We have to get out of here," Perry said. "Now."

They got up to the second storey of the parking garage when the whole

building moaned and shuddered beneath them, like a tremor. They froze

on the stairwell. Somewhere in the garage, something crashed into

something else with a sound like thunder, and then it was echoed with

an actual thunder-crack, a sound like a hundred rifles fired in

unison.

Hilda looked at him. "No way. Not further up. Not in this building."

He agreed. They pelted down the street and into the first sleeting

showers coming out of a sky that was now dirty grey and low. A

sandwich board advertising energy beverages spun through the air like

a razor-edged frisbee, trailing a length of clothesline that had

tethered it to the front of some beach-side cafe. On the beach across

the road, beachcomber robots burrowed into the sand, trying to get

safe from the wind, but were foiled again and again, rolled around

like potato bugs into the street, into the sea, into the

buildings. They seizured like dying things. Perry felt an irrational

urge to rescue them.

"High ground," Hilda said, pointing away from the beach. "High ground

and find a basement. Just like a twister."

A sheet of water lifted off the surface of the sea and swept across

the road at them, soaking them to the skin, followed by a sheet of

sand that coated them from head to toe. It was all the encouragement

they needed. They ran.

They ran, but the streets were running with rain now and more debris

was rolling past them. They got up one block and sloshed across the

road. They made it halfway up the next block, past a coffee shop and a

surf-shop in low-slung buildings, and the wind literally lifted them

off their feet and slammed them to the ground. Perry grabbed Hilda and

dragged her into an alley behind the surf-shop. There were dumpsters

there, and a recessed doorway, and they squeezed past the dumpster and

into the doorway.

Now in the lee, they realized how loud the storm had been. Their ears

rang with it, and rang again with another thunderclap. Their chests

heaved and they shivered, grabbing each other. The doorway stank of

piss and the crackling ozone around them.

"This place, holy fuck, it's about to lift off and fly away," Hilda

said, panting. Perry's unbroken arm throbbed and he looked down to see

a ragged cut running the length of his forearm. From the Dumpster?

"It's a big storm," Perry said. "They come through now and

again. Sometimes they blow away."

"What do they blow away? Trailers? Apartment buildings?" They were

both spitting sand and Perry's arm oozed blood.

"Sometimes!" Perry said. They huddled together and listened to the

wind lashing at the buildings around them. The Dumpster blocking their

doorway groaned, and then it actually slid a few inches. Water coursed

down the alley before them, with debris caught in it: branches, trash,

then an electric motorcycle, scratching against the road as it rattled

through the river.

They watched it pass without speaking, then both of them screamed and

scrambled back as a hissing, soaked house-cat scrambled over the

dumpster, landing practically in their laps, clawing at them with

hysterical viciousness.

"Fuck!" Hilda said as it caught hold of her thumb with its teeth. She

pushed at its face ineffectually, hissing with pain, and Perry finally

worked a thumb into the hinge of its jaw and forced it open. The cat

sprang away, clawing up his face, leaping back onto the Dumpster.

Hilda's thumb was punctured many times, already running free with

blood. "I'm going to need rabies shots," she said. "But I'll live."

They cuddled, in the blood and the mud, and watched the river swell

and run with more odd debris: clothes and coolers, beer bottles and a

laptop, cartons of milk and someone's purse. A small palm-tree. A

mailbox. Finally, the river began to wane, the rain to falter.

"Was that it?" Hilda said.

"Maybe," Perry said. He breathed in the moist air. His arms throbbed

-- one broken, the other torn open. The rain was petering out fast

now, and looking up, he could see blue sky peeking through the dirty,

heavy clouds, which were scudding away as fast as they'd rolled in.

"Next time, we check the weather before we go to the beach," he said.

She laughed and leaned against him and he yelped as she came into

contact with his hurt arm. "We got to get you to a hospital," she

said. "Get that looked at."

"You too," he said, pointing at her thumb. It was all so weird and

remote now, as they walked through the Miami streets, back toward the

garage. Other shocked people wandered the streets, weirdly friendly,

smiling at them like they all shared a secret.

The beach-front was in shambles, covered in blown trash and mud,

uprooted trees and fallen leaves, broken glass and rolled cars. Perry

hit the car radio before they pulled out of the garage. An announcer

reported that Tropical Storm Henry had gone about three miles inland

before petering out to a mere sun-shower, along with news about the

freeways and hospitals being equally jammed.

"Huh," Perry said. "Well, what do we do now?"

"Let's find a hotel room," Hilda said. "Have showers, get something to

eat."

It was a weird and funny idea, and Perry liked it. He'd never played

tourist in Florida, but what better place to do so? They gathered

their snacks from the back of the car and used the first aid kit in

the trunk to tape themselves up.

They tried to reach Lester but no one answered. "He's probably at the

ride," Perry said. "Or balls-deep in reverse-engineering the Disney

Box thing. OK, let's find a hotel room."

Everything on the beach was fully booked, but as they continued inland

for a couple blocks, they came upon coffin hotels stacked four or five

capsules high, painted gay Miami deco pastels, installed in rows in

old storefronts or stuck in street-parking spots, their silvered

windows looking out over the deserted boulevards.

"Should we?" Perry said, gesturing at them.

"If we can get an empty one? Damn right -- these things are going to

be in serious demand in pretty short order."

Stepping into the coffin hotel transported Perry back to his days on

the road, his days staying at coffin hotel after coffin hotel, to his

first night with Hilda, in Madison. One look at Hilda told him she

felt the same. They washed each other slowly, as though they were

underwater, cleaning out one-another's wounds, sluicing away the caked

on mud and grime blown deep into their ears and the creases of their

skin, nestled against their scalps.

They lay down in bed, naked, together, spooned against one

another. "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons," Hilda said, snuggling

against him, hand moving in slow circles on his tummy.

They slept that way and got back on the road long past dark, driving

the blasted freeway slowly, moving around the broken glass and blown

out tires that remained.

The path of the hurricane followed the coast straight to Hollywood, a

line of smashed trees and car wrecks and blown-off roofs that made the

nighttime drive even more disorienting.

They went straight back to the condo, but Lester wasn't there. Worry

nagged at Perry. "Take me to the ride?" he said, after he'd paced the

apartment a few times.

Hilda looked up from the sofa, where she had collapsed the instant

they came through the door, arm flung over her face. "You're shitting

me," she said. "It's nearly midnight, and we've been in a hurricane."

Perry squirmed. "I've got a bad feeling, OK? And I can't drive

myself." He flapped his busted arm at her.

Hilda looked at him, her eyes narrowed. "Look, don't be a jerk, OK?

Lester's a big boy. He's probably just out with Suzanne. He'd have

called you if there'd been a problem."

He looked at her, bewildered by the ferocity of her response. "OK,

I'll call a cab," he said, trying for a middle ground.

She jumped up from the couch. "Whatever. Fine. Let me get my

keys. Jesus."

He had no idea how he'd angered her, but it was clear that he had, and

the last thing he wanted was to get into a car with her, but he

couldn't think of a way of saying that without escalating things.

So they drove in white-lipped silence to the ride, Hilda tense with

anger, Perry tense with worry, both of them touchy as cats, neither

saying a word.

But when they pulled up to the ride, they both let out a gasp. It was

lit with rigged floodlights and car headlights, and it was swarming

with people. As they drew closer, they saw that the market stalls were

strewn across the parking lot, in smashed pieces. As they drew closer

still, they saw that the ride itself was staring eyeless at them,

window-glass smashed.

Perry was out of the car even before it stopped rolling, Hilda

shouting something after him. Lester was just on the other side of the

ride-entrance, wearing a paper mask and rubber boots, wading in

three-inch deep, scummy water.

Perry splashed to a halt. "Holy shit," he breathed. The ride was lit

with glow-sticks, waterproof lamps, and LED torches, and the lights

reflected crazily from the still water that filled it as far as the

eye could see, way out into the gloom.

Lester looked up at him. His face was lined and exhausted, and it

gleamed with sweat. "Storm broke out all the windows and trashed the

roof, then flooded us out. It did a real number on the market, too."

His voice was dead.

Perry was wordless. Bits of the ride-exhibits floated in the water,

along with the corpses of the robots.

"No drainage," Lester said. "The code says drainage, but there's none

here. I never noticed it before. I'm going to rig a pump, but my

workshop's pretty much toast." Lester's workshop had been in the old

garden-center at the side of the ride. It was all glass. "We had some

pretty amazing winds."

Perry felt like he should be showing off his wound to prove that he

hadn't been fucking off while the disaster was underway, but he

couldn't bring himself to do so. "We got caught in it in Miami," he

said.

"Wondered where you were. The kid who was minding the shop just cut

and run when the storm rolled in."

"He did? Christ, what an irresponsible asshole. I'll break his neck."

A slimy raft of kitchen gnomes -- their second business venture --

floated past silently in the harsh watery light. The smell was almost

unbearable.

"It wasn't his job --" Lester's voice cracked on *job*, and he

breathed deeply. "It wasn't his job, Perry. It was your job. You're

running around, having a good time with your girlfriend, firing

lawyers --" He stopped and breathed again. "You know that they're

going to sue us, right? They're going to turn us into a smoking ruin

because you fired them, and what the fuck are you going to do about

that? Whose job is that?"

"I thought you said they weren't going to sue," Perry said. It came

out in an embarrassed mumble. Lester had never talked to him like

this. Never.

"Kettlewell and Tjan aren't going to sue," Lester said. "The lawyers

you fired, the venture capitalists who backed them? They're going to

turn us into paste."

"What would you have preferred?" Hilda said. She was standing in the

doorway, away from the flood, watching them intently. Her eyes were

raccoon-bagged, but she was rigid with anger. Perry could hardly look

at her. "Would you have preferred to have those fuckers go around

destroying the lives of your supporters in order to enrich a few pig

assholes?"

Lester just looked at her.

"Well?"

"Shut up, Yoko," he said. "We're having a private conversation here."

Perry's jaw dropped, and Hilda was already in motion, sloshing into

the water in her sandals. She smacked Lester across the cheek, a crack

that echoed back over the water and walls.

Lester brought his hand up to his reddening face. "Are you done?" he

said, his voice hard.

Hilda looked at Perry. Lester looked at Perry. Perry looked at the

water.

"I'll meet you by the car," Perry said. It came out in a mumble. They

held for a moment, the three of them, then Hilda walked out again,

leaving Lester and Perry looking at one another.

"I'm sorry," Perry said.

"About Hilda? About the lawsuits? About skipping out?"

"About everything," he said. "Let's fix this up, OK?"

"The ride? I don't even know if I want to. Why bother? It'll cost a

fortune to get it online, and they'll only shut it down again with the

lawsuit. Why bother."

"So we won't fix the ride. Let's fix us."

"Why bother," Lester said, and it came out in the same mumble.

The watery sounds of the room and the smell and the harsh reflected

rippling light made Perry want to leave. "Lester --" he began.

Lester shook his head. "There's nothing more we can do tonight,

anyway. I'll rent a pump in the morning."

"I'll do it," Perry said. "You work on the Disney-in-a-Box thing."

Lester laughed, a bitter sound. "Yeah, OK, buddy. Sure."

Out in the parking-lot, the hawkers were putting their stalls back

together as best they could. The shantytown was lit up and Perry

wondered how it had held together. Pretty good, is what he guessed --

they met and exceeded county code on all of those plans.

Hilda honked the horn at him. She was fuming behind the wheel and they

drove in silence. He felt numb and wrung out and he didn't know what

to say to her. He lay awake in bed that night waiting to hear Lester

come home, but he didn't.

#

Sammy loved his morning meetings. They all came to his office, all the

different park execs, creatives, and emissaries from the old partner

companies that had spun off to make movies and merch and educational

materials. They all came each day to talk to him about the next day's

Disney-in-a-Box build. They all came to beg him to think about adding

in something from their franchises and cantons to the next

installment.

There were over a million DiaBs in the field now, and they weren't

even trying to keep up with orders anymore. Sammy loved looking at the

online auction sites to see what the boxes were going for -- he knew

that some of his people had siphoned off a carload or two of the

things to e-tail out the back door. He loved that. Nothing was a

better barometer of your success than having made something other

people cared enough about to steal.

He loved his morning meetings, and he conducted them with the flair of

a benevolent emperor. He'd gotten a bigger office -- technically it

was a board-room for DiaB strategy, but Sammy *was* the DiaB

strategy. He'd outfitted it with fan-photos of their DiaB shrines in

their homes, with kids watching enthralled as the day's model was

assembled before their eyes. The hypnotic fascination in their eyes

was unmistakable. Disney was the focus of their daily lives, and all

they wanted was more, more, more. He could push out five models a day,

ten, and they'd go nuts for them.

But he wouldn't. He was too cunning. One model a day was all. Leave

them wanting more. Never breathe a hint of what the next day's model

would be -- oh, how he loved to watch the blogs and the chatter as the

models self-assembled, the heated, time-bound fights over what the

day's model was going to be.

"Good morning, Ron," he said. Wiener had been lobbying to get a Main

Street build into the models for weeks now, and Sammy was taking great

pleasure in denying it to him without shutting down all hope. Getting

Ron Wiener to grovel before him every morning was better than a cup of

coffee.

"I've been thinking about what you said, and you're right," Wiener

said. He always started the meeting by telling Sammy how right he was

to reject his last idea. "The flag-pole and marching-band scene would

have too many pieces. House cats would knock it over. We need

something more unitary, more visually striking. So here's what I've

been thinking: what about the fire-engine?"

Sammy raised an indulgent eyebrow.

"Kids *love* fire trucks. All the colors are in the printer's gamut --

I checked. We could create a Mickey-and-Friends fire-crew to position

around it, a little barn for it."

"The only thing I liked about firetrucks when I was a kid was that the

word started with 'f' and ended with 'uck' --" Sammy smiled when he

said it, and waited for Wiener to fake hilarity, too. The others in

the room -- other park execs, some of their licensing partners, a few

advertisers -- laughed too. Officially, this was a "brainstorming

session," but everyone knew that it was all about getting the nod from

Sammy.

Wiener laughed dutifully and slunk away. More supplicants came

forward.

"How about this?" She was very cute -- dressed in smart, dark clothes

that were more Lower East Side than Orlando. She smelled good, too --

one of the new colognes that hinted at free monomers, like hot plastic

or a new-bought tire. Cat-slanted green eyes completed the package.

"What you got there?" She was from an ad agency, someone Disney Parks

had done business with at some point. Agencies had been sending their

people to these meetings too, trying to get a co-branding coup for one

of their clients.

"It's a series of three, telling a little story. Beginning, middle and

end. The first one is a family sitting down to breakfast, and you can

see, it's the same old crap, boring microwave omelets and breakfast

puddings. Mom's bored, dad's more bored, and sis and brother here are

secretly dumping theirs onto mom's and dad's plates. All this stuff is

run using the same printers, so it looks very realistic."

It did indeed. Sammy hadn't thought about it, but he supposed it was

only natural that the omelets were printed -- how else could General

Mills get that uniformity? He should talk to some of the people in

food services about getting some of that tech to work at the parks.

"So in part two, they're setting up the kitchen around this mystery

box -- one part Easy-Bake lightbulb oven, one part Tardis. You know

what that is?"

Sammy grinned. "Why yes, I believe I do." Their eyes met in a fierce

look of mutual recognition. "It's a breakfast printer, isn't it?" The

other supplicants in the room sucked in a collective breath. Some

chuckled nervously.

"It's about moving the apparatus to the edge. Bridging the last

mile. Why not? This one will do waffles, breakfast cereals, bagels and

baked goods, small cakes. New designs every day -- something for mom

and dad, something for the kids, something for the sullen teens. We're

already doing this at the regional plants and distributorships, on

much larger scales. But getting our stuff into consumers' homes,

getting them *subscribed* to our food --"

Sammy held up a hand. "I see," he said. "And our people are already

primed for home-printing experiences. They're right in your sweet

spot."

"Part three, Junior and little sis are going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,

but these things are shaped *like them*, with their portraits on each

sugar-lump. Mom and dad are eating tres sophistique croissants and

delicate cakes. Look at Rover here, with his own cat-shaped

dog-biscuit. See how happy they all are?"

Sammy nodded. "Shouldn't this all be under nondisclosure?" he said.

"Probably, but what are you gonna do? You guys are pretty good at

keeping secrets, and if you decide to shaft us by selling out to one

of our competitors, we're probably dead, anyway. I'll be able to ship

out half a million units in the first week, then we can ramp

production if need be -- lots of little parts-and-assembly

subcontractors will take the work if we offer."

Sammy liked the way she talked. Like someone who didn't need to spend

a lot of time screwing around, planning, like someone who could just

make it happen.

"You're launching when?"

"Three days after you start running this campaign," she said, without

batting an eyelash.

"My name's Sammy," he said. "How's Thursday?"

"Launch on Sunday?" She shook her head. "It's tricky, Sunday

launches. Gotta pay everyone scale-and-a-half." She gave him a

wink. "What the hell, it's not my money." She stuck out her hand. She

was wearing a couple of nice chunky obsidian rings in abstract curvy

shapes, looking a little porny in their suggestion of breasts and

thighs. He shook her hand and it was warm and dry and strong.

"Well, that's this week taken care of," Sammy said, and pointedly

cleared the white-board surface running the length of the table. The

others groaned and got up and filed out. The woman stayed behind.

"Dinah," she said. She handed him a card and he noted the

agency. Dallas-based, not New York, but he could tell she was a

transplant.

"You got any breakfast plans?" It was hardly gone 9AM -- Sammy liked

to get these meetings started early. "I normally get something sent

in, but your little prototypes there..."

She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than

him, and she wore it well. "Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy,

I'm nothing *but* breakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday,

remember?"

"Heh. Oh yeah."

"I'm on the next flight to DFW," she said. "I've got a cab waiting to

take me to the airport."

"I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details," Sammy said.

"Only if you want to do it in the taxi."

"I was thinking we could do it on the plane," he said.

"You're going to buy a ticket?"

"On my plane," he said. They'd given him use of one of the company

jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs.

"Oh yes, I think that can be arranged," she said. "It's Sammy, right?"

"Right," he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely

flight to Dallas. Very productive.

#

Lester hadn't left Suzanne's apartment in days. She'd rented a place

in the shantytown -- bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter,

but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry's

apartment had become so tense.

Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found

interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of

disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was

fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with

one channel, broadcasting one frame per day.

She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry's ongoing

efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was

heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about

money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows,

fixing the roof -- none of it was cheap. And with the market in

pieces, he wasn't getting any rent.

She looked over Lester's shoulder for the fiftieth time. "How's it

going?"

"Don't write about this, OK?"

He'd never said that to her.

"I'll embargo it until you ship."

He grunted. "Fine, I guess. OK, well, I've got it running on generic

goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that

requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new

firmware. They don't make it easy, which is weird. It's like they

don't plan on updating it once it's in the field -- maybe they just

plan on replacing them at regular intervals."

"Why's the firmware matter to you?"

"Well, that's where it stores information about where to get the day's

designs. If we're going to push our own designs to it, we need to give

people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way

to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I

don't know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into

thinking that it's accessing their site when it's really going to

ours. That means getting people to configure another machine -- no one

but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that."

Suzanne nodded. She wondered if "a few hardcore geeks" summed up the

total audience for this project in any event. She didn't mention it,

though. Lester's brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the

crease above his nose.

"Well, I'm sure you'll get it," she said.

"Yeah. It's just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could

totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader."

Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose

which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring,

sexy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering

angrily about boot-loaders.

Suzanne missed Russia. She'd had a good life there, covering the

biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry,

but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better

than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to.

She'd liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the

squalor. She'd bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends

at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners

where they took apart the day's experiences on Planet Petrograd.

"I'm going out, Lester," she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and

blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation.

"Hey," he said. "Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I'm just -- I'm trying to

work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I

don't know what to do --" He broke off and thumped the side of the

printer.

"How's Perry getting on with rebuilding?"

"He's getting on," Lester said. "As far as I know. I read that the

Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that

means."

"He freaks me out," Suzanne said. "I mean, I feel terrible for him,

and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people -- the

way they follow him around. It's just weird. Like the charismatic

cults back home." She realized she'd just called Russia "home" and it

made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these

people, anyway?

Lester hadn't noticed. "I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they

like what he has to say about stories. I just can't get a lot of spit

in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something

we did and completed and should move on from."

Suzanne didn't have anything to say, and Lester wasn't particularly

expecting anything, he was giving off a palpable let-me-work vibe, so

she let herself out of the apartment -- her apartment! -- and headed

out into the shantytown. On the way to the ride, she passed the little

tea-house where Kettlewell and Tjan had done their scheming and she

suddenly felt very, very old. The only grownup on-site.

She was about to cross the freeway to the ride when her phone

rang. She looked at the face and then nearly dropped it. Freddy was

calling her.

"Hello, Suzanne," he said. The gloat in his voice was unmistakable. He

had something really slimy up his sleeve.

"How can I help you?"

"I'm calling for comment on a story," he said. "It's my understanding

that your lad, Perry, pitched a tantie and fired the business-managers

of the ride, and has told the lawyers representing him against Disney

that he intends to drop the suit."

"Is there a question in there?"

"Oh, there are many questions in there, my darling. For starters, I

wondered how it could possibly be true if you haven't written about it

on your little 'blog' --" even over the phone, she could hear the

sarcastic quotes. "-- You seem to be quite comprehensive in

documenting the undertakings of your friends down there in Florida."

"Are you asking me to comment on why I haven't commented?"

"For starters."

"Have you approached Perry for a comment?"

"I'm afraid he was rather abrupt. And I couldn't reach his Valkyrie of

the Midwest, either. So I'm left calling on you, Suzanne. Any

comment?"

Suzanne stared across the road at the ride. She'd been gassed there,

chased by armed men, watched a war there.

"The ride doesn't have much formal decision-making process," she said

finally. "That means that words like 'fired' don't really apply

here. The boys might have a disagreement about the best way to

proceed, but if that's the case, you'll have to talk to them about

it."

"Are you saying that you don't know if your boyfriend's best friend is

fighting with his business partners? Don't you all live together?"

"I'm saying that if you want to find out what Lester and Perry are

doing, you'll have to ask Lester and Perry."

"And the living together thing?"

"We don't live together," she said. It was technically true.

"Really?" Freddy said.

"Do we have a bad connection?"

"You don't live together?"

"No."

"Where do you live then?"

"My place," she said. "Have your informants been misinforming you? I

hope you haven't been paying for your information, Freddy. I suppose

you don't, though. I suppose there's no end of cranks who really enjoy

spiteful gossip and are more than happy to email you whatever

fantasies they concoct."

Freddy tsked. "And you don't know what's happened to Kettlewell and

Tjan?"

"Have you asked them?"

"I will," he said. "But since you're the ranking reporter on the

scene."

"I'm just a blogger, Freddy. A busy blogger. Good afternoon."

The call left her shaking, though she was proud of how calm she'd kept

her voice. What a goddamned troll. And she was going to have to write

about this now.

There were ladders leaned up against the edge of the ride, and a

motley crew of roofers and glaziers on them and on the roof, working

to replace the gaping holes the storm had left. The workers mostly

wore black and had dyed hair and lots of metal flashing from their

ears and faces as they worked. A couple had stripped to the waist,

revealing full-back tattoos or even more piercings and subcutaneous

implants, like armor running over their spines and shoulder-blades. A

couple of boom-boxes blasted out grinding, incoherent music with a lot

of electronic screams.

Around the ride, the market-stalls were coming back, rebuilt from a

tower of fresh-sawed lumber stacked in the parking-lot. This was a lot

more efficient, with gangs of vendors quickly sawing the lumber to

standard sizes, slapping each one with a positional sensor, then

watching the sensor's lights to tell them when it was properly lined

up with its mates, and then slipping on corner-clips that held it all

together. Suzanne watched as a whole market stall came together this

way, in the space of five minutes, before the vendors moved on to

their next stall. It was like a high-tech version of an Amish

barn-raising, performed by bandanna-clad sketchy hawkers instead of

bearded technophobes.

She found Perry inside, leaning over a printer, tinkering with its

guts, LED torches clipped to the temples of his glasses. He was

hampered by having only one good arm, and he pressed her into service

passing him tools for a good fifteen minutes before he straightened up

and really looked at her.

"You come down to help out?"

"To write about it, actually."

The room was a hive of activity. A lot of goth kids of various ages

and degrees of freakiness, a few of the squatter kids, some people she

recognized from the second coming of Death Waits. She couldn't see

Death Waits, though.

"Well, that's good." He powered up the printer and the air filled with

the familiar smell of Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave. She had an eerie

flashback to her first visit to this place, when they'd showed her how

they could print mutated, Warhol-ized Barbie heads. "How's Lester

getting on with cracking that printer?"

*Why don't you ask him yourself?* She didn't say it. She didn't know

why Lester had come to her place after the flood instead of going

home, why he stiffened up and sniffed when she mentioned Perry's

name, why he looked away when she mentioned Hilda.

"Something about firmware."

He straightened his back more, making it pop and gave her his devilish

grin, the one where his wonky eyebrow went up and down. "It's always

firmware," he said, and laughed a little. Maybe they were both

remembering those old days, the Boogie Woogie Elmos.

"Looks like you've got a lot of help," Suzanne said, getting out a

little steno pad and a pen.

Perry nodded at it, and she was struck by how many times they'd stood

like this, a few feet apart, her pen poised over her pad. She'd

chronicled so much of this man's life.

"They're good people, these folks. Some of them have some carpentry or

electronics experience, the rest are willing to learn. It's going

faster than I thought it would. Lots of support from out in the world,

too -- people sending in cash to help with replacement parts."

"Have you heard from Kettlewell or Tjan?"

The light went out of his face. "No," he said.

"How about from the lawyers?"

"No comment," he said. It didn't sound like a joke.

"Come on, Perry. People are starting to ask questions. Someone's going

to write about this. Do you want your side told or not?"

"Not," he said, and disappeared back into the guts of the printer.

She stared at his back for a long while before turning on her heel,

muttering, "Fuck," and walking back out into the sunshine. There'd

been a musty smell in the ride, but out here it was the Florida smell

of citrus and car-fumes, and sweat from the people around her, working

hard, trying to wrest a living from the world.

She walked back across the freeway to the shantytown and ran into

Hilda coming the other way. The younger woman gave her a cool look and

then looked away, and crossed.

That was just about enough, Suzanne thought. Enough playtime with the

kids. Time to go find some grownups. She wasn't here for her

health. If Lester didn't want to hang out with her, if Perry had had

enough of her, it was time to go do something else.

She went back to her room, where Lester was still working on his DiaB

project. She took out her suitcase and packed with the efficiency of

long experience. Lester didn't notice, not even when she took the

blouse she'd hand-washed and hung to dry on the back of his chair,

folded it and put it in her suitcase and zipped it shut.

She looked at his back working over the bench for a long time. He had

a six-pack of chocolate pudding beside him, and a wastebasket

overflowing with food wrappers and boxes. He shifted in his seat and

let out a soft fart.

She left. She paid the landlady through the end of the week. She could

send Lester an email later.

The cab took her to Miami. It wasn't until she got to the airport that

she realized she had no idea where she was going. Boston? San

Francisco? Petersburg? She opened her laptop and began to price out

last minute tickets. The rush of travelers moved around her and she

was jostled many times.

The standby sites gave her a thousand options -- Miami to JFK to

Heathrow to Petersburg, Miami to Frankfurt to Moscow to Petersburg,

Miami to Dallas to San Francisco.... The permutations were

overwhelming, especially since she wasn't sure where she wanted to be.

Then she heard something homey and familiar: a large group of Russian

tourists walking past, talking loudly in Russian, complaining about

the long flight, the bad food, and the incompetence of their tour

operator. She smiled to see the old men with their high-waisted pants

and the old women with their bouffant hair.

She couldn't help but eavesdrop -- at their volume, she would have

been hard-pressed *not* to listen in. A little boy and girl tore ass

around the airport, under the disapproving glares from DHS goons, and

they screamed as they ran, "Disney World! Disney World! Disney World!"

She'd never been -- she'd been to a couple of the kitschy Gulag parks

in Russia, and she'd grown up with Six Flags coaster parks and Ontario

Place and the CNE in Toronto, not far from Detroit. But she'd never

been to The Big One, the place that even now managed to dominate the

world's consciousness of theme-parks.

She asked her standby sites to find her a room in a Disney hotel

instead, looking for an inclusive rate that would get her onto the

rides and pay for her meals. These were advertised at roadside kiosks

at 100-yard intervals on every freeway in Florida, so she suspected

they were the best deal going.

A moment of browsing showed her that she'd guessed wrong. A week in

Disney cost a heart-stopping sum of money -- the equivalent of six

months' rent in Petersburg. How did all these Russians afford this

trip? What the hell compelled people to part with these sums?

She was going to have to find out. It was research. Plus she needed a

vacation.

She booked in, bought a bullet-train ticket, and grabbed the handle of

her suitcase. She examined her welcome package as she waited for the

train. She was staying at something called the Polynesian Resort

hotel, and the brochure showed a ticky-tacky tiki-themed set of

longhouses set on an ersatz white-sand beach, with a crew of Mexican

and Cuban domestic workers in leis, Hawai'ian shirts, and lava-lavas

waving and smiling. Her package included a complimentary luau -- the

pictures made it clear this was nothing like the tourist luaus she'd

attended in Maui. On top of that, she was entitled to a "character

breakfast" with a wage-slave in an overheated plush costume, and an

hour with a "resort counsellor" who'd help her plan her trip for

maximal fun.

The bullet-train came and took on the passengers, families bouncing

with anticipation, joking and laughing in every language spoken. These

people had just come through a US Customs checkpoint and they were

acting like the world was a fine place. She decided there must be

something to this Disney business.

#

Death Waits waited, and waited and waited for the ride to come back

online. He split his days between hanging out at home, writing about

the story, running the fly-throughs from the other rides, watching

what was happening in Brazil, answering his fan-mail; the rest of the

time he spent with his new friends down at the site of the ride,

encouraging them to pitch in and help Perry and Lester to get the

thing back up and running. Fast, please. It was driving him bonkers

not to be able to ride any longer. After everything he'd been through,

he deserved a ride.

His friends were wonderful. Wonderful! Lacey especially. She was a

nurse and a goddess of mercy. The money that flooded into his paypals

whenever his friends let it be known that he needed more covered all

his expenses. He never wanted for companionship, conversation,

helpmeets, or respect. It was a wonderful life.

If only the ride would come online.

He woke next to Lacey, she asleep still, her hair spread out across

the pillow in a fall of shiny black with blue highlights -- she'd

given him a matching dye-job a few days before and they looked like a

matched set now. He let his hands lazily trace her soft skin, the

outlines of her tattoos, her implants and piercings. He felt a

stirring between his legs.

Lacey yawned and woke and kissed him. "Good morning, my handsome man,"

she said.

"Good morning, my beautiful woman. What's the plan for today?"

"Whatever you want," she said.

"Breakfast, then down to the ride," he said. "I'll do my email and

writing there today."

"Something before breakfast?" she asked, with a lopsided smile that

was adorable.

"Oh yes, please," he said, his voice breathy.

#

The smell at the Wal-Mart was overpowering. It was one part sharp

mold, one part industrial disinfectant, a citrus smell that made your

eyes water and your sinuses burn.

"I've rented some big blowers," Perry said. "They'll help air the

place out. If that doesn't work, I might have to resurface the floor,

which would be rough -- it could take a week to get that done

properly."

"A week?" Death said. Jesus. No way. Not another week. He didn't know

it for sure, but he had a feeling that a lot of these people would

stop showing up eventually if there was no ride for them to geek out

over. He sure would.

"You smell that? We can't close the doors and the windows and leave it

like this."

Death's people, standing around them, listening in, nodded. It was

true. You'd melt people's lungs if you shut them up with these fumes.

"How can I help?" Death said. It was his constant mantra with

Perry. Sometimes he didn't think Perry liked him very much, and it was

good to keep on reminding him that Death and his buddies were here to

be part of the solution. That Perry needed them.

"The roof is just about done, the robots are back online. The dividers

should be done today. I've got the chairs stripped down for routine

maintenance, I could use a couple people for that."

"What's Lester working on?" Death said.

"You'd have to ask him."

Death hadn't seen Lester in days, which was weird. He hoped Lester

didn't dislike him. He worried a lot about whether people liked him

these days. He'd thought that Sammy liked him, after all.

"Where is he?"

"Don't know."

Perry put dark glasses on.

Death Waits took the hint. "Come on," he said to Lacey, who patted him

on the hand as he lifted up in his chair and rolled out to the

van. "Let's just call him."

"Lo?"

"It's Death Waits. We're down at the ride, but there's not much to do

around here. I thought maybe we could help you with whatever you were

working on?"

"What do you know about what I'm working on?" Lester said.

"Um. Nothing."

"So how do you know you want to help?"

Death Waits closed his eyes. He wanted to help these two. They'd made

something important, didn't they know that?

"What are you working on?"

"Nothing," Lester said.

"Come on," Death said. "Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you

guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute."

Lester snorted. "Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards,

turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I'll meet you

there."

"You mean go into the --" Death didn't know what it was called. He

always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum

across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but

in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were

connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney's

extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted

go-away green. The weird town across the road was *right there*.

"Yeah, across the road into the shantytown."

"OK," Death said. "See you soon." He hung up and patted Lacey's

hand. "We're going over there," he said, pointing into the shantytown.

"Is it safe?"

He shrugged. "I guess so." He loved his chair, loved how tall it made

him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up

on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt

very vulnerable -- a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small

fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were

technically homeless.

"Should we drive?"

"I think we can make it across," he said. Traffic was light, though

the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather

up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary

to be going into the town, but he couldn't afford to freak out Lester

by showing up with an entourage.

The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and

the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed

this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking

smells -- barbecue and Cuban spices -- and a little hint of septic

tank or compost heap. The buildings didn't make any sense to Death's

eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made

of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry

lines, power lines, and graffiti.

Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with

a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes

everywhere. Little kids playing in the street -- hadn't these people

heard of stranger danger -- stopped to stare at him with big

shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to

the third storey. Voices whispered and called.

Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids,

and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the

window of what looked like a little diner.

Death hadn't known what to expect from this little town, but he

certainly hadn't pictured so many little shops. He realized that he

thought of shops as being somehow civilized -- tax paying,

license-bearing entities with commercial relationships with suppliers,

with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild.

But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop,

advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating

enticements -- *Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies,

OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails*. He passed twenty different shops in as many

steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed

into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them.

Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican

pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes

watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of

the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it

would be in full sight of all these people.

It was a funny thought. He'd grown up in sparse suburbs where you'd

never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their

porches. Even though it was a "nice" neighborhood, there were muggings

and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt

like taking your life into your hands.

Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park,

it felt somehow safer. Weird.

They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural -- a Mexican in a

cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck,

surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton shirts and

blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into

a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the

ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among

them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper.

"You seem to be recovering quickly," he said, sizing up Death in his

chair. "Good to see it." He seemed a little distant, which Death

chalked up to being interrupted.

"It's great to see you again," Death said. "My friends and I have been

coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never

see you there, so I thought I'd call you."

"You'd call me."

"To see if we could help," Death said. "With whatever you're doing."

"Come in," Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for

the first time the small sign that said *HOTEL ROTHSCHILD,* with a

stately peacock behind it.

The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to

get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was

stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The

lobby -- such as it was -- was completely filled by him, Lacey and

Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it

couldn't have cornered to get there.

Lester looked embarrassed. "Sorry, I didn't think of that. Um. OK, I

could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We'd have to

belt you in, but it's do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top

floor -- it's how they get the beds into the upper stories."

"I can get up on canes," Death Waits said. "Is it safe to leave my

chair outside, though?"

Lester's eyebrows went up. "Well of course -- sure it is." Death felt

weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the

transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair?

He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood

gingerly. He'd been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes

all week, but he hadn't tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn't too

many floors up.

Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they

reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run

into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed

over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little

smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an

effort.

"OK," he said. "All done."

"Great," Lester said. "This is what I'm working on. You talked to

Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I've

cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it -- just stick it on a

network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it

becomes an open box -- it'll accept anyone's goop. You can send it

your own plans."

Death hadn't seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that

he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in

the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn't felt

since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began.

"So how does this tie in to the ride?" Death asked. "I was thinking of

building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress

people? No, I don't think so.

"So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from

the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every

day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you

know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region

liked --"

Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. "Woah, wait a

second. No, no, no --" Death was used to having his friends hang on

his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the

story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was

talking to.

"Sorry," he said. "Got ahead of myself."

"Look," Lester said, prodding at the printer. "This thing is its own

thing. We're about more than the ride here. I know you really like it,

and that's very cool, but there's no way that everything I do from now

on is going to be about that fucking thing. It was a lark, it's cool,

it's got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own

thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their

living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them."

Death couldn't make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn't

*like* the ride. How was that possible? "I don't get it," he said at

last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey,

too. He didn't like how this was going at all.

Lester picked up a screwdriver. "You see this? It's a tool. You can

pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use

the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You

can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it." He

thumped the printer. "This thing is a tool, too, but it's not *your*

tool. It belongs to someone else -- Disney. It isn't interested in

listening to you or obeying you. It doesn't want to give you more

control over your life.

"This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own

personal body, but it wasn't under my control. What's the word the

academics use? 'Agency.' I didn't have any agency. It didn't matter

what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around

behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and

pains.

"If you don't control your life, you're miserable. Think of the people

who don't get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids,

mental patients. There's something inherently awful about living like

that. Autonomy makes us happy."

He thumped the top of the printer again. "So here's this stupid thing,

which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing

that you use to better your life, but in reality, it's a tool that

Disney uses to control your life. You can't program it. You can't

change the channel. It doesn't even have an *off switch*. That's what

gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted

from something that controls to something that gives you control."

Lester's eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and

the aftermath of the beating, and the life he'd lived. Lester was

telling him that the ride wasn't important to him anymore, that he'd

be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something

else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling

of bitterness at the thought.

"So what about the ride?"

"The ride? I told you. I'm done with it. It's time to do the next

thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?"

"With the ride," Death said patiently, with the manner of someone

talking to a child.

Lester turned his back on Death.

"I'm done with the ride," Lester said. "I don't want to waste your

time." It was clear he meant, *You're wasting my time.* He bent over

the printer.

Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down

the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was

all he could do to keep from crying.

#

Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned

amusement, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and

forth. She'd bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet

Coke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic

toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo.

Now she watched the kids tear ass up and down the train, or sit

mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the

cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she

found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando

airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage

carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make

sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its

coffers.

The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in

English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian -- in that order -- and

displayed on the porters' red coats with brass buttons were

name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages

they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne -- a veteran of

innumerable hotels -- could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase.

He brought her to a coach-station and saw her aboard a bus marked for

the Polynesian, decorated with tiki-lamps, bamboo, and palm-fronds

(she touched one and discovered that it was vinyl). He refused her tip

as they saw her aboard, and then stood and waved her off with his

white gloves and giant white smile. She had to chuckle as she pulled

away, amazed at how effective these little touches were. She felt her

muscles loosening, little involuntary chuckles rising in her

throat. The coach was full of parents and children from all over the

world, grinning and laughing and hugging and talking excitedly about

the day ahead of them.

The coach let them off to a group of Hawai'ian-shirt-clad staff who

shouted "Aloha!" at them as they debarked, and picked up their luggage

with swift, cheerful, relentless efficiency. Her check-in was so

painless she wasn't sure it was over until a nice young lady who

looked Chechen picked up her bag for her and urged her out to the

grounds, which were green and lush, like nothing she'd seen since

landing in Florida. She was surrounded by the hotel structures,

long-houses decorated with Polynesian masks and stalked by leggy

ibises and chirping tropical birds. Before her was a white-sand beach

fronting onto an artificial lake ringed with other luxury hotels: a

gigantic 1970s Soviet A-frame building and a gingerbread-choked

Victorian hotel. The lake was ringed with a monorail track and plied

by handsome paddle-wheeler ferry-boats.

She stared gape-jawed at this until the bellhop gently tugged at her

elbow, giving her a dazzling smile.

Her room was the kind of thing you'd see Lucy and Ricky checking into

on honeymoon in an old *I Love Lucy* episode -- wicker ceiling fans,

bamboo furniture, a huge hot-tub shaped like a seashell. Outside, a

little terrace looking over the lake, with a pair of cockatoos looking

quizzically at her. The bellhop waved at them and they cawed at her

and flew off. Suzanne must have made a disappointed noise, because the

bellhop patted her on the arm and said, "Don't worry, we feed them

here, they come back all the time. Greedy birdies!"

She tipped the bellhop five bucks once she'd been given the grand tour

of the room -- a tame Internet connection that was "kid-friendly" and

a likewise censored video-on-demand service, delivery pizza or sushi,

information on park hours, including the dazzling array of extras she

could purchase. It turned out that resort guests were eligible to

purchase priority passes for boarding rides ahead of the plebes, and

for entering parks early and staying late. This made Suzanne feel

right at home -- it was very Russian in its approach: the more you

spent, the better your time was.

She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it

loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that

would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her

spend money like water.

Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an

itinerary. Once she'd showered she found she didn't want to wear any

of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear

into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a

barkcloth Hawai'ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks

and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that

she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap

sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her

Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.

She passed the rest of the day at the Magic Kingdom, taking a ferry

from the hotel's pier to the Victorian wrought-iron docks on the other

side of the little artificial lake. As she cleared the turnstiles into

Main Street, USA, her heart quickened. Kids rushed past her, chased by

their parents' laughing calls to slow down. Balloon sellers and

old-fashioned popcorn machines jostled for space in the crowd, and a

brass band was marching down the street in straw boaters and red

striped jackets, playing a Sousa march.

She ambled up the road, peering in the adorable little shop windows,

like the shops in a fancy casino, all themed artificial facades that

were, in back, all one shop, linked through the length of the street.

She reached the castle before she realized it, and saw that it was

shorter than it had appeared. Turning around and looking back down

Main Street, she saw that the trees lining the sides of the street had

been trimmed so they got progressively smaller from the gates to the

castle, creating a kind of false perspective line. She laughed now,

amused by the accomplishment of the little trompe l'oeil.

She squeezed past the hordes of Asian tourists taking precisely the

same picture of the castle, one after another, a phenomenon she'd

observed at other famous landmarks. For some Japanese shutterbugs, the

holiday photo experience was as formal as the Stations of the Cross,

with each picture of each landmark rigidly prescribed by custom and

unwritten law.

Now she was under the castle and headed for what her map assured her

was Fantasyland. Just as she cleared the archway, she remembered her

conversations with that Death Waits kid about Fantasyland: this was

the part that had been made over as a goth area, and then remade as

the Happiest Construction Site on Earth.

And so it was. The contrast was stark. From fairy castle to

green-painted construction sidings. From smiling, well-turned out

"castmembers" to construction workers with butt-crack-itis and grouchy

expressions. Fantasyland was like an ugly scar on the blemish-free

face of a Barbie doll.

She liked it.

Something about all that artifice, all that cunning work to cover up

all the bodies a company like Disney would have buried under its

manicured Main Street -- it had given her a low-level, tooth-grinding

headache, a kind of anger at the falseness of it all. Here, she could

see the bodies as they buried them.

Out came her camera and she went on the prowl, photographing and

photographing, seeking high ground from which to catch snaps over the

siding. She'd look at the satellite pics of this spot later.

Now she knew what her next project would be: she would document this

scar. She'd dig up the bodies.

Just for completeness' sake, she went on some of the rides. Her

super-fancy pass let her sail past the long lines of bored kids, angry

dads, exhausted moms. She captured their expressions with her camera.

The rides were all right. She was sick of rides, truth be told. As an

art-form, they were wildly overrated. Some of them made her sick and

some of them were like mildly interesting trips through someone's

collection of action-figures in a dark room. The Disney rides didn't

even let you drive, like Lester's ride did, and you didn't get to vote

on them.

By the time the sun had gone down, she was ready to go back to the

room and start writing. She wanted to get all this down, the beauty

and the terror, the commerce lurking underneath the friendly

facade. As the day lengthened into night, there were more and more

screaming children, more angry parents. She caught parents smacking

kids, once, twice, got her camera out, caught three more.

They sent a big pupu platter up to her room with a dish of poi and a

hollow pineapple filled with rum. She took her computer out onto her

lanai and looked out over the lake. An ibis came by and demanded some

of her dinner scraps. She obliged it and it gave her a cold look, as

if determining whether she'd be good for dessert, then flew off.

She began to write.

#

Something had changed between Kettlewell and Eva since they'd left

Florida with the kids. It wasn't just the legal hassles, though there

were plenty of those. They'd gone to Florida with a second chance -- a

chance for him to be a mover again, a chance for her to have a husband

who was happy with his life again.

Now he found himself sneaking past her when she was in the living room

and they slept back to back in bed with as much room between them as

possible.

Ada missed Lyenitchka and spent all her time in her bedroom IMing her

friend or going questing with her in their favorite game, which

involved Barbies, balrogs, and buying outfits. Pascal missed all the

attention he had received as the designated mascot of the two little

girls.

It was not a high point in the history of the Kettlewell clan.

"Hello?"

"Landon Kettlewell?"

"Hello, Freddy," he said.

"My fame precedes me," the journalist said. Kettlewell could hear the

grin in his voice. That voice was unmistakable -- Kettlewell had heard

it in the occassional harassing voicemail that Suzanne forwarded on.

"How are you?"

"Oh, I'm very well sir, and kind of you to ask, yes indeed. I hear

you're not doing so well, though?"

"I can't complain."

"I wish you would, though." You could tell, Freddy thought he was a

funny son of a bitch. "Seriously, Mr Kettlewell. I'm calling to follow

up on the story of the litigation that Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks

are facing for unilaterally canceling the arrangement you'd made to

finance their litigation. I'm hoping that you'll give me a quote that

might put this into perspective. Is the defense off? Will Gibbons and

Banks be sued? Are you a party to the suit?"

"Freddy?"

"Yes, Mr Kettlewell."

"I am not a child, nor am I a fool, nor am I a sucker. I'm also not a

hothead. You can't goad me into saying something. You can't trick me

into saying something. I haven't hung up on you yet, but I will unless

you can give me a single good reason to believe that any good could

possibly come out of talking to you."

"I'm going to write this story and publish it today. I can either

write that you declined to comment or I can write down whatever

comment you might have on the matter. You tell me which is fairer?"

"Goodbye, Freddy."

"Wait, wait! Just wait."

Kettlewell liked the pleading note in Freddy's voice.

"What is it, Freddy?"

"Can I get you to comment on the general idea of litigation

investment? A lot of people followed your lead in seeking out

litigation investment opportunities. There's lots of money tied up in

it these days. Do incidents like the one in Florida mean that

litigation investment is a dead strategy?"

"Of course not," Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn't be talking to this

man, but the question drove him bonkers. He'd invented litigation

investment. "Those big old companies have two common characteristics:

they've accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and

they've got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives

who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that's

changed, and so long as that's all true, there will be little

companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as

investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital

and putting it to work."

"But aren't Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?"

Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. "Yeah, so what?"

"Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies --"

"It's about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out

of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible

outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they'd get

away scot-free or they'd make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation

funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to

heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have

accumulated."

"But when a big company invests in destroying another big company --"

"Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they

form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the

floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is the *last*

thing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of

those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are

spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for

itself. In a market, when you topple a company that's come to

complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that

niche for new innovators."

"And why is that better than stability? Don't the workers at these

companies deserve the security that comes from their employers'

survival?"

"Oh come on, Freddy. Stop beating that drum. If you're an employee and

you want to get a good deal out of an employer, you're better off if

you've got fifty companies you could work for than just one."

"So you're saying that if you destroy Disney with your lawsuit, the

fifty thousand people who work at Walt Disney World will be able to,

what, work for those little rides like your friends have built?"

"They'll find lots of work, Freddy. If we make it possible for anyone

to open an innovative little ride without worrying about getting

clobbered by a big old monopolist. You like big corporations so much?"

"Yes, but it's not little innovative startups that invest in these

funds, is it?"

"It's they who benefit once the fund takes up their cause."

"And how's that working out for the ride people you're meant to be

helping out? They rejected you, didn't they?"

Kettlewell really hated Freddy, he realized. Not just a little -- he

had a deep and genuine loathing. "Oh, for fuck's sake. You don't like

little companies. You don't like big companies. You don't like

workers' co-ops. What do you want us to do, Freddy? You want us to

just curl up under a rock and die? You sit there and make up your

funny names for things; you make your snarky little commentaries, but

how much good have *you* done for the world, you complaining, sniping

little troll?"

The line got very quiet. "Can I quote you?"

"You certainly can," Kettlewell huffed. In for a penny, in for a

pound. "You can print that, and you can kiss my ass."

"Thank you, Mr Kettlewell," Freddy said. "I'll certainly take the

suggestion under advisement."

Kettlewell stood in his home office and stared at the four

walls. Upstairs, Pascal was crying. He did that a lot

lately. Kettlewell breathed deeply and tried to chill out.

Someone was knocking at his door, though. He answered it

tentatively. The kid he found there was well-scrubbed, black, in his

twenties, and smiling amiably.

"Landon Kettlewell?"

"Who's suing me?" Kettlewell could spot a process server a mile away.

The guy shrugged and made a little you-got-me smile. "Couldn't say,

sir," he said, and handed Kettlewell the envelope, holding it so that

the header was clearly visible to the camera set into the lapel of his

shirt.

"You want me to sign something?" Kettlewell said.

"It's all right, sir," the kid said and pointed at the camera. "It's

all caught on video."

"Oh, right," Kettlewell said. "Want a cup of water? Coffee?"

"I expect you're going to be too busy to entertain, sir," the kid

said, and ticked a little salute off his forehead. "But you seem like

a nice guy. Good luck with it all."

Kettlewell watched him go, then closed the door and walked back to his

office, opening the envelope and scanning it. No surprises there --

the shareholders in the investment syndicate that had backed Lester

and Perry were suing him for making false representations about his

ability to speak for them.

Tjan called him a minute later.

"They got you too, huh?" Kettlewell said.

"Just left. Wish I could say it was unexpected."

"Wish I could say I blamed them," Kettlewell said.

"Hey, you should see what the ride's been doing this week since

Florida went down," Tjan said. "It's totally mutated. I think it's

mostly coming from the Midwest, though those Brazilians seem to keep

on logging in somehow too."

"How many rides are there in South America, anyways?"

"Brazilians of them!" Tjan said with a mirthless chuckle. "Impossible

to say. They've got some kind of variant on the protocol that lets a

bunch of them share one network address. I think some of them aren't

even physical rides, just virtual flythroughs. Some are directly

linked, some do a kind of mash-up between their current norms and

other rides' current norms. It's pretty weird."

Kettlewell paced. "Well, at least someone's having a good time."

"They're going to nail us to the wall," Tjan said. "Both of

us. Probably the individual ride-operators, too. They're out for

blood."

"It's not like they even lost much money."

"They didn't need to -- they feel like they lost the money they might

have won from Disney."

"But that was twenty years away, and highly speculative."

Tjan sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. "Landon, you're a

very, very good finance person. The best I've ever met, but you really

need to understand that even the most speculative investor is mostly

speculating about how he's going to spend all the money you're about

to make him. If investors didn't count their chickens before they

hatched, you'd never raise a cent."

"Yeah," Kettlewell said. He knew it, but he couldn't soak it in. He'd

won and lost so many fortunes -- his own and others' -- that he'd

learned to take it all in stride. Not everyone else was so sanguine.

"So what do we do about it? I don't much want to lose everything."

"You could always go back to Russia," Kettlewell said, suddenly

feeling short-tempered. Why did he always have to come up with the

plan? "Sorry. You know what the lawyers are going to tell us."

"Yeah. Sue Perry and Lester."

"And we told Lester we wouldn't do that. It was probably a mistake to

do this at all, you know."

"No, don't say that. The idea was a really good one. You might have

saved their asses if they'd played along."

"And if I'd kept the lawyers on a shorter leash."

They both sat in glum silence.

"How about if we defend ourselves by producing evidence that they

reneged on a deal we'd made in good faith. Then the bastards can sue

Perry and Lester and we'll still be keeping our promise."

Kettlewell tried to picture Perry in a courtroom. He'd never been the

most even-keeled dude and since he'd been shot and had his arm broken

and been gassed, he was almost pathological.

"I've got a better idea," he said, growing excited as it unfolded in

his mind. He had that burning sensation he got sometimes when he knew

he was having a real doozy. "How about if we approach each of the

individual ride co-ops and see if they'll join the lawsuit separately

from the umbrella org? Play it right and we'll have the lawsuit back

on, without having to get our asses handed to us and without having to

destroy Perry and Lester!"

Tjan laughed. "That's -- that's... Wow! Genius. Yeah, OK, right! The

Boston group is in, I'll tell you that much. I'm sure we can get half

a dozen more in, too. Especially if we can get Perry to agree not to

block it, which I'm sure he'll do after I have a little talk with

him. This'll work!"

"Sometimes the threat of total legal destruction can have a wonderful,

clarifying effect on one's mind," Kettlewell said drily. "How're the

kids?"

"Lyenitchka is in a sulk. She wants to go back to Florida and she

wants to see Ada some more. Plus she's upset that we never made it to

Disney World."

Kettlewell flopped down on his couch. "Have you seen Suzanne's blog

lately?"

Tjan laughed. "Yeah. Man, she's giving it to them with both

barrels. Makes me feel sorry for 'em."

"Um, you *do* know that we're suing them for everything they've got,

right?"

"Well, yes. But that's just money. Suzanne's going to take their

balls."

They exchanged some more niceties and promised that they'd get

together face-to-face real soon and Kettlewell hung up. From behind

him, he heard someone fidgeting.

"Kids, you know you aren't supposed to come into my office."

"Sounds like things have gotten started up again." It wasn't the kids,

it was Eva. He sat up. She was standing with her arms folded in the

doorway of his office, staring at him.

"Yeah," he said, mumbling a little. She was really beautiful, his

wife, and she put up with a hell of a lot. He felt obscurely ashamed

of the way that he'd treated her. He wished he could stand up and give

her a warm hug. He couldn't.

Instead, she sat beside him. "Sounds like you'll be busy."

"Oh, I just need to get all the individual co-ops on board, talk to

the lawyers, get the investors off my back. Have a shareholders'

meeting. It'll be fine."

Her smile was little and sad. "I'm going, Landon," she said.

The blood drained from his face. She'd left him plenty, over the

years. He'd deserved it. But it had always been white-hot, in the

middle of a fight, and it had always ended with some kind of

reconciliation. This time, it had the feeling of something planned and

executed in cold blood.

He sat up and folded his hands in his lap. He didn't know what else to

do.

Her smile wilted. "It's not going to work, you and me. I can't live

like this, lurching from crisis to crisis. I love you too much to

watch that happen. I hate what it turns me into. You're only happy

when you're miserable, you know that? I can't do that forever. We'll

be part of each others' lives forever, but I can't be Mrs Stressbunny

forever."

None of this was new. She'd shouted variations on this at him at many

times in their relationship. The difference was that now she wasn't

shouting. She was calm, assured, sad but not crying. Behind her in the

hallway, he saw that she'd packed her suitcase, and the little

suitcases the kids used when they travelled together.

"Where will you go?"

"I'm going to stay with Lucy, from college. She's living down the

peninsula in Mountain View. She's got room for the kids."

He felt like raging at her, promising her a bitter divorce and custody

suit, but he couldn't do it. She was completely right, after all. Even

though his first impulse was to argue, he couldn't do it just then.

So she left, and Kettlewell was alone in his nice apartment with his

phone and his computer and his lawsuits and his mind fizzing with

ideas.

#

The last thing Sammy wanted was a fight. Dinah's promo was making

major bank for the company -- and he was taking more and more meetings

in Texas with Dinah, which was a hell of a perk. They'd shipped two

million of the DiaBs, and were projecting ten million in the first

quarter. Park admission was soaring and the revenue from the

advertising was going to cover the entire cost of the next rev of the

DiaBs, which would be better, faster, smaller and cheaper.

That business with Death Waits and the new Fantasyland and the ride --

what did it matter now? He'd been so focused on the details that he'd

lost track of the big picture. Walt Disney had made his empire by

figuring out how to do the next thing, not wasting his energy on how

to protect the last thing. It had all been a mistake, a dumb mistake,

and now he was back on track. From all appearances, the lawsuits were

on the verge of blowing away, anyway. Fantasyland -- he'd turned that

over to Wiener, of all people, and he was actually doing some good

stuff there. Really running with the idea of restoring it as a

nostalgia site aimed squarely at fatkins, with lots of food and

romantic kiddie rides that no kid would want to ride in the age of the

break-neck coaster.

The last thing he wanted was a fight. What he wanted was to make

assloads of money for the company, remake himself as a power in the

organization.

But he was about to have a fight.

Hackelberg came into his office unannounced. Sammy had some of the

Imagineers in, showing him prototypes of the next model, which was

being designed for more reliable shipping and easier

packing. Hackelberg was carrying his cane today, wearing his ice-cream

suit, and was flushed a deep, angry red that seemed to boil up from

his collar.

One look from his blazing eyes was enough to send the Imagineers

scurrying. They didn't even take their prototype with them. Hackelberg

closed the door behind them.

"Hello, Samuel," he said.

"Nice to see you. Can I offer you a glass of water? Iced tea?"

Hackelberg waved the offers away. "They're using your boxes to print

their own designs," he said.

"What?"

"Those freaks with their home-made ride. They've just published a

system for printing their own objects on your boxes."

Sammy rewound the conversations he'd had with the infosec people in

Imagineering about what countermeasures they'd come up with, what they

were proof against. He was pissed that he was finding out about this

from Hackelberg. If Lester and Perry were hacking the DiaBs, they

would be talking about it nonstop, running their mouths on the

Internet. Back when he was his own competitive intelligence

specialist, he would have known about this project the second it

began. Now he was trying to find a competitive intelligence person who

knew his ass from his elbow, so far without success.

"Well, that's regrettable, obviously, but so long as we're still

selling the consumables..." The goop was a huge profit-maker for the

company. They bought it in bulk, added a proprietary, precisely mixed

chemical that the printer could check for in its hoppers, and sold it

to the DiaB users for a two thousand percent markup. If you tried to

substitute a competitor's goop, the machine would reject it. They

shipped out new DiaBs with only half a load of goop, so that the first

purchase would come fast. It was making more money, week-on-week, than

popcorn.

"The crack they're distributing also disables the checking for the

watermark. You can use any generic goop in them."

Sammy shook his head and restrained himself from thumping his hand

down on the desk. He wanted to scream.

"We're not suing them, are we?"

"Do you think that's wise, Samuel?"

"I'm no legal expert. You tell me. Maybe we can take stronger

countermeasures with the next generation --" He gestured at the

prototype on his desk.

"And abandon the two million units we've shipped to date?"

Sammy thought about it. Those families might hang on to their original

two million forever, or until they wore out. Maybe he should be

building them to fall apart after six months of use, to force updates.

"It's just so unfair. They're ripping us off. We spent the money on

those units so that we could send our message out. What the hell is

wrong with those people? Are they compulsive? Do they *have* to

destroy every money-making business?"

Hackelberg sat back. "Samuel, I think it's time we dealt with them."

Sammy's mind was still off on the strategies for keeping Lester and

Perry at bay, though. Sure, a six-month obsolescence curve would do

it. Or they could just charge money for the DiaBs now that people were

starting to understand what they were for. Hell, they could just make

the most compelling stuff for a DiaB to print and maybe that would be

enough.

Hackelberg tapped the tip of his cane once, sharply. Sammy came back

to the conversation. "So that's settled. Filing suit today. We're

going to do a discovery on them that'll split them open from asshole

to throat. No more of this chickenshit police stuff -- we're going to

figure out every source of income these bastards have, we're going to

take away their computers, we're going down to their ISPs and getting

their emails and instant messages.

"And as we've seen, they're going to retaliate. That's fine. We're not

treating these people as a couple of punk pirates who go down at the

first sign of trouble. Not anymore. We know that these people are the

competition. We're going to make an example of them. They're the first

ones to attack on this front, but they won't be the last. We're

vulnerable, Samuel, but we can contain that vulnerability with enough

deterrent."

Hackelberg seemed to be expecting something of Sammy, but Sammy was

damned if he knew what it was. "OK," he said lamely.

Hackelberg's smile was like a jack o'lantern's. "That means that we've

got to be prepared for their discovery on *us*. I need to know every

single detail of this DiaB project, including the things I'd find if I

went through your phone records and your email. Because they *will* be

going through them. They'll be putting you and your operation under

the microscope."

Sammy restrained his groan. "I'll have it for you," he said. "Give me

a day or two."

He saw Hackelberg out of his office as quickly as he could, then shut

the door. Hackelberg wanted everything, and that meant *everything*,

including his playmates from the advertising industry --

everything. He was becoming the kind of executive who emitted

strategic intelligence, rather than the kind who gathered it. That

wouldn't do. That wasn't the natural order of things.

He sat down at his computer. Someone had to do the competitive

intelligence work around here and it looked like it would have to be

him.

#

What the World Can Learn from Disney

Suzanne Church

It's easy to dismiss Disney. They make more lawsuits than rides these

days. They have a reputation for Polyannaish chirpiness. Their

corporate communications veer from Corporate Passive Voice Third

Person to a syrupy, condescending kiddee-speak that's calculated to

drive children into a frenzy of parent-nagging screeches.

But if you haven't been to a Disney Park in a while, you don't know

what you're missing. I've been in Walt Disney World for a week now,

and I'm here to tell you, it's pretty good. No, it's better than that

-- it's *amazing*.

You've probably heard about the attention to detail: the roofline over

Fantasyland features sagging, Georgian tiles, crazy chimneys, and

subtly animated gargoyles (left over from a previous, goth-ier

incarnation of this part of the park). You don't see this unless you

raise your eyes above the busy, intriguing facades that front the

rides, above the masterfully painted signage, and higher still. In

other words, unless you're someone like me, looking for details, you

won't spot them. They're there as pure gold-plating, they're there

because someone who took pride in his work *put them there*.

It tells you something about the people behind the scenes here. People

who care about their jobs work here. It's easy to forget that when

you're thinking about Disney, a company whose reputation these days

has more to do with whom they sue than with what they make.

But oh, what they make. There's a safari park here, something like a

zoo but without that stuff that makes you feel like you're

participating in some terrible exercise that strips noble animals of

their dignity for our amusement. Instead, the animals here roam free,

near their hairless monkey cousins, separated from them by water

features, camouflaged ditches, simulated ancient ruins [more details].

That's just one of six parks, each subdivided into six or seven

"lands," each land with its own unique charm, culture, and

customs. That's not counting the outlying areas: two new towns, golf

courses, a velodrome, a preserved marshland that you can tour in a

skiff with a local naturist. In these days of cheap fabrication, it's

easy to forget what you can do with several billion dollars and the

kind of hubris that leads you to dredge lakes, erect papier mache

mountains, and create your own toy mass-transit system.

Of course, Disney Parks are no strangers to small scale

fabrication. See their tiny, clever Disney-in-a-Box devices, which I

have chronicled here from the other side. On the one hand, these

things are networked volumetric printers, but on the other, they are

superb category-busters that have achieved an entirely justifiable --

yet still staggering -- market penetration in just a few months.

I came here ready to be bored and disgusted and fleeced of every

nickel. I am disappointed. The parks are tremendous at separating

people from money, it's true. They've structured each promenade and

stroll so that even a walk to the bathroom can create a

Mommy-Daddy-Want-It-NOW situation. For such a happy place, there

certainly are a lot of weepy children and frustrated parents.

But it's hard to fault Disney for being a business that makes a lot of

money. That's the point, after all. And it can't be cheap to keep the

tens of thousands of "castmembers" (yes, they really do call them

that, even when they're earning minimum wage and work jobs with all

the glamour of a bathroom attendant) hanging around, picking up litter

and confronting every new "guest" with eerily convincing cheer.

As for "bored" and "disgusted" -- not yet. Bored -- it's impossible to

imagine such a thing. For starters, the world's middle classes have

converged here in a sort of bourgeois UN, and you can get a lot of

pleasure out of watching a Chinese "little emperor" with doting

parents in tow making friends with a tiny perfect Russian mafiyeh

princess whose parents flick nervously at their nicotine inhalers and

scout the building facades for hidden cameras.

Of course, if people-watching isn't your thing, there are the rides

themselves, which make art out of the shoebox diorama. There are

luaus, indoor scuba diving with live sharks, and an island of

genuinely sleazy nightclubs where you can get propositioned for some

improbable acts that are hardly family friendly. These last appear to

be largely populated by the "castmembers" seeking a little after-work

action.

Disgusted? I think if I were a parent, there'd be parts of the

experience that drove me nuts. But once you get to know the rhythm of

the place, you start to see that there are navigable pathways that

don't lead through any commercial areas -- fantastic adventure

playgrounds, nature hikes, petting zoos, horseback rides, sports

training. And for every kid who's having a blood-sugar meltdown after

consuming half a quart of high-fructose lube slathered on a cinnamon

bun, there's another who is standing open-mouthed with complete bodily

wonder, at some stupendous spectacle, clearly forming neuronal

connections of a sort that will create the permanent predisposition to

an appreciation of spectacle, wonder, and beauty.

This is the kind of place where you have to love the sin and hate the

sinner. The company may sue and resort to dirty tricks, but it's also

chock full of real artists making real art.

If you haven't been for a visit, you should. Honestly. Oh, by all

means, also go somewhere unspoiled (if you can find it). Go

camping. Go to one of the rides I've written so much about. But if you

want to see the bright side of what billions can do -- the stuff you

never get from outside the walls of this fortress of fun -- buy a

ticket.

#

The barman at Suzanne's hotel started building her a Lapu-Lapu as she

came up the stairs. The drink involved a hollow pineapple, overproof

rum, and an umbrella, and she'd concluded that it contained the

perfect dosage of liquid CNS depressant to unwind her after a day of

battle at the parks. That day she'd spent following around the troupes

of role-playing actors at Disney's Hollwood Studios: a cast of a

hundred costumed players who acted out a series of interlocking

comedies set in the black-and-white days of Hollywood. They were

fearlessly cheeky, grabbing audience members and conscripting them in

their plays.

Now she was footsore and there was still a nighttime at Epcot in her

future. The barman passed her the pineapple and she thumped her

lanyard against the bar twice -- once to pay for the drink and once to

give him a generous tip. He was gay as a goose, but fun to look at,

and he flirted with her for kicks.

"Gentleman caller for you, Suzanne," he said, tilting his head. "You

temptress."

She looked in the direction indicated and took in the man sitting on

the bar-stool. He didn't have the look of a harried dad and he was too

old to be a love-flushed honeymooner. In sensible tropical-weight

slacks and a western shirt, he was impossible to place. He smiled and

gave her a little wave.

"What?"

"He came in an hour ago and asked for you."

She looked back at the man. "What's your take on him?"

"I think he works here. He didn't pay with an employee card, but he

acted like it."

"OK," she said, "send out a search party if I'm not back in an hour."

"Go get him, tiger," the barman said, giving her hand a squeeze.

She carried her pineapple with her and drifted down the bar.

"Hello there," she said.

"Ms Church," the man said. He had a disarming, confident smile. "My

name is Sammy Page."

She knew the name, of course. The face, too, now that she thought

about it. He offered her his hand. She didn't take it. He put it down,

then wiped it on his trouser-leg.

"Are you having a good time?"

"A lovely time, thank you." She sipped her drink and wished it was a

little more serious and intimidating. It's hard to do frosty when

you're holding a rum-filled pineapple with a paper parasol.

His smile faltered. "I read your article. I can't believe I missed

it. I mean, you've been here for six days and I just figured it out

today? I'm a pretty incompetent villain."

She let a little smile slip out at that. "Well, it's a big Internet."

"But I *love* your stuff. I've been reading it since, well, back when

I lived in the Valley. I used to get the Merc actually delivered on

paper."

"You are a walking fossil, aren't you?"

He bobbed his head. "So it comes down to this. I've been very

distracted with making things besides lawsuits lately, as you

know. I've been putting my energy into doing stuff, not preventing

stuff. It's been refreshing."

She grubbed in her pocket and came up with a little steno book and a

pencil. "Do you mind if I take notes?"

He gulped. "Can this all be on background?"

She hefted her notebook. "No," she said finally. "If there's anything

that needs publishing, I'm going to have to publish it. I can respect

the fact that you're speaking to me with candor, but frankly, Mr Page,

you haven't earned the privilege of speaking on background."

He sipped at his drink -- a more grown-up highball, with a lone

ice-cube in it, maybe a Scotch and soda. "OK, right. Well, then, on

the record, but candorously. I loved your article. I love your work in

general. I'm really glad to have you here, because I think we make

great stuff and we're making more of it than ever. Your latest post

was right on the money -- we care about our work here. That's how we

got to where we are."

"But you devote a lot of your resources to other projects here, don't

you? I've heard about you, Mr Page. I've interviewed Death Waits." He

winced and she scribbled a note, leaving him on tenterhooks while she

wrote. Something cold and angry had hold of her writing arm. "I've

interviewed him and heard what he has to say about this place, what

you have done."

"My hands aren't the cleanest," he said. "But I'm trying to atone." He

swallowed. The barman was looking at them. "Look, can I take you for a

walk, maybe? Someplace more private?"

She thought about it. "Let me get changed," she said. "Meet you in the

lobby in ten."

She swapped her tennis shoes for walking sandals and put on a clean

shirt and long slacks, then draped a scarf over her shoulders like a

shawl. Outside, the sunset was painting the lagoon bloody. She was

just about to rush back down to the lobby when she stopped and called

Lester, her fingers moving of their own volition.

"Hey, you," he said. "Still having fun in Mauschwitz?"

"It keeps getting weirder here, let me tell you," she said. She told

him about Sammy showing up, wanting to talk with her.

"Ooh, I'm jealous," Lester said. "He's my arch-rival, after all."

"I hadn't thought of it that way. He *is* kind of cute --"

"Hey!"

"In a slimy, sharky way. Don't worry, Lester. I miss you, you know?"

"Really?"

"Really. I think I'm about done here. I'm going to come home soon."

There was a long pause, then a snuffling sound. She realized he was

crying. He slurped. "Sorry. That's great, babe. I missed you."

"I -- I missed you too. Listen, I've got to go meet this guy."

"Go, go. Call me after dinner and tell me how it goes. Meanwhile, I'm

going to go violate the DiaB some more."

"Channel it, that's right."

"Right on."

Sammy met her in the lobby. "I thought we could go for a walk around

the lake," he said. "There's a trail that goes all the way

around. It's pretty private."

She looked at the lake. At twelve o'clock, the main gates of the Magic

Kingdom; at three, the retro A-frame Contemporary hotel, at nine, the

wedding-cake Grand Floridian Resort.

"Lead on," she said. He led her out onto the artificial white-sand

beach and around, and a moment later they were on a pathway paved with

octagonal tiles, each engraved with the name of a family and a year.

"I really liked your article."

"You said that."

They walked a while longer. "It reminded me of why I came here. I

worked for startups, and they were fun, but they were ephemeral. No

one expected something on the Web to last for half a century. Maybe

the brand survives, but who knows? I mean, who remembers Yahoo!

anymore? But for sure, anything you built then would be gone in a year

or two, a decade tops.

"But here..." He waved his hands. They were coming around the bend for

the Contemporary now, and she could see it in all its absurd glory. It

had been kept up so that it looked like it might have been erected

yesterday, but the towering white A-frame structure with the monorail

running through its midriff was clearly of another era. It was like a

museum piece, or a bit of artillery on the field at a civil war

reenactment.

"I see."

"It's about the grandiosity, the permanence. The belief in doing

something -- anything -- that will endure."

"You didn't need to bring me someplace private to tell me that."

"No, I didn't." He swallowed. "It's hard because I want to tell you

something that will compromise me if I say it."

"And I won't let you off the hook by promising to keep it

confidential."

"Exactly."

"Well, you're on the horns of a dilemma then, aren't you?" The sun was

nearly set now, and stones at their feet glittered from beneath,

sprinkled with twinkling lights. It made the evening, scented with

tropical flowers and the clean smell of the lake, even more lovely. A

cool breeze fluffed her hair.

He groaned. She had to admit it, she was enjoying this. Was it any

less than this man deserved?

"Let me try this again. I have some information that, if I pass it on

to you, could save your friends down in Hollywood from terrible

harm. I can only give you this information on the condition that you

take great pains to keep me from being identified as the source."

They'd come to the Magic Kingdom now. Behind them, the main gates

loomed, and a pufferbelly choo-choo train blew its whistle as it

pulled out of the station. Happy, exhausted children ran across the

plaza, heading for the ferry docks and the monorail ramps. The stones

beneath her feet glittered with rainbow light, and tropical birds

called to each other from the Pirates of the Caribbean Adventure

Island in the middle of the lake.

"Hum," she said. The families laughed and jostled each

other. "Hum. OK, one time only. This one is off the record."

Sammy looked around nervously. "Keep walking," he said. "Let's get

past here and back into the private spots."

*But it's the crowds that put me in a generous mood.* She didn't say

it. She'd give him this one. What harm could it do? If it was

something she had to publish, she could get it from another source.

"They're going to sue your friends."

"So what else is new?"

"No, personally. They're going to the mattresses. Every trumped up

charge they can think of. But the point here isn't to get the cops to

raid them, it's to serve discovery on every single communication,

every document, every file. Open up everything. Root through every

email until they find something to hang them with."

"You say 'they' -- aren't *you* 'they'?"

It was too dark to see his face now, but she could tell the question

made him uncomfortable.

"No. Not anymore." He swallowed and looked out at the lake. "Look, I'm

doing something now -- something... *amazing*. The DiaB, it's breaking

new ground. We're putting three-d printers into every house in

America. What your friend Lester is doing, it's actually *helping*

us. We're inventing a whole new --"

"Business?"

"No, not just a business. A world. It's what the New Work was missing

-- a three-d printer in every living room. A killer app. There were

personal computers and geeks for years before the spreadsheet came

along. Then there was a reason to put one in every house. Then we got

the Internet, the whole software industry. A new world. That's where

we're headed. It's all I want to do. I don't want to spend the rest of

my life suing people. I want to *do stuff*."

He kicked at the rushes that grew beside the trail. "I want to be

remembered for that. I want *that* to be my place in the history books

-- not a bunch of lawsuits."

Suzanne walked along beside him in silence for a time. "OK, so what do

you want me to do about it?"

"I thought that if --" He shut up. "Look, I tried this once before. I

told that Freddy bastard everything in the hopes that he'd come onto

my side and help me out. He screwed me. I'm not saying you're Freddy,

but --"

Suzanne stopped walking. "What do you want from me, sir? You have

hardly been a friend to me and mine. It's true that you've made

something very fine, but it's also true that you helped sabotage

something every bit as fine. You're painting yourself as the victim of

some mysterious 'them.' But as near as I can work out, the only

difference between you and 'them' is that you're having a little

disagreement with them. I don't like to be used as part of your

corporate head-games and power-struggles."

"Fine," he said. "Fine. I deserve that. I deserve no

better. Fine. Well, I tried."

Suzanne refused to soften. Grown men sulking did not inspire any

sympathy in her. Whatever he wanted to tell her, it wasn't worth going

into his debt.

He gave a shuddering sigh. "Well, I've taken you away from your

evening of fun. Can I make it up to you? Would you like to come with

me on some of my favorite rides?"

This surprised her a little, but when she thought about it, she

couldn't see why not. "Sure," she said.

#

Taking a guest around Disney World was like programming a playlist for

a date or a car-trip. Sammy had done it three or four times for people

he was trying to win over (mostly women he was trying to screw) and he

refined his technique every time.

So he took her to the Carousel of Progress. It was the oldest

untouched ride in the park, a replica of the one that Walt himself had

built for GE at the 1964 World's Fair. There had been attempts to

update it over the years, but they'd all been ripped out and the show

restored to its mid-sixties glory.

It was a revolving theater where robots danced and sang and talked

through the American Century, from the last days of the coal stove up

to the dawn of the space age. It had a goofy, catchy song, cornball

jokes, and he relished playing guide and telling his charges about the

time that the revolving theater had trapped a careless castmember in

its carousel and crushed her to death. That juxtaposition of sunny,

goofy American corporate optimism and the macabre realities of

operating a park where a gang of half-literate minimum-wage workers

spent their days shovelling the world's rich children into modified

threshing machines -- it was delicious.

Suzanne's body language told him the whole story from the second she

sat down, arms folded, a barely contained smirk on her lips. The

lights played over the GE logo, which had acquired an even more

anachronistic luster since the last time he'd been. Now that GE had

been de-listed from the NYSE, it was only a matter of time before they

yanked the sponsorship, but for now, it made the ride seem like it was

part time-machine. Transported back to the corporate Pleistocene, when

giant dinocorps thundered over the plains.

The theater rotated to the first batch of singing, wise-cracking

robots. Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head bemusedly. Out

came the second batch, the third -- now they were in the fabulous

forties and the Andrews Sisters played while grandma and grandpa robot

watched a bulging fish-eye TV and sister got vibrated by an electric

slimming belt. The jokes got worse, the catchy jingle -- "There's a

great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every daaaaay!" --

got repeated with more vigor.

"It's like an American robot performance of *Triumph of the Will*,"

she whispered to him, and he cracked up. They were the only two in the

theater. It was never full, and he himself had taken part in spitball

exercises brainstorming replacements, but institutionally, Disney

Parks couldn't bring itself to shut it down. There was always some

excuse -- rabid fans, historical interest, competing priorities -- but

it came down to the fact that no one wanted to bring the axe down on

the robot family.

The final segment now, the whole family enjoying a futuristic

Christmas with a high-tech kitchen whose voice-activated stove went

haywire. All the robots were on stage for the segment, and they

exhorted the audience to sing and clap along. Sammy gave in and

clapped, and a second later, Suzanne did, too, laughing at the

silliness of it all. When the house lights came up and the bored --

but unsquashed -- castmember spieled them out of the ride, Sammy had a

bounce in his step and the song in his head.

"That was *terrible*!" Suzanne said.

"Isn't it great?"

"God, I'll never get that song out of my head." They moved through the

flashing lights of Tomorrowland.

"Look at that -- no line on Space Mountain," Sammy said, pointing.

So they rode Space Mountain -- twice. Then they caught the

fireworks. Then Sammy took her over to Tom Sawyer Island on a

maintenance boat and they sat up in the tree house and watched as the

park heaved and thronged, danced and ran, laughed and chattered.

"Hear the rustling?"

"Yeah, what is that, rabbits or something?"

"Giant rats." Sammy grinned in the dark. "Giant, feral rats."

"Come on, you're joking."

"Cross my heart. We drain the lake every now and then and they migrate

to the island. No predators. Lots of dropped french fries -- it's

ratopia here. They get as big as cats. Bold little fuckers too. No one

likes to be here alone at night."

"What about us?"

"We're together."

The rustling grew louder and they held their breath. A bold rat like a

raccoon picked its way across the path below them. Then two

more. Suzanne shivered and Sammy did, too. They were huge, feral,

menacing.

"Want to go?"

"Hell *yes*," she said. She fumbled in her purse and came out with a

bright little torch that shone like a beacon. You weren't supposed to

use bright lights on the island after hours while the rest of the park

was open, but Sammy was glad of it.

Back on the mainland, they rode Big Thunder Mountain and moseyed over

to the new, half-rebuilt Fantasyland. The zombie maze was still open,

and they got lost in it amid the groans, animatronic shamblers, and

giggling kids running through the hedges.

Something happened in the maze. Between entering it and leaving it,

they lost their cares. Instead of talking about the park and

Hackelberg, they talked about ways of getting out of the maze, talked

about which zombie was coming next, about the best zombie movies

they'd ever seen, about memorable Halloweens. As they neared the exit,

they started to strategize about the best ride to go on next. Suzanne

had done the Haunted Mansion twice when she first arrived and now --

"Come on, it's such a cliche," Sammy said. "Anyone can be a Haunted

Mansion fan. It's like being a Mickey fan. It takes real character to

be a Goofy fan."

"You're a Goofy fan, I take it?"

"Indeed. And I'm also a Jungle Cruise man."

"More corny jokes?"

"'We've been *dying* to have you' -- talk about cornball humor."

They rode both. The park was closing, and all around them, people were

streaming away from the rides. No lines at all, not even in front of

the rollercoasters, not even in front of Dumbo, not even in front of

the ultra-violent fly-over of the world of the zombies (nee Peter

Pan's Flight, and a perennial favorite).

"You know, I haven't just *enjoyed* the park like this in years." He

was wearing a huge foam Goofy hat that danced and bobbed on his head,

trying to do little pas-de-deux with the other Goofy hats in the

vicinity. It also let out the occassional chuckle and snatch of song.

"Shut up," Suzanne said. "Don't talk about magic. Live magic."

They closed the park, letting themselves get herded off of Main Street

along with the last stragglers. He looked over his shoulder as they

moved through the arches under the train-station. The night crew was

moving through the empty Main Street, hosing down the streets,

sweeping, scrubbing. As he watched, the work lights came on, throwing

the whole thing into near-daylight illumination, making it seem less

like an enchanted wonderland and more like a movie set, an artifice. A

sham.

It was one in the morning and he was exhausted. And Hackelberg was

going to sue.

"Sammy, what do you want me to do, blackmail him?"

"I don't know -- sure. Why not? You could call him and say, 'I hear

you're working on this lawsuit, but don't you think it's hypocritical

when you've been doing all this bad stuff --'"

"I don't blackmail people."

"Fine. Tell your friends, then. Tell some lawyers. That could work."

"Sammy, I think we're going to have to fight this suit on its merits,

not on the basis of some sneaky intel. I appreciate the risk you're

putting yourself to --"

"We ripped off some of Lester's code for the DiaB." He blurted it out,

not believing he was hearing himself say it. "I didn't know it at the

time. The libraries were on the net and my guys were in a hurry, and

they just imported it into the build and left it there -- they rewrote

it with the second shipment, but we put out a million units running a

library Lester wrote for volumetric imaging. It was under some crazy

viral open source license and we were supposed to publish all our

modifications, and we never did."

Suzanne threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. Sammy found

himself laughing along with her.

"OK," she said. "OK. That's a good one. I'll tell Lester about

it. Maybe he'll want to use it. Maybe he'll want to sue."

Sammy wanted to ask her if she'd keep his name out of it, but he

couldn't ask. He'd gone to Hackelberg with the info as soon as he'd

found out and they'd agreed to keep it quiet. The Imagineers

responsible had had a very firm talking to, and had privately admitted

to a curious and aghast Sammy over beers that everyone everywhere did

this all the time, that it was so normal as to be completely

unremarkable. He was pretty sure that a judge wouldn't see it that

way.

Suzanne surprised him by giving him a strong, warm hug. "You're not

the worst guy in the world, Sammy Page," she said. "Thanks for showing

me around your park."

#

Kettlewell had been almost pathetic in his interest in helping Lester

out. Lester got the impression that he'd been sitting around his

apartment, moping, ever since Eva had taken the kids and gone. As

Lester unspooled the story for him -- Suzanne wouldn't tell him how

she'd found this out, and he knew better than to ask -- Kettlewell

grew more and more excited. By the time Lester was through, he was

practically slobbering into the phone.

"Oh, oh, oh, this is going to be a *fun* phoner," he said.

"You'll do it, then? Even after everything?"

"Does Perry know you've called me?"

Lester swallowed. "No," he said. "I don't talk to Perry much these

days."

Kettlewell sighed. "What the hell am I going to do with you two?"

"I'm sorry," Lester said.

"Don't be sorry. Be happy. Someone should be happy around here."

#

Herve Guignol chaired the executive committee. Sammy had known him for

years. They'd come east together from San Jose, where Guignol had run

the entertainment side of eBay. They'd been recruited by Disney Parks

at the same time, during the hostile takeover and breakup, and they'd

had their share of nights out, golf games, and stupid movies together.

But when Guignol was wearing his chairman's hat, it was like he was a

different person. The boardroom was filled with huge, ergonomic

chairs, the center of the table lined with bottles of imported water

and trays of fanciful canapes in the shapes of Disney

characters. Sammy sat to Guignol's left and Hackelberg sat to his

right.

Guignol brought the meeting to order and the rest of the committee

stopped chatting and checking email and looked expectant. At the touch

of a button, the door swung shut with an authoritative clunk and

shutters slid down over the window.

"Welcome, and thank you for attending on such short notice. You know

Augustus Hackelberg; he has something to present to you."

Hackelberg climbed to his feet and looked out at them. He didn't look

good.

"An issue has arisen --" Sammy loved the third person passive voice

that dominated corporate meetings. Like the issue had arisen all on

its own, spontaneously. "A decision that was taken has come back to

bite us." He explained about the DiaBs and the code, laying it out

more or less as it happened, though of course he downplayed his

involvement in advising Sammy to go ahead and ship.

The committee asked a few intense questions, none directed at Sammy,

who kept quiet, though he instinctively wanted to defend his

record. They took a break after an hour, and Sammy found himself in a

corner with Guignol.

"What do you think?" Sammy asked him.

Guignol grimaced. "I think we're pretty screwed. Someone is going to

have to take a fall for this, you know. It's going to cost us a

fortune."

Sammy nodded. "Well, unless we just settle with them," he said. "You

know -- we drop the suit we just filed and they drop theirs...." He

had hoped that this would come out on its own, but it was clear that

Hackelberg wasn't going to offer it up himself. He was too in love

with the idea of getting his hands on Perry and Lester.

Guignol rocked his head from side to side. "You think they'd go for

it?"

Sammy dropped his voice to a whisper and turned away from the rest of

the room to confound any lip-readers. "I think they've *offered* to do

that."

Guignol cut his eyes over to Hackelberg and Sammy nodded,

imperceptibly.

Guignol moved away, leaving Sammy to eat a Mickey head built from

chunks of salmon and hamachi. Guignol moved among the committee,

talking to a few members. Sammy recognized the behavior --

consolidating power. Hard to remember that this was the guy he'd

played savage, high-stakes games of putt-putt golf with.

The meeting reconvened. No one looked at Sammy. They all looked at

Hackelberg.

"What about trying to settle the suit?" Guignol said.

Hackelberg flushed. "I don't know if that's possible --"

"What about if we offer to settle in exchange for dropping the suit

we've just filed?"

Hackelberg's hands squeezed the side of the table. "I don't think that

that would be a wise course of action. This is the opportunity we've

been waiting for -- the chance to crack them wide open and see what's

going on inside. Discover just what they've taken from us and how. Out

them for all their bad acts."

Guignol nodded. "OK, that's true. Now, as I understand it, every DiaB

we shipped with this Banks person's code on it is a separate act of

infringement. We shipped a million of them. What's the potential

liability per unit?"

"Courts usually award --"

Guignol knocked quietly on the table. "What's the *potential

liability* -- what's the size of the bill a court *could* hand down,

if a jury was involved? If, say, this became part of someone's

litigation portfolio."

Hackelberg looked away. "It's up to five hundred thousand per separate

act of infringement."

Guignol nodded. "So, we're looking at a ceiling on the liability at

$500 billion, then?"

"Technically, yes. But --"

"I propose that we offer a settlement, quid-pro-quo with this Banks

person. We drop our suit if he indemnifies us from damages for his."

"Seconded," said someone at the table. Things were picking up

steam. Sammy bit the inside of his cheek to keep his smile in check.

"Wait," Hackelberg said. "Gentlemen and lady, please. While it's true

that damages can technically run to $500,000 per infringement, that

simply isn't done. Not to entities like this firm. Listen, we *wrote*

that law so we could sue people who took from *us*. It won't be used

against us. We will face, at worst, a few hundred dollars per act of

infringement. Still a sizable sum of money, but in the final analysis

--"

"Thank you," Guignol said. "All in favor of offering a settlement?"

It was unanimous -- except for Hackelberg.

#

Sammy got his rematch with Hackelberg when the quarterly financials

came out. It was all that black ink, making him giddy.

"I don't want to be disrespectful," he said, knowing that in

Hackelberg's books, there could be nothing more disrespectful than

challenging him. "But we need to confront some business realities

here."

Hackelberg's office was nothing like Sammy had expected -- not a

southern gentleman's study lined with hunting trophies and framed

ancestral photos. It was as spare as the office of a temp, almost

empty save for a highly functional desk, built-in bookcases lined with

law-books, and a straight-backed chair. It was ascetic, severe, and it

was more intimidating than any dark-wood den could hope to be.