Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (latest novels to read .TXT) 📖

meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high -- higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf -- Tim

, I had to remember to call him Tim -- would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.

Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile. He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates.

I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it. "So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?" I asked Tim.

Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation -- that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to pounce on her work.

Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. "We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President inside

you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to flash-bake

the Presidents on your mind!" His eyes glittered in the twilight.

Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing.

"Wow," I said. "That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?" The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars.

"That's not really my area," Tim said. "I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want."

"That would be fine," Lil said, taking my elbow. "I think we should be heading home, now, though." She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight.

"That's too bad," Tim said. "My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by."

The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. "That would be great

!" I said, too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away.

"But we've got an early morning tomorrow," Lil said. "You've got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for groceries." She was lying, but she was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But my faith was unshakeable.

"Eight a.m. shift? No problem -- I'll be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time to change. All right?"

Dan tried. "But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made reservations."

"Aw, we can eat any time," I said. "This is a hell of an opportunity."

"It sure is," Dan said, giving up. "Mind if I come along?"

He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, If he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him

. I was past caring -- I was going to beard the lion in his den!

Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. "Then it's settled! Let's go."

===


On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over.

Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to tear down.

She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy.

She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously.

Did you have me killed

? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big deal for her.

"Hi there," I said, brightly. "Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan, right?"

Debra nodded at him. "Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?"

Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle. "Hello, Debra," he said. He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he was more a part of Debra's ad-hoc than Lil's was shattered by my presence.

Tim said, "Can I show them the demo, Debra?"

Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, "Sure, why not. You'll like this, guys."

Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment -- they'd spent a week tearing down a show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground into the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil.

Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype.

"This is it -- our uplink. So far, we've got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild."

I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I was

Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and chewing tobacco.

I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit.

Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me.

"That's really fine," I said. "Really, really fine. Moving."

Tim blushed. "Thanks! I did the gestalt programming -- it's my specialty."

Debra spoke up from behind him -- she'd sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. "I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all."

Tim sniffed. "Not synthetic at all," he said, turning to me. "It's nice and soft, right?"

I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: "Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course. We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the show -- we want to transcend it

."

Tim nodded reluctantly. "Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by making the experience human

, a mile in the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's brain?"


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CHAPTER 4
=========


One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:

1. That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,

2. That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion,

3. That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.

Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless cooperation born of the adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired activity in her wake.

It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army.

Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride.

Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory, and, gingerly, I executed it.

God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through,