Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (list of ebook readers .TXT) 📕
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“So you’re a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you’re being chased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they’re really scary—I’ve got Suneep’s concept artists going back to the drawing board, hitting basic research on stuff that’ll just scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you’ve left, you’ve had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the next time you come back, it’s all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall’s drawing ’em, we’re bound to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself.
When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there’d been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they’d turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We’ll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational, even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia.
And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.
“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn’t be trying to take it away from us. Didn’t you say that?”
Tim rocked back as if I’d slapped him and the blood drained from his face. “But we’re not taking it away!” he said. “You invited us to help.”
I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they’ve come up with some great ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to the other side and we’re going to lose everything because of them. I felt like shit.
“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim’s grin came back and he clapped his hands together. He really loves the Mansion, I thought. He could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.
Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and sped towards Suneep’s lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers. “They don’t have the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as we pedaled.
“Says who?” Dan said.
“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationary members right from the start. They weren’t even allowed into the design meetings.”
“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said.
Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger.
“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this project wouldn’t change midway through. Now it has, and I’ve got other commitments that I’m going to have to cancel because this is going off-schedule.”
I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believe me, I’m just as upset about this as you are. We don’t like this one little bit.”
He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I’ve been holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been? If they replan the rehab now, I’ll have to go along with them. I can’t just leave the Mansion half-done—they’ll murder me.”
The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don’t like the new rehab plan, and we’re going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell them they’ll have to find other Imagineering support if they want to go through with it, that you’re booked solid.”
Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a minute approval. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That’ll help all right. Just tell ’em that they’re welcome to make any changes they want to the plan, if they can find someone else to execute them.”
Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someone else to do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my team’s done so far. I just flush my time down the toilet.”
“It won’t come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no for a couple days, we’ll do the rest.”
Suneep looked doubtful.
“I promise,” I said.
Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair. “All right,” he said, morosely.
Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said.
It should have worked. It almost did.
I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan exhorted.
“Look, you don’t have to roll over for Debra and her people! This is your garden, and you’ve tended it responsibly for years. She’s got no right to move in on you—you’ve got all the Whuffie you need to defend the place, if you all work together.”
No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as possible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to let him do his thing.
When Lil had arrived, she’d sized up the situation with a sour expression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me. She’d chosen the middle, and to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on her long, pale neck.
Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. “They’re stealing your future! They’re stealing your past! They claim they’ve got your support!”
He lowered his tone. “I don’t think that’s true.” He grabbed a castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he said so low it was almost a whisper.
“No,” the castmember said.
He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is it true?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly.
“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd.
“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now.
“No!” the crowd roared.
“NO!” he shouted back.
“You don’t have to roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them packing. They’re only taking over because you’re letting them. Are you going to let them?”
“NO!”
Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything, they’ve done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they’re displacing doesn’t have a hope of fighting back.
For the defenders, it’s a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting back will surely burn away even that meager reward.
No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the thing everyone’s fighting over. For example:
It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept.
Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.
At least, that’s what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman’s strident harangue burst over their heads.
I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel.
“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn’t on the lesson-plan.
“Come on, heads up! This is not a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you’ll set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we’ll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you’ve forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I’m going to run it down for you right now, anyway.
“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You’ll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It’s worth repeating. Here goes:
“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is in charge. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be fun.”
She taught the course like a pro—you could tell she’d been drilling her lecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a break for it and was restrained.
At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.
It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wall of ad-hocs.
Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.
The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs’ courses would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of the new lecturers had
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