Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (good story books to read .txt) 📕

I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh electronics.

We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst.

Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and they started the demo.

Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.

Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.

Nothing.

I was offline.

===


Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.

Lil was upset -- even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she said, after a hard moment's staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river.

"Tell you?" I said, dumbly.

"They're really good. They're better than good. They're better than us. Oh, God."

Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. "I don't think so. I don't think they've got soul, I don't think they've got history, I don't think they've got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys -- they visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that." I'm offline, and they're not -- what the hell happened?

"It'll be okay, Lil. There's nothing in that place that's better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know that -- you've spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing we've been maintaining for all these years?"

She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. "Sorry," she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. "Sorry -- it's just shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're not -- hey, that's the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted.

"Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry," she said. "Let's go congratulate them."

As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having improved her mood without artificial assistance.

===


Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall, where Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth.

She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a torch to the bowl.

"Thanks," she said, laconically. "It was a team effort." She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads together.

Lil said, "What's your timeline, then?"

Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh -- a Faraday cage. That's why the HERF gun hadn't done anything; that's why they'd been so casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of Debra's ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Florida -- myself included -- came up with.

For instance, I didn't think there was a single castmember in the Park outside of Deb's clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged another one -- and another, and another. Whatever they could get away with.

Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. "When was the last time you backed up?" I asked her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us.

"Yesterday," she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an overmediated guest than a tireless castmember.

"Let's run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night and at lunchtime -- with things the way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's work, much less a week's."

Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. "You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell me how to live my life, okay?"

"Come on, Lil -- it only takes a minute, and it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?" I hated the whine in my voice.

"No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the Mansion -- some collectible stuff, maybe."

"For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?"

Lil groaned and glared at me.

I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my new body.

===


Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was offline yet -- it just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises she was coping with.

Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy.

So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway?

Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone.

I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee.

"Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch," Lil said as I stumbled in.

She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall.

"You wouldn't get up," I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.

"And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me -- the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping."

"Can't." I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.

"Really?" she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.

"Yes. Really. It's your shift -- fucking work it or call in sick."

Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. "What's wrong, honey?" she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall.

"Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've got real work to do -- in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?"

Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said.

Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19 -- apparent and real -- and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember.

Her parents -- Tom and Rita -- on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into sharp relief.

They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over.

The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders' lackeys -- who worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions -- put up a token resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and pitching in.

"But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that," Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. "We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it