Gradually, Death’s cries became softer, and then he snuffled and snorted and Hilda gave him a kleenex from her purse. He wiped his face and blew his nose and squeezed the kleenex tight in his hand. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened and shut it.Then, in a whisper, he told them his story. The man in the parking-lot and his erection. The hospital. Posting on the message boards.The lawyer.“What?” Perry said, loud enough that they all jumped and Death Waits flinched pathetically in his hospital bed. Hilda squeezed his arm hard. “Sorry, sorry,” Perry muttered. “But this lawyer, what did he say to you?”Perry listened for a time. Death Waits spoke in a low monotone, pausing frequently to draw in shuddering breaths that were almost sobs.“Fuckingbastards,” Perry said. “Evil, corporate, immoral, sleazy—”Hilda squeezed his arm again. “Shh,” she said. “Take it easy. You’re upsetting him.”Perry was so angry he could barely see, barely think. He was trembling, and they were all staring at him, but he couldn’t stop. Death had shrunk back into himself, squeezed his eyes shut.“I’ll be back in a minute,” Perry said. He felt like he was suffocating. He walked out of the room so fast it was practically a jog, then pounded on the elevator buttons, waited ten seconds and gave up and ran down ten flights of stairs. He got outside into the coolness of the hazy night and sucked in huge lungsful of wet air, his heart hammering in his chest.He had his phone in his hand and he had scrolled to Kettlewell’s number, but he kept himself from dialing it. He was in no shape to discuss this with Kettlewell. He wanted witnesses there when he did it, to keep him from doing something stupid.He went back inside. The security guards watched him closely, but he forced himself to smile and act calm and they didn’t stop him from boarding the elevator.“I’m sorry,” he said to all of them. “I’m sorry,” he said to Death Waits. “Let me make something very, very clear: you are free to use the Internet as much as you want. You are free to tell your story to anyone you want to tell it to. Even if it screws up my case, you’re free to do that. You’ve given up enough for me already.”Death looked at him with watery eyes. “Really?” he said. It came out in a hoarse whisper.Perry moved the breakfast tray that covered Death’s laptop, then opened the laptop and positioned it where Death could reach it. “It’s all yours, buddy. Whatever you want to say, say it. Let your freak flag fly.”Death cried again then, silent tears slipping down his hollow cheeks. Perry got him some kleenex from the bathroom and he blew his nose and wiped his face and grinned at them all, a toothless, wet, ruined smile that made Perry’s heart lurch. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. What the hell was he doing? This kid—he would never get the life he’d had back.“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Death said.“Please don’t be grateful to me,” Perry said. “We owe you the thanks around here. Remember that. We haven’t done you any favors. All the favors around here have come from you.“Any lawyer shows up here again representing me, I want you to email me.”In the car back, no one said anything until they were within sight of the shantytown. “Kettlewell isn’t going to like this,” Suzanne said.“Yeah, I expect not,” Perry said. “He can go fuck himself.”Imagineering sent the prototype up to Sammy as soon as it was ready, the actual engineers who’d been working on it shlepping it into his office.He’d been careful to cultivate their friendship through the weeks of production, taking them out for beers and delicately letting them know that they were just the sort of people who really understood what Disney Parks was about, not like those philistines who comprised the rest of the management layer at Disney. He learned their kids’ names and forwarded jokes to them by email. He dropped by their break-room and let them beat him at pinball on their gigantic, bizarre, multi-board homebrew machine, letting them know just how cool said machine was.Now it was paying off. Judging from the device he was looking at, a breadbox-sized, go-away-green round-shouldered smooth box that it took two of them to carry in.“Watch this,” one of them said. He knocked a complicated pattern on the box’s top and a hidden hatch opened out of the side, yawning out and forming a miniature staircase from halfway down the box’s surface to the ground. There was soft music playing inside the box: a jazzy, uptempo futuristic version ofWhen You Wish upon a Star.A little man appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was made of pipe-cleaners and he took the stairs in three wobbling strides. He ignored them as he lurched around the box’s perimeter until he came to a far corner, then another hatch slid away and the little man reached inside and tugged out the plug and the end of the power-cord. He hugged the plug to his chest and began to wander around Sammy’s desk, clearly looking for an electrical outlet.“It’s a random-walk search algorithm,” one of the Imagineers said. “Watch this.” After a couple of circuits of Sammy’s desk the little robot went to the edge and jumped, hanging on to the power-cable, which unspooled slowly from the box like a belay-line, gently lowering the man to the ground. A few minutes later, he had found the electrical outlet and plugged in the box.The music inside stilled and a fanfare began. The trumpeting reached a joyous peak—“It’s found a network connection”—and then subsided into marching-band music. There was a smell like Saran-Wrap in the microwave. A moment later, another pipe-cleaner man emerged from the box, lugging a chunk of plastic that looked like the base of a rocket in an old-timey science fiction movie.The first pipe-cleaner man was shinnying up the power cable. He crested the desktop and joined his brother in ferrying out more parts. Each one snapped into the previous one with a Lego-likeclick. Taking shape on the desktop in slow stages, the original, 1955 Tomorrowland, complete with the rocket to the moon, the Clock of the World and—“Dairy Farmers of America Present the Cow of Tomorrow?” Sammy said, peering at the little brass plaque on the matchbox-sized diorama, which showed a cow with an IV in her hock, watching a video of a pasture. “You’re kidding me.”“No!” one Imagineer said. “It’s all for real—the archives have all these tight, high-rez three-d models of all the rides the Park’s ever seen. This is totally historically accurate.”The Kaiser Aluminum Hall of Fame. The Monsanto Hall of Chemistry. Thimble Drome Flight Circle, with tiny flying miniature airplanes.“Holy crap,” Sammy said. “Peoplepaidto see these things?”“Go on,” the other Imagineer said. “Take the roof off the Hall of Chemistry.”Sammy did, and was treated to a tiny, incredibly detailed three-d model of the Hall’s interior exhibits, complete with tiny people in 1950s garb marveling at the truly crappy exhibits.“We print to 1200 dpi with these. We can put pupils on the eyeballs at that rez.”The pieces were still trundling out. Sammy picked up the Monsanto Hall of Chemistry and turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the minute detail, admiring the way all the pieces snapped together.“It’s kind of brittle,” the first Imagineer said. He took it from Sammy and gave it a squeeze and it cracked with a noise like an office chair rolling over a sheet of bubble-wrap. The pieces fell to the desk.A pipe-cleaner man happened upon a shard after a moment and hugged it to his chest, then toddled back into the box with it.“There’s a little optical scanner in there—it’ll figure out which bit this piece came from and print another one. Total construction of this model takes about two hours.”“You built this entire thing from scratch in three weeks?”The Imagineers laughed. “No, no—no way! No, almost all the code and designs came off the net. Most of this stuff was developed by New Work startups back in the day, or by those ride weirdos down in Hollywood. We just shoved it all into this box and added the models for some of our old rides from the archives. This was easy, man—easy!”Sammy’s head swam. Easy! This thing was undeniably super-cool. He wanted one. Everyone was going to want one!“You can print these as big as you want, too—if we gave it enough time, space and feedstock, it’d run these buildings at full size.”The miniature Tomorrowland was nearly done. It was all brave, sad white curves, like the set of a remake of Rollerball, and featured tiny people in 1950s clothes, sun-dresses and salaryman hats, black-rimmed glasses and scout uniforms for the boys.Sammy goggled at it. He moved the little people around, lifted off the lids.“Man, I’d seen the three-d models and flythroughs, but they’re nothing compared to actually seeing it, owning it. People will want libraries of these things. Whole rooms devoted to them.”“Umm,” one of the Imagineers said. Sammy knew his name, but he’d forgotten it. He had a whole complicated scheme for remembering people’s names by making up stories about them, but it was a lot of work. “Well, about that. This feedstock is very fast-setting, but it doesn’t really weather well. Even if you stored it in a dark, humidity-controlled room, it’d start to delaminate and fall to pieces within a month or two. Leave it in the living room in direct sunlight and it’ll crumble within a couple days.”Sammy pursed his lips and thought for a while. “Please, please tell me that there’s something proprietary we can require in the feedstock that can make us into the sole supplier of consumables for this thing.”“Maybe? We could certainly tag the goop with something proprietary and hunt for it when we do the build, refuse to run on anyone else’s goop. Of course, that won’t be hard to defeat—”“We’ll sue anyone who tries it,” Sammy said. “Oh, boys, you’ve outdone yourselves. Seriously. If I could give you a raise, I would. As it is, take something home from the architectural salvage lot and sell it on eBay. It’s as close to a bonus as this fucking company’s going to pay any of us.”They looked at him quizzically, with some alarm and he smiled and spread his hands. “Ha ha, only serious boys. Really—take some stuff home. You’ve earned it. Try and grab something from the ride-system itself, that’s got the highest book-value.”They left behind a slim folder with production notes and estimates, suppliers who would be likely to bid on a job like this. He’d need a marketing plan, too—but this was farther than he ever thought he’d get. He could show this to legal and to the board, and yes, to Wiener and the rest of the useless committee. He could get everyone lined up behind this and working on it. Hell, if he spun it right they’d all be fighting to have their pet projects instantiated with it.He fiddled with a couple of overnight shippers’ sites for a while, trying to figure out what it would cost to sell these in the Park and have them waiting on the marks’ doorsteps when they got back home. There were lots of little details like that, but ultimately, this was good and clean—it would extend the Parks’ reach right into the living rooms of their customers, giving them a new reason to think of the Park every day.Kettlewell and Tjan looked up when Perry banged through the door of the tea-house they’d turned into their de facto headquarters.Perry had gone through mad and back to calm on the ride home, but as he drew closer to the tea-house, passing the people in the streets, the people living their lives without lawyers or bullshit, his anger came back. He’d even stopped outside the tea-house and breathed deeply, but his heart was pounding and his hands kept balling into fists and sometimes, man, sometimes you’ve just got to go for it.He got to the table and grabbed the papers there and tossed them over his shoulder.“You’re fired,” he said. “Pack up and go, I want you out by morning. You’re done here. You don’t represent the ride and you never will. Get lost.” He didn’t know he was going to say it until he said it, but it felt right. This was what he was feeling—hisproject had been stolen and bad things were being done inhisname and it was going to stop, right now.Tjan and Kettlewell got to their feet and looked at him, faces blank with shock. Kettlewell recovered first. “Perry, let’s sit down and do an exit interview, all right? That’s traditional.”Perry was shaking with anger now. These two friends of his, they’d fucking screwed him—committed their dirty work in his name. But Kettlewell was holding a chair out to him and the others in the tea-house were staring and he thought about Eva and the kids and the baseball gloves, and he sat down.He squeezed his thighs hard with his clenching hands, drew in a deep breath, and recited what Death Waits had told him in an even, wooden voice.“So that’s it. I don’t know if you instructed the lawyers to do this or only just distanced yourself enough from them to let them do this on their own. The point is that the way you’re running this campaign is victimizing people who believe in us, making life worse for people who already got a shitty, shitty deal on our account. I won’t have it.”Kettlewell and Tjan looked at each other. They’d both stayed poker-faced through Perry’s accusation, and now Kettlewell made a little go-ahead gesture at Tjan.“There’s no excuse for what that lawyer did. We didn’t authorize it, we didn’t know it had happened, and we wouldn’t have permitted it if we had. In a suit like this, there are a lot of moving parts and there’s no way to keep track of all of them all of the time. You don’t know what every ride operator in the world is up to, you don’t even know where all the rides in the worldare. That’s in the nature of a decentralized business.“But here’s the thing: the lawyer was at least partly right. Everything that kid blogs, emails, and says will potentially end up in the public record. Like it or not, that kid can no longer consider himself to have a private life, not until the court case is up. Neither can you or I, for that matter. That’s in the nature of a lawsuit—and it’s not something any of us can change at this point.”Perry heard him as from a great distance, through the whooshing of the blood in his ears. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.Tjan and Kettlewell looked at each other.“So even if we’re ’fired’—” Tjan said at last, making sarcastic finger-quotes, “this problem won’t go away. We’ve floated the syndicate and given control of the legal case to them. If you try to ditch it, you’re going to have to contend withtheirlawsuits, too.”“I didn’t—” Perry started. But he had, he’d signed all kinds of papers: first, papers that incorporated the ride-runners’ co-op; and, second, papers that gave legal representation over to the syndicate.“Perry, I’m the chairman of the Boston ride collective. I’m their rep on the co-op’s board. You can’t fire me. You didn’t hire me. They did. So stop breathing through your nose like a locomotive and calm down. None of us wanted that lawyer to go after that kid.”He knew they were making sense but he didn’t want to care. He’d ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up.He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn’t going to go there.“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Gone. We can figure out by email how to have a smooth transition, but no more of this. Not on my head. Not on my account.”He stalked away, which is what he should have done in the first place. Fuck being reasonable. Reasonable sucked.Death found out about the Disney-in-a-Box printers seconds after they were announced. He’d been tuning his feed-watchers to give him news about the Disney Parks for nearly a decade, and this little PR item on the Disney Parks newswire rang all the cherries on his filters, flagging the item red and rocketing it to the top of his news playlist, making all the icons in the sides of his screen bounce with delight.The announcement made him want to throw up. They were totally ripping off the rides, and he knew for a fact that most of the three-d meshes of the old yesterland rides and even the contemporary ones were fan-made, so those’d be ripped off, too.And the worst part was, he could feel himself getting excited. This was just the kind of thing that would have given him major fanboy drool as recently as a month ago.He just stared angrily at his screen. Being angry made the painkillers wear off, so the madder he got the more he hurt. He could nail the rocker-switch and dose himself with more of whatever the painkiller plugged into his IV was today, but since Perry and Lester and their girlfriends (had that other one been Suzanne Church? It sure looked like her) had told him he could use his laptop again, he’d stayed off the juice as much as possible. The computer could make him forget he hurt.He looked at the clock. It was 4AM. The blinds on the ward were shut most of the time, and he kept to his own schedule, napping and then surfing, then nodding off and then surfing some more. The hospital staff just left his food on the table beside him if he was asleep when it arrived, though they woke him for his sponge baths and to stick fresh needles in his arms, which were filled with bruisey collapsed veins.There was no one he could tell about this. Sure, there were chat-rooms with 24/7 chatter from Disney freaks, but he didn’t much want to chat with them. Some of his friends would still be up and tweaking, but Christ, who wanted to IM with a speed freak at four in the morning? His typing was down to less than 30 wpm, and he couldn’t keep it up for long. What he really wanted was to talk to someone about this.He really wanted to talk to Perry about this. He should send him an email, but he had the inkling of an idea and he didn’t want to put it in writing, because it was a deliciously naughty idea.It was dumb to even think about phoning him, he barely knew him, and no one liked to get calls at four am. Besides—he’d checked—Perry’s number was unlisted.From: deathw@deathwait.er To: pgibbons@hollywood.ride Subject: What’s your phone number?Perry, I know that it’s presumptuous, but I’d really like to talk to you v2v about something important that I’d prefer not to put in writing. I don’t have any right to impose on you, especially not after you’ve already done me the kindness of coming to see me in the hospital, but I hope you’ll send me your number anyway. Alternatively, please call me on my enum—1800DEATHWAITS-GGFSAH.Your admirer,Death WaitsIt was five minutes later when his laptop rang. It was unnaturally loud on the ward, and he heard his roommates stir when the tone played. He didn’t have a headset—Christ, he was an idiot. Wait, there was one, dangling from the TV. No mic, but at least he could pair it with his laptop for sound. He stabbed at the mute button and reached for the headset and slipped it on. Then he held the computer close to his face and whispered “Hello?” into its little mic. His voice was a croak, his ruined mouth distorting the word. Why had he decided to call this guy? He was such an idiot.“This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?”“Yes, sorry, I don’t have a mic. Can you hear me OK?”“If I turn the volume all the way up I can.”There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin.“What’s on your mind, Death?”“I didn’t expect you to be awake at this hour.”“I had a rough night,” Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied.“What happened?”“Nothing important,” Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly understood that Perry had had a rough night because ofhim, because of whathe’dtold Perry. It made him want to cry.“I’m sorry,” Death said.“What’s on your mind, Death?” Perry said again.Death told him what he’d found, about the Disney printers. He read Perry the URLs so he could look them up.“OK, that’s interesting,” Perry said. Death could tell he didn’t really think it was that interesting.“I haven’t told you my idea yet.” He groped for the words. His mouth had gone dry. “OK, so Disney’s going to ship these things to tons of people’s houses, they’ll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two, there’s going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country.”“Right.”“So here’s my idea: what if you could get them to build non-Disney stuff? What if you could send them plans for stuff from the rides? What if you could just download your friends’ designs? What if this was opened wide.”Perry chuckled on the other end of the line, then laughed, full-throated and full of merriment. “I like the way you think, kid,” he said, once he’d caught his breath.And then this amazing thing happened. Perry Gibbonsbrainstormedwith him about the kinds of designs they could push out to these things. It was like some kind of awesome dream come true. Perry was treating him like a peer, loving his ideas, keying off of them.Then a dismal thought struck him. “Wait though, wait. They’re using their own goop for the printers. Every design we print makes them richer.”Perry laughed again, really merry. “Oh, that kind of thing never works. They’ve been trying to tie feedstock to printers since the inkjet days. We go through that like wet kleenex.”“Isn’t that illegal?”“Who the fuck knows? It shouldn’t be. I don’t care about illegal anymore. Legal gets you lawyers. Come on, dude—what’s the point of being all into some anti-authoritarian subculture if you spend all your time sucking up to the authorities?”Death laughed, which actually hurt quite a bit. It was the first laugh he’d had since he’d ended up in the hospital, maybe the first one since he’d been fired from Disney World, and as much as it hurt, it felt good, too, like a band being loosened from around his broken ribs.His roommates stirred and one of them must have pushed the nurse call button, because shortly thereafter, the formidable Ukrainian nurse came in and savagely told him off for disturbing the ward at five in the morning. Perry heard and said his goodbyes, like they were old pals who’d chatted too long, and Death Waits rang off and fell into a light doze, grinning like a maniac.Hilda eyed Perry curiously. “That sounded like an interesting conversation,” she said. She was wearing a long t-shirt of his that didn’t really cover much, and she looked delicious in it. It was all he could do to keep from grabbing her and tossing her on the bed—of course, the cast meant that he couldn’t really do that. And Hilda wasn’t exactly smiling, either.“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.“It wasn’t the talking that did it, it was you not being there in the first place. Gave me the toss-and-turns.”She came over to him then, the lean muscles in her legs flexing as she crossed the living room. She took his laptop away and set it down on the coffee-table, then took off his headset. He was wearing nothing but boxers, and she reached down and gave his dick a companionable honk before sitting down next to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek, the throat and the lips.“So, Perry,” she said, looking into his eyes. “What the fuck are you doing sitting in the living room at 5 am talking to your computer? And why didn’t you come to bed last night? I’m not going to be hanging out in Florida for the rest of my life. I woulda thought you’d want to maximize your Hilda-time while you’ve got the chance.”She smiled to let him know she was kidding around, but she was right, of course.“I’m an idiot, Hilda. I fired Tjan and Kettlewell, told them to get lost.”“I don’t know why you think that’s such a bad idea. You need business-people, probably, but it doesn’t need to be those guys. Sometimes you can have too much history with someone to work with him. Besides, anything can be un-said. You can change your mind in a week or a month. Those guys aren’t doing anything special. They’d come back to you if you asked ’em. You’re Perry motherfuckin’ Gibbons. You rule, dude.”“You’re a very nice person, Hilda Hammersen. But those guys are running our legal defense, which we’re going to need, because I’m about to do something semi-illegal that’s bound to get us sued again by the same pack of assholes as last time.”“Disney?” She snorted. “Have you ever read up on the history of the Disney Company? The old one, the one Walt founded? Walt Disney wasn’t just a racist creep, he was also a mad inventor. He kept coming up with these cool high-tech ways of making cartoons—sticking real people in them, putting them in color, adding sync-sound. People loved it all, but it drove him out of business. It was all too expensive.“So he recruited his brother, Roy Disney, who was just a banker, to run the business. Roy turned the business around, watching the income and the outgo. But all this came at a price: Roy wanted to tell Walt how to run the business. More to the point, he wanted to tell Walt that he couldn’t just spend millions from the company coffers on weird-ass R&D projects, especially not when the company was still figuring out how to exploit thelastR&D project Walt had chased. But it was Walt’s company, and he’d overrule Roy, and Roy would promise that it was going to put them in the poorhouse and then he’d figure out how to make another million off of Walt’s vision, because that’s what the money guy is supposed to do.“Then after the war, Walt went to Roy and said, ’Give me $17 million, I’m going to build a theme-park. And Roy said, ’You can’t have it and what’s a theme-park?’ Walt threatened to fire Roy, the way he always had, and Roy pointed out that Disney was now apubliccompany with shareholders who weren’t going to let Walt cowboy around and piss away their money on his toys.”“So how’d he get Disneyland built?”“He quit. He started his own company, WED, for Walter Elias Disney. He poached all the geniuses away from the studios and turned them into his ’Imagineers’ and cashed in his life-insurance policy and raised his own dough and built the park, and then made Roy buy the company back from him. I’m guessing that that felt pretty good.”“It sounds like it must’ve,” Perry said. He was feeling thoughtful, and buzzed from the sleepless night, and jazzed from his conversation with Death Waits. He had an idea that they could push designs out to the printers that were like the Disney designs, but weird and kinky and subversive and a little disturbing.“I can understand why you’d be nervous about ditching your suits, but they’re just that, suits. At some level, they’re all interchangeable, mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not someone who’ll run the show. If that’s not these guys, hey, that’s cool. Find a couple more suits and run them.”“Jesus, you reallyareYoko, aren’t you?” Lester was wearing his boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room’s doorway where Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car starting down in the parking lot.“Good morning, Lester,” Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no offense taken, all good, all good.“You fired who now, Perry?” Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon that he’d designed specifically for this purpose.“I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan,” Perry said. He was blushing. “I would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to do it, though. I had to.”“I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we’ve got some of the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our outfit. It’s their show, too. You can’t just go shit-canning them. Not just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing and they’re keeping the lawyers at bay too. They’re managing all the evil shit so we don’t have to. I don’t want to be in charge of the evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn’t going to be easy. They’re all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur.”“You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those two,” Hilda said. “You’re experienced now, and you’ve founded a movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just need better management structure: an executive you can overrule whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss.”Lester acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “I’m being pretty mellow about this, buddy. I’m not making a big deal out of the fact that you did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I might have done the same. But it’s the cold light of day now and it’s time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can’t afford to burn all this to the ground and start over now.”Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be unreasonable.“Lester, they violated our trust. It was their responsibility to do this thing and do it right. They didn’t do that. They didn’t look closely at this thing so that they wouldn’t have to put the brakes on if it turned out to be dirty. Which do you think those two would rather have happen: we run a cool project that everyone loves, or we run a lawsuit that makes ten billion dollars for their investors? They’re playing a different game from us and their victory condition isn’t ours. I don’t want to be reasonable. I want to do the right thing. You and me could have sold out a thousand times over the years and made money instead of doing good, but we didn’t. We didn’t because it’s better to be right than to be reasonable and rich. You say we can’t afford to get rid of those two. I say we can’t afford not to.”“You need to get a good night’s sleep, buddy,” Lester said. He was blowing through his nose, a sure sign that he was angry. It made Perry’s hackles go up—he and Lester didn’t fight much but when they did, hoo-boy. “You need to mellow out and see that what you’re talking about is abandoning our friends, Kettlewell and Tjan, to make our own egos feel a little better. You need to see that we’re risking everything, risking spending our lives in court and losing everything we’ve ever built.”A Zen-like calm descended on Perry. Hilda was right. Suits were everywhere, and you could choose your own. You didn’t need to let the Roy Disneys of the world call the shots.“I’m sorry you feel that way, Lester. I hear everything you’re saying, but you know what, it’s going to be my way. I understand that what I want to do is risky, but there’s no way I can go on doing what I’m doing and letting things get worse and worse. Making a little compromise here and there is how you end up selling out everything that’s important. We’re going to find other business-managers and we’re going to work with them to make a smooth transition. Maybe we’ll all come out of this friends later on. They want to do something different from what I want to do is all.”This wasn’t calming Lester down at all. “Perry, this isn’t your project to do what you want with. This belongs to a lot of us. I did most of the work in there.”“You did, buddy. I get that. If you want to stick with them, that’s how it’ll go. No hard feelings. I’ll go off and do my own thing, run my own ride. People who want to connect to my network, no sweat, they can do it. That’s cool. We’ll still be friends. You can work with Kettlewell and Tjan.” Perry could hardly believe these words were coming out of his mouth. They’d been buddies forever, inseparable.Hilda took his hand silently.Lester looked at him with increasing incredulity. “You don’t mean that.”“Lester, if we split, it would break my heart. There wouldn’t be a day that went by from now to the end of time that I didn’t regret it. But if we keep going down this path, it’s going to cost me my soul. I’d rather be broke than evil.” Oh, it felt sogoodto be saying this. To finally affirm through deed and word that he was a good person who would put ethics before greed, before comfort even.Lester looked at Hilda for a moment. “Hilda, this is probably something that Perry and I should talk about alone, if you don’t mind.”“Imind, Lester. There’s nothing you can’t say in front of her.”Lester apparently had nothing to say to that, and the silence made Perry uncomfortable. Lester had tears in his eyes, and that hit Perry in the chest like a spear. His friend didn’t cry often.He crossed the room and hugged Lester. Lester was wooden and unyielding.“Please, Lester. Please. I hate to make you choose, but you have to choose. We’re on the same side. We’ve always been on the same side. Neither of us are the kind of people who send lawyers after kids in hospital. Never. I want to make it good again. We can have the kind of gig where we do the right thing and the cool thing. Come on, Lester. Please.”He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he’d won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone—his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked.“Hello?” he said. Not many people had this number—he didn’t like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first.“Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?” He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. Shit. He’d given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face.“It’s not a good time, Freddy,” he said. “If you call my secretary—”“I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers—your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C.”Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride assholes would have known about the printers. That’s what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn’t had time to look for it, though, and he didn’t want to use the Disney Parks competitive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a fuck-up) he didn’t want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.“I’m not familiar with any response,” Sammy said. “I’m afraid I can’t comment—”“Oh, it’ll only take a moment to explain it,” Freddy said and then launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had passed out last week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on, so that anyone’s goop could print to it.“So, what I’m looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you condone this? Did you anticipate it? What if someone prints an AK-47 with it?”“No one’s going to print a working AK-47 with this,” Sammy said. “It’s too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it—” He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “As to the rest of it, that would be something you’d have to speak to one of my legal colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?”Freddy laughed. “Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background, no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?”Sammy felt his face go white. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about—”“Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked out of the organization—no one around to call the lawyers out on their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike.”Sammy seethed. He’d been concentrating on making new stuff, great stuff. Competitive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made and the world would be a more fun place once it was.Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those ride shit-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He’d brought his own destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. God, he was a total fuck-up.Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly—not humming like a fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley of magic-users’ songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to hell and back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the versioning system, and he’d been able to choose from among them and pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt’s 1955 Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool.“I’ll just say you declined to comment, then?”Asshole.“You write whatever you need to write, Freddy,” he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn’t fuck it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to.“Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week.”He wasn’t ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn’t walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he’d had all the treatment he needed—even if his doctor hadn’t been able to look him in the eye when this was explained—and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere.He’d put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he’d had with Perry and the idea he’d had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn’t even know if his apartment was still there—he hadn’t been back in weeks and the rent was overdue.And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights—some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!)—side-conversations, philosophical arguments.Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune—half-a-year’s wages at his old job—waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him.The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. “Your friends are here,” she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn’t have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants—the first pair he’d worn in weeks—and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent.“You will use canes?” she asked. He’d had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes? No way.“I can’t,” he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall.“Wheelchair,” she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in pushing a chair with a squeaky wheel—though the chair itself was a pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney, which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where the nurse’s station, the elevators, the common area and hisfanswere.They weren’t just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but also a big crowd of people he’d never met, didn’t recognize. There were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a wild cheer. The orderly stopped pushing his chair and the nurse rushed forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two very pretty girls—he hadn’t thought about “pretty” anything in a long, long time—unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS.The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands, but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear, something about getting security to get rid of these people if they were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was athreatand that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced off in a deeply Slavic huff.And then he was among his welcoming party, and itwasa party—there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they’d seen the story he’d described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was something that was as personal as the twin language they’d developed to communicate with one another when they were little girls.His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery, girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey’s makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him—one girl had gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it all started.Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells that weren’t sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs.“Now, it’s all arranged,” one of the straight-looking ones told him. He’d figured out that these were the pure story people, who’d read his descriptions and concluded that he’d seen something more than anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn’t seem too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old mates. “Don’t worry about a thing.” Car after car appeared, taking away more of the party. “Here you go.”Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge cargo space. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. “My mom was in a wheelchair for ten years before she passed,” a hippie told him. He was older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went.They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic—Death marveling at buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital—when the English teacher dude looked shyly at Death.“You think it’s real—the Story, I mean—don’t you?”Death thought about this for a second. He’d been very focused on the Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a meditative state he’d found easy to attain with all the painkillers.“It’s real,” he said.The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a little. “We think so too.”They pulled up to his condo—how’d they know where he lived?—and parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of fucked-up the rear bumper, but other than that, it was just as he remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash, too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his building, pushing—A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward him, handling the curb easily, hardly a bump, and the two pretty girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived to brush their breasts and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that he’d felt since before his beating.He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator.The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the night talking about the story that they’d seen in the ride, where they’d seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether they had any business rating things now that the story had shown itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and it should be left to unconscious effort.But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story, or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who couldn’t see it or wouldn’t see it.At first Death didn’t know what to make of all this talk. At first he found it funny and more than a little weird to be taking the story this seriously. It was beautiful, but it was an accidental beauty. The ride was the important thing, the story was its effect.But these people convinced him that they were right, that the storyhadto be important. After all, it had inspired all of them, hadn’t it? The ride was just technology—the story was what the ride wasfor.His head swam with it.“We’ve got to protect it,” he said finally, after listening to the argument, after eating the food with which they’d filled his fridge, after talking intensely with Tracey (or possibly Lacey) about their parents’ unthinking blandness, after letting the English teacher guy (whose name was Jim) take him to the toilet, after letting his old goth pals play some music some mutual friends had just mixed.“We’ve got to protect it and sharpen it. The story wants to get out and there will be those who can’t see it.” He didn’t care that his speech was mangled by his fucked-up face. He’d seen his face in the mirror and Tracey and Lacey had done a nice job in making it up—he looked like a latter-day Marilyn Manson, his twisted mouth a ghoulish smear. The doctors had talked about giving him another series of surgeries to fix his lip, a set of implanted dentures to replace the missing teeth, had even mentioned that there were specialist clinics where he could get a new set budded and grown right out of his own gums. That had been back when the mysterious forces of the lawsuit and the ride were paying his bills.Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he’d get used to this, he’d come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one of the weird ones, like the old-timers who’d come to Disney with their teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths’ kids were never goths, it seemed—more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the grave.“We’ll let everyone know about it,” he said, thinking not ofeveryonebut of all the cool subculture kids he’d grown up with and worshipped and been rejected by and dated and loved and hated—“and we’ll make it part ofeveryone’s story. We’ll protect it, guys. Of course we’ll protect it.”That settled the argument. Death hadn’t expected that. Since when did he get the last word on any subject? Since now. They were following his lead.And then the girls put him to bed, shyly helping him undress, each of them leaning over him to kiss him good night. Tracey’s kiss was sisterly, on the cheek, her spicy perfume and her jet-black hair caressing him. Lacey’s kiss was anything but sisterly. She mashed her breasts to his chest and thrust her tongue into his mouth, keeping her silver eyes open and staring deep into his, her fingers working busily in his hair.She broke the kiss off with a gasp and a giggle. She traced the ruin of his mouth with a fingertip, breathing heavily, and let it slide lower, down his chest. He found himself actuallyhard, the first pleasurable sensation he’d had in his dick since that fateful night. From the corridor came an impatient cough—Tracey, waiting for Lacey to get going.Lacey rolled her eyes and giggled again and then slid her hand the rest of the way down, briefly holding his dick and then encircling his balls with her fingers before kissing him again on the twist of his lips and backing out of the room, whispering, “Sleep well, see you in the morning.”Death lay awake and staring at the ceiling for a long time after they had gone. The English teacher dude had left him with a bedpan for the night and many of them had promised to return in rotations indefinitely during the days, helping him out with dressing and shopping and getting him in and out of his marvelous chair.He stared and stared at that ceiling, and then he reached for his laptop, there beside the bed, the same place it had lived when he was in the hospital. He fired it up and went straight to today’s fly-throughs of the ride and ran through them from different angles—facing backward and sideways, looking down and looking up, noting all the elements that felt likestoryand all the ones that didn’t, wishing he had his plus-one/minus-one joystick with him to carve out the story he was seeing.Lester wouldn’t work the ride anymore, so Perry took it on his own. Hilda was in town buying groceries—his chest-freezer of gourmet surplus food had blown its compressor and the contents had spoiled in a mess of venison and sour blueberry sauce and duck pancakes—and he stood alone. Normally he loved this, being the carnival barker at the middle of the three-ring circus of fans, tourists and hawkers, but today his cast itched, he hadn’t slept enough, and there were lawyers chasing him. Lots of lawyers.A caravan of cars pulled into the lot like a Tim Burton version of a funeral, a long train of funnycar hearses with jacked-up rear wheels and leaning chimney-pots, gargoyles and black bunting with super-bright black-light LEDs giving them a commercially eldritch glow. Mixed in were some straight cars, and they came and came and came, car on car. The hawkers got out more stuff, spread it out further, and waited while the caravan maneuvered itself into parking spots, spilling out into the street.Riders got out of the cars, mostly super-skinny goths—a line of special low-calorie vegan versions of Victorian organ-meat delicacies had turned a mom-and-pop cafe in Portland, Oregon, into a Fortune 500 company a few years before—in elaborate DIY costumery. It shimmered darkly, petticoats and toppers, bodices and big stompy boots and trousers cut off in ribbons at the knees.The riders converged on one of the straight cars, a beige mini-van, and crowded around it. A moment later, they were moving toward Perry’s ticket-taking stand. The crowd parted as they approached and in Perry saw whom they’d been clustered around. It was a skinny goth kid in a wheelchair like the ones they kept in the ride—they’d get that every now and again, a guest in his own chair, just needing a little wireless +1/-1 box. His hair was shaggy and black with green highlights, stuck out like an anime cosplayer’s. He was white as Wonder Bread, with something funny about his mouth. His legs were in casts that had been wrapped with black gauze, and a pair of black pointy shoes had been slid over his toes, tipped with elaborate silver curlicues.The chair zipped forward and Perry recognized him in a flash: Death Waits! He felt his mouth drop open and he shut it and came around the stand.“No way!” he said, and grabbed Death’s hand, encrusted in chunky silver jewelry, a different stylized animal skull on each finger. Death’s ruined mouth pulled up in a kind of smile.“Nice to see you,” he said, limply squeezing Perry’s hand. “It was very kind of you to visit me in the hospital.”Perry thought of all the things that had happened since then and wondered how much of it, if any, Death had a right to know about. He leaned in close, conscious of all the observers. “I’m out of the lawsuit. We are. Me and Lester. Fired those guys.” Behind his reflective contacts, Death’s eyes widened a touch.He slumped a little. “Because of me?”Perry thought some. “Not exactly. But in a way. It wasn’t us.”Death smiled. “Thank you.”Perry straightened up. “Looks like you brought down a good crowd,” he said. “Lots of friends!”Death nodded. “Lots of friends these days,” he said. An attractive young woman came over and squeezed his shoulder.They were such a funny bunch in their DIY goth-frocks, micro-manufactured customized boots, their elaborate tattoos and implants and piercings, but for all that, cuddly and earnest with the shadows visible of the geeks they’d been. Perry felt he was smiling so broadly it almost hurt.“Rides are on me, gang,” he said. “In you go. Your money’s no good here. Any friend of Death Waits rides for free today.”They cheered and patted him on the back as they went through, and Death Waits looked like he’d grown three inches in his wheelchair, and the pretty girl kissed Perry’s cheek as she went by, and Death Waits had a smile so big you could hardly tell there was anything wrong with his mouth.They rode it through six times in a row, and as they came back around for another go and another, they talked intently about the story, the story, the story. Perry knew about the story, he’d seen it, and he and Lester had talked it over now and again, but he was still constantly amazed by its ability to inspire riders.Paying customers slipped in and out, too, and seemed to catch some of the infectious intensity of the story group. They went away in pairs, talking about the story, and shopped the market stalls for a while before coming back to ride again, to look for more story.They’d never named the ride. It had always been “the ride.” Not even a capital “R.” For a second, Perry wondered if they’d end up calling it “The Story” in the end.Perry got his Disney-in-a-Box through a circuitous route, getting one of the hawkers’ brothers to order it to a PO box in Miami, to which Perry would drive down to pick it up and take it back.Lester roused himself from the apartment when Perry told him it had arrived. Lester and Suzanne had been AWOL for days, sleeping in until Perry left, coming back after Perry came back, until it felt like they were just travelers staying in the same hotel.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.
Gradually, Death’s cries became softer, and then he snuffled and snorted and Hilda gave him a kleenex from her purse. He wiped his face and blew his nose and squeezed the kleenex tight in his hand. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened and shut it.
Then, in a whisper, he told them his story. The man in the parking-lot and his erection. The hospital. Posting on the message boards.
The lawyer.
“What?” Perry said, loud enough that they all jumped and Death Waits flinched pathetically in his hospital bed. Hilda squeezed his arm hard. “Sorry, sorry,” Perry muttered. “But this lawyer, what did he say to you?”
Perry listened for a time. Death Waits spoke in a low monotone, pausing frequently to draw in shuddering breaths that were almost sobs.
“Fuckingbastards,” Perry said. “Evil, corporate, immoral, sleazy—”
Hilda squeezed his arm again. “Shh,” she said. “Take it easy. You’re upsetting him.”
Perry was so angry he could barely see, barely think. He was trembling, and they were all staring at him, but he couldn’t stop. Death had shrunk back into himself, squeezed his eyes shut.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Perry said. He felt like he was suffocating. He walked out of the room so fast it was practically a jog, then pounded on the elevator buttons, waited ten seconds and gave up and ran down ten flights of stairs. He got outside into the coolness of the hazy night and sucked in huge lungsful of wet air, his heart hammering in his chest.
He had his phone in his hand and he had scrolled to Kettlewell’s number, but he kept himself from dialing it. He was in no shape to discuss this with Kettlewell. He wanted witnesses there when he did it, to keep him from doing something stupid.
He went back inside. The security guards watched him closely, but he forced himself to smile and act calm and they didn’t stop him from boarding the elevator.
“I’m sorry,” he said to all of them. “I’m sorry,” he said to Death Waits. “Let me make something very, very clear: you are free to use the Internet as much as you want. You are free to tell your story to anyone you want to tell it to. Even if it screws up my case, you’re free to do that. You’ve given up enough for me already.”
Death looked at him with watery eyes. “Really?” he said. It came out in a hoarse whisper.
Perry moved the breakfast tray that covered Death’s laptop, then opened the laptop and positioned it where Death could reach it. “It’s all yours, buddy. Whatever you want to say, say it. Let your freak flag fly.”
Death cried again then, silent tears slipping down his hollow cheeks. Perry got him some kleenex from the bathroom and he blew his nose and wiped his face and grinned at them all, a toothless, wet, ruined smile that made Perry’s heart lurch. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. What the hell was he doing? This kid—he would never get the life he’d had back.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Death said.
“Please don’t be grateful to me,” Perry said. “We owe you the thanks around here. Remember that. We haven’t done you any favors. All the favors around here have come from you.
“Any lawyer shows up here again representing me, I want you to email me.”
In the car back, no one said anything until they were within sight of the shantytown. “Kettlewell isn’t going to like this,” Suzanne said.
“Yeah, I expect not,” Perry said. “He can go fuck himself.”
Imagineering sent the prototype up to Sammy as soon as it was ready, the actual engineers who’d been working on it shlepping it into his office.
He’d been careful to cultivate their friendship through the weeks of production, taking them out for beers and delicately letting them know that they were just the sort of people who really understood what Disney Parks was about, not like those philistines who comprised the rest of the management layer at Disney. He learned their kids’ names and forwarded jokes to them by email. He dropped by their break-room and let them beat him at pinball on their gigantic, bizarre, multi-board homebrew machine, letting them know just how cool said machine was.
Now it was paying off. Judging from the device he was looking at, a breadbox-sized, go-away-green round-shouldered smooth box that it took two of them to carry in.
“Watch this,” one of them said. He knocked a complicated pattern on the box’s top and a hidden hatch opened out of the side, yawning out and forming a miniature staircase from halfway down the box’s surface to the ground. There was soft music playing inside the box: a jazzy, uptempo futuristic version ofWhen You Wish upon a Star.
A little man appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was made of pipe-cleaners and he took the stairs in three wobbling strides. He ignored them as he lurched around the box’s perimeter until he came to a far corner, then another hatch slid away and the little man reached inside and tugged out the plug and the end of the power-cord. He hugged the plug to his chest and began to wander around Sammy’s desk, clearly looking for an electrical outlet.
“It’s a random-walk search algorithm,” one of the Imagineers said. “Watch this.” After a couple of circuits of Sammy’s desk the little robot went to the edge and jumped, hanging on to the power-cable, which unspooled slowly from the box like a belay-line, gently lowering the man to the ground. A few minutes later, he had found the electrical outlet and plugged in the box.
The music inside stilled and a fanfare began. The trumpeting reached a joyous peak—“It’s found a network connection”—and then subsided into marching-band music. There was a smell like Saran-Wrap in the microwave. A moment later, another pipe-cleaner man emerged from the box, lugging a chunk of plastic that looked like the base of a rocket in an old-timey science fiction movie.
The first pipe-cleaner man was shinnying up the power cable. He crested the desktop and joined his brother in ferrying out more parts. Each one snapped into the previous one with a Lego-likeclick. Taking shape on the desktop in slow stages, the original, 1955 Tomorrowland, complete with the rocket to the moon, the Clock of the World and—
“Dairy Farmers of America Present the Cow of Tomorrow?” Sammy said, peering at the little brass plaque on the matchbox-sized diorama, which showed a cow with an IV in her hock, watching a video of a pasture. “You’re kidding me.”
“No!” one Imagineer said. “It’s all for real—the archives have all these tight, high-rez three-d models of all the rides the Park’s ever seen. This is totally historically accurate.”
The Kaiser Aluminum Hall of Fame. The Monsanto Hall of Chemistry. Thimble Drome Flight Circle, with tiny flying miniature airplanes.
“Holy crap,” Sammy said. “Peoplepaidto see these things?”
“Go on,” the other Imagineer said. “Take the roof off the Hall of Chemistry.”
Sammy did, and was treated to a tiny, incredibly detailed three-d model of the Hall’s interior exhibits, complete with tiny people in 1950s garb marveling at the truly crappy exhibits.
“We print to 1200 dpi with these. We can put pupils on the eyeballs at that rez.”
The pieces were still trundling out. Sammy picked up the Monsanto Hall of Chemistry and turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the minute detail, admiring the way all the pieces snapped together.
“It’s kind of brittle,” the first Imagineer said. He took it from Sammy and gave it a squeeze and it cracked with a noise like an office chair rolling over a sheet of bubble-wrap. The pieces fell to the desk.
A pipe-cleaner man happened upon a shard after a moment and hugged it to his chest, then toddled back into the box with it.
“There’s a little optical scanner in there—it’ll figure out which bit this piece came from and print another one. Total construction of this model takes about two hours.”
“You built this entire thing from scratch in three weeks?”
The Imagineers laughed. “No, no—no way! No, almost all the code and designs came off the net. Most of this stuff was developed by New Work startups back in the day, or by those ride weirdos down in Hollywood. We just shoved it all into this box and added the models for some of our old rides from the archives. This was easy, man—easy!”
Sammy’s head swam. Easy! This thing was undeniably super-cool. He wanted one. Everyone was going to want one!
“You can print these as big as you want, too—if we gave it enough time, space and feedstock, it’d run these buildings at full size.”
The miniature Tomorrowland was nearly done. It was all brave, sad white curves, like the set of a remake of Rollerball, and featured tiny people in 1950s clothes, sun-dresses and salaryman hats, black-rimmed glasses and scout uniforms for the boys.
Sammy goggled at it. He moved the little people around, lifted off the lids.
“Man, I’d seen the three-d models and flythroughs, but they’re nothing compared to actually seeing it, owning it. People will want libraries of these things. Whole rooms devoted to them.”
“Umm,” one of the Imagineers said. Sammy knew his name, but he’d forgotten it. He had a whole complicated scheme for remembering people’s names by making up stories about them, but it was a lot of work. “Well, about that. This feedstock is very fast-setting, but it doesn’t really weather well. Even if you stored it in a dark, humidity-controlled room, it’d start to delaminate and fall to pieces within a month or two. Leave it in the living room in direct sunlight and it’ll crumble within a couple days.”
Sammy pursed his lips and thought for a while. “Please, please tell me that there’s something proprietary we can require in the feedstock that can make us into the sole supplier of consumables for this thing.”
“Maybe? We could certainly tag the goop with something proprietary and hunt for it when we do the build, refuse to run on anyone else’s goop. Of course, that won’t be hard to defeat—”
“We’ll sue anyone who tries it,” Sammy said. “Oh, boys, you’ve outdone yourselves. Seriously. If I could give you a raise, I would. As it is, take something home from the architectural salvage lot and sell it on eBay. It’s as close to a bonus as this fucking company’s going to pay any of us.”
They looked at him quizzically, with some alarm and he smiled and spread his hands. “Ha ha, only serious boys. Really—take some stuff home. You’ve earned it. Try and grab something from the ride-system itself, that’s got the highest book-value.”
They left behind a slim folder with production notes and estimates, suppliers who would be likely to bid on a job like this. He’d need a marketing plan, too—but this was farther than he ever thought he’d get. He could show this to legal and to the board, and yes, to Wiener and the rest of the useless committee. He could get everyone lined up behind this and working on it. Hell, if he spun it right they’d all be fighting to have their pet projects instantiated with it.
He fiddled with a couple of overnight shippers’ sites for a while, trying to figure out what it would cost to sell these in the Park and have them waiting on the marks’ doorsteps when they got back home. There were lots of little details like that, but ultimately, this was good and clean—it would extend the Parks’ reach right into the living rooms of their customers, giving them a new reason to think of the Park every day.
Kettlewell and Tjan looked up when Perry banged through the door of the tea-house they’d turned into their de facto headquarters.
Perry had gone through mad and back to calm on the ride home, but as he drew closer to the tea-house, passing the people in the streets, the people living their lives without lawyers or bullshit, his anger came back. He’d even stopped outside the tea-house and breathed deeply, but his heart was pounding and his hands kept balling into fists and sometimes, man, sometimes you’ve just got to go for it.
He got to the table and grabbed the papers there and tossed them over his shoulder.
“You’re fired,” he said. “Pack up and go, I want you out by morning. You’re done here. You don’t represent the ride and you never will. Get lost.” He didn’t know he was going to say it until he said it, but it felt right. This was what he was feeling—hisproject had been stolen and bad things were being done inhisname and it was going to stop, right now.
Tjan and Kettlewell got to their feet and looked at him, faces blank with shock. Kettlewell recovered first. “Perry, let’s sit down and do an exit interview, all right? That’s traditional.”
Perry was shaking with anger now. These two friends of his, they’d fucking screwed him—committed their dirty work in his name. But Kettlewell was holding a chair out to him and the others in the tea-house were staring and he thought about Eva and the kids and the baseball gloves, and he sat down.
He squeezed his thighs hard with his clenching hands, drew in a deep breath, and recited what Death Waits had told him in an even, wooden voice.
“So that’s it. I don’t know if you instructed the lawyers to do this or only just distanced yourself enough from them to let them do this on their own. The point is that the way you’re running this campaign is victimizing people who believe in us, making life worse for people who already got a shitty, shitty deal on our account. I won’t have it.”
Kettlewell and Tjan looked at each other. They’d both stayed poker-faced through Perry’s accusation, and now Kettlewell made a little go-ahead gesture at Tjan.
“There’s no excuse for what that lawyer did. We didn’t authorize it, we didn’t know it had happened, and we wouldn’t have permitted it if we had. In a suit like this, there are a lot of moving parts and there’s no way to keep track of all of them all of the time. You don’t know what every ride operator in the world is up to, you don’t even know where all the rides in the worldare. That’s in the nature of a decentralized business.
“But here’s the thing: the lawyer was at least partly right. Everything that kid blogs, emails, and says will potentially end up in the public record. Like it or not, that kid can no longer consider himself to have a private life, not until the court case is up. Neither can you or I, for that matter. That’s in the nature of a lawsuit—and it’s not something any of us can change at this point.”
Perry heard him as from a great distance, through the whooshing of the blood in his ears. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
Tjan and Kettlewell looked at each other.
“So even if we’re ’fired’—” Tjan said at last, making sarcastic finger-quotes, “this problem won’t go away. We’ve floated the syndicate and given control of the legal case to them. If you try to ditch it, you’re going to have to contend withtheirlawsuits, too.”
“I didn’t—” Perry started. But he had, he’d signed all kinds of papers: first, papers that incorporated the ride-runners’ co-op; and, second, papers that gave legal representation over to the syndicate.
“Perry, I’m the chairman of the Boston ride collective. I’m their rep on the co-op’s board. You can’t fire me. You didn’t hire me. They did. So stop breathing through your nose like a locomotive and calm down. None of us wanted that lawyer to go after that kid.”
He knew they were making sense but he didn’t want to care. He’d ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up.
He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn’t going to go there.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Gone. We can figure out by email how to have a smooth transition, but no more of this. Not on my head. Not on my account.”
He stalked away, which is what he should have done in the first place. Fuck being reasonable. Reasonable sucked.
Death found out about the Disney-in-a-Box printers seconds after they were announced. He’d been tuning his feed-watchers to give him news about the Disney Parks for nearly a decade, and this little PR item on the Disney Parks newswire rang all the cherries on his filters, flagging the item red and rocketing it to the top of his news playlist, making all the icons in the sides of his screen bounce with delight.
The announcement made him want to throw up. They were totally ripping off the rides, and he knew for a fact that most of the three-d meshes of the old yesterland rides and even the contemporary ones were fan-made, so those’d be ripped off, too.
And the worst part was, he could feel himself getting excited. This was just the kind of thing that would have given him major fanboy drool as recently as a month ago.
He just stared angrily at his screen. Being angry made the painkillers wear off, so the madder he got the more he hurt. He could nail the rocker-switch and dose himself with more of whatever the painkiller plugged into his IV was today, but since Perry and Lester and their girlfriends (had that other one been Suzanne Church? It sure looked like her) had told him he could use his laptop again, he’d stayed off the juice as much as possible. The computer could make him forget he hurt.
He looked at the clock. It was 4AM. The blinds on the ward were shut most of the time, and he kept to his own schedule, napping and then surfing, then nodding off and then surfing some more. The hospital staff just left his food on the table beside him if he was asleep when it arrived, though they woke him for his sponge baths and to stick fresh needles in his arms, which were filled with bruisey collapsed veins.
There was no one he could tell about this. Sure, there were chat-rooms with 24/7 chatter from Disney freaks, but he didn’t much want to chat with them. Some of his friends would still be up and tweaking, but Christ, who wanted to IM with a speed freak at four in the morning? His typing was down to less than 30 wpm, and he couldn’t keep it up for long. What he really wanted was to talk to someone about this.
He really wanted to talk to Perry about this. He should send him an email, but he had the inkling of an idea and he didn’t want to put it in writing, because it was a deliciously naughty idea.
It was dumb to even think about phoning him, he barely knew him, and no one liked to get calls at four am. Besides—he’d checked—Perry’s number was unlisted.
From: deathw@deathwait.er To: pgibbons@hollywood.ride Subject: What’s your phone number?
Perry, I know that it’s presumptuous, but I’d really like to talk to you v2v about something important that I’d prefer not to put in writing. I don’t have any right to impose on you, especially not after you’ve already done me the kindness of coming to see me in the hospital, but I hope you’ll send me your number anyway. Alternatively, please call me on my enum—1800DEATHWAITS-GGFSAH.
Your admirer,
Death Waits
It was five minutes later when his laptop rang. It was unnaturally loud on the ward, and he heard his roommates stir when the tone played. He didn’t have a headset—Christ, he was an idiot. Wait, there was one, dangling from the TV. No mic, but at least he could pair it with his laptop for sound. He stabbed at the mute button and reached for the headset and slipped it on. Then he held the computer close to his face and whispered “Hello?” into its little mic. His voice was a croak, his ruined mouth distorting the word. Why had he decided to call this guy? He was such an idiot.
“This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?”
“Yes, sorry, I don’t have a mic. Can you hear me OK?”
“If I turn the volume all the way up I can.”
There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin.
“What’s on your mind, Death?”
“I didn’t expect you to be awake at this hour.”
“I had a rough night,” Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied.
“What happened?”
“Nothing important,” Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly understood that Perry had had a rough night because ofhim, because of whathe’dtold Perry. It made him want to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Death said.
“What’s on your mind, Death?” Perry said again.
Death told him what he’d found, about the Disney printers. He read Perry the URLs so he could look them up.
“OK, that’s interesting,” Perry said. Death could tell he didn’t really think it was that interesting.
“I haven’t told you my idea yet.” He groped for the words. His mouth had gone dry. “OK, so Disney’s going to ship these things to tons of people’s houses, they’ll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two, there’s going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country.”
“Right.”
“So here’s my idea: what if you could get them to build non-Disney stuff? What if you could send them plans for stuff from the rides? What if you could just download your friends’ designs? What if this was opened wide.”
Perry chuckled on the other end of the line, then laughed, full-throated and full of merriment. “I like the way you think, kid,” he said, once he’d caught his breath.
And then this amazing thing happened. Perry Gibbonsbrainstormedwith him about the kinds of designs they could push out to these things. It was like some kind of awesome dream come true. Perry was treating him like a peer, loving his ideas, keying off of them.
Then a dismal thought struck him. “Wait though, wait. They’re using their own goop for the printers. Every design we print makes them richer.”
Perry laughed again, really merry. “Oh, that kind of thing never works. They’ve been trying to tie feedstock to printers since the inkjet days. We go through that like wet kleenex.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Who the fuck knows? It shouldn’t be. I don’t care about illegal anymore. Legal gets you lawyers. Come on, dude—what’s the point of being all into some anti-authoritarian subculture if you spend all your time sucking up to the authorities?”
Death laughed, which actually hurt quite a bit. It was the first laugh he’d had since he’d ended up in the hospital, maybe the first one since he’d been fired from Disney World, and as much as it hurt, it felt good, too, like a band being loosened from around his broken ribs.
His roommates stirred and one of them must have pushed the nurse call button, because shortly thereafter, the formidable Ukrainian nurse came in and savagely told him off for disturbing the ward at five in the morning. Perry heard and said his goodbyes, like they were old pals who’d chatted too long, and Death Waits rang off and fell into a light doze, grinning like a maniac.
Hilda eyed Perry curiously. “That sounded like an interesting conversation,” she said. She was wearing a long t-shirt of his that didn’t really cover much, and she looked delicious in it. It was all he could do to keep from grabbing her and tossing her on the bed—of course, the cast meant that he couldn’t really do that. And Hilda wasn’t exactly smiling, either.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.
“It wasn’t the talking that did it, it was you not being there in the first place. Gave me the toss-and-turns.”
She came over to him then, the lean muscles in her legs flexing as she crossed the living room. She took his laptop away and set it down on the coffee-table, then took off his headset. He was wearing nothing but boxers, and she reached down and gave his dick a companionable honk before sitting down next to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek, the throat and the lips.
“So, Perry,” she said, looking into his eyes. “What the fuck are you doing sitting in the living room at 5 am talking to your computer? And why didn’t you come to bed last night? I’m not going to be hanging out in Florida for the rest of my life. I woulda thought you’d want to maximize your Hilda-time while you’ve got the chance.”
She smiled to let him know she was kidding around, but she was right, of course.
“I’m an idiot, Hilda. I fired Tjan and Kettlewell, told them to get lost.”
“I don’t know why you think that’s such a bad idea. You need business-people, probably, but it doesn’t need to be those guys. Sometimes you can have too much history with someone to work with him. Besides, anything can be un-said. You can change your mind in a week or a month. Those guys aren’t doing anything special. They’d come back to you if you asked ’em. You’re Perry motherfuckin’ Gibbons. You rule, dude.”
“You’re a very nice person, Hilda Hammersen. But those guys are running our legal defense, which we’re going to need, because I’m about to do something semi-illegal that’s bound to get us sued again by the same pack of assholes as last time.”
“Disney?” She snorted. “Have you ever read up on the history of the Disney Company? The old one, the one Walt founded? Walt Disney wasn’t just a racist creep, he was also a mad inventor. He kept coming up with these cool high-tech ways of making cartoons—sticking real people in them, putting them in color, adding sync-sound. People loved it all, but it drove him out of business. It was all too expensive.
“So he recruited his brother, Roy Disney, who was just a banker, to run the business. Roy turned the business around, watching the income and the outgo. But all this came at a price: Roy wanted to tell Walt how to run the business. More to the point, he wanted to tell Walt that he couldn’t just spend millions from the company coffers on weird-ass R&D projects, especially not when the company was still figuring out how to exploit thelastR&D project Walt had chased. But it was Walt’s company, and he’d overrule Roy, and Roy would promise that it was going to put them in the poorhouse and then he’d figure out how to make another million off of Walt’s vision, because that’s what the money guy is supposed to do.
“Then after the war, Walt went to Roy and said, ’Give me $17 million, I’m going to build a theme-park. And Roy said, ’You can’t have it and what’s a theme-park?’ Walt threatened to fire Roy, the way he always had, and Roy pointed out that Disney was now apubliccompany with shareholders who weren’t going to let Walt cowboy around and piss away their money on his toys.”
“So how’d he get Disneyland built?”
“He quit. He started his own company, WED, for Walter Elias Disney. He poached all the geniuses away from the studios and turned them into his ’Imagineers’ and cashed in his life-insurance policy and raised his own dough and built the park, and then made Roy buy the company back from him. I’m guessing that that felt pretty good.”
“It sounds like it must’ve,” Perry said. He was feeling thoughtful, and buzzed from the sleepless night, and jazzed from his conversation with Death Waits. He had an idea that they could push designs out to the printers that were like the Disney designs, but weird and kinky and subversive and a little disturbing.
“I can understand why you’d be nervous about ditching your suits, but they’re just that, suits. At some level, they’re all interchangeable, mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not someone who’ll run the show. If that’s not these guys, hey, that’s cool. Find a couple more suits and run them.”
“Jesus, you reallyareYoko, aren’t you?” Lester was wearing his boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room’s doorway where Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car starting down in the parking lot.
“Good morning, Lester,” Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no offense taken, all good, all good.
“You fired who now, Perry?” Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon that he’d designed specifically for this purpose.
“I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan,” Perry said. He was blushing. “I would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to do it, though. I had to.”
“I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we’ve got some of the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our outfit. It’s their show, too. You can’t just go shit-canning them. Not just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing and they’re keeping the lawyers at bay too. They’re managing all the evil shit so we don’t have to. I don’t want to be in charge of the evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn’t going to be easy. They’re all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur.”
“You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those two,” Hilda said. “You’re experienced now, and you’ve founded a movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just need better management structure: an executive you can overrule whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss.”
Lester acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “I’m being pretty mellow about this, buddy. I’m not making a big deal out of the fact that you did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I might have done the same. But it’s the cold light of day now and it’s time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can’t afford to burn all this to the ground and start over now.”
Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be unreasonable.
“Lester, they violated our trust. It was their responsibility to do this thing and do it right. They didn’t do that. They didn’t look closely at this thing so that they wouldn’t have to put the brakes on if it turned out to be dirty. Which do you think those two would rather have happen: we run a cool project that everyone loves, or we run a lawsuit that makes ten billion dollars for their investors? They’re playing a different game from us and their victory condition isn’t ours. I don’t want to be reasonable. I want to do the right thing. You and me could have sold out a thousand times over the years and made money instead of doing good, but we didn’t. We didn’t because it’s better to be right than to be reasonable and rich. You say we can’t afford to get rid of those two. I say we can’t afford not to.”
“You need to get a good night’s sleep, buddy,” Lester said. He was blowing through his nose, a sure sign that he was angry. It made Perry’s hackles go up—he and Lester didn’t fight much but when they did, hoo-boy. “You need to mellow out and see that what you’re talking about is abandoning our friends, Kettlewell and Tjan, to make our own egos feel a little better. You need to see that we’re risking everything, risking spending our lives in court and losing everything we’ve ever built.”
A Zen-like calm descended on Perry. Hilda was right. Suits were everywhere, and you could choose your own. You didn’t need to let the Roy Disneys of the world call the shots.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Lester. I hear everything you’re saying, but you know what, it’s going to be my way. I understand that what I want to do is risky, but there’s no way I can go on doing what I’m doing and letting things get worse and worse. Making a little compromise here and there is how you end up selling out everything that’s important. We’re going to find other business-managers and we’re going to work with them to make a smooth transition. Maybe we’ll all come out of this friends later on. They want to do something different from what I want to do is all.”
This wasn’t calming Lester down at all. “Perry, this isn’t your project to do what you want with. This belongs to a lot of us. I did most of the work in there.”
“You did, buddy. I get that. If you want to stick with them, that’s how it’ll go. No hard feelings. I’ll go off and do my own thing, run my own ride. People who want to connect to my network, no sweat, they can do it. That’s cool. We’ll still be friends. You can work with Kettlewell and Tjan.” Perry could hardly believe these words were coming out of his mouth. They’d been buddies forever, inseparable.
Hilda took his hand silently.
Lester looked at him with increasing incredulity. “You don’t mean that.”
“Lester, if we split, it would break my heart. There wouldn’t be a day that went by from now to the end of time that I didn’t regret it. But if we keep going down this path, it’s going to cost me my soul. I’d rather be broke than evil.” Oh, it felt sogoodto be saying this. To finally affirm through deed and word that he was a good person who would put ethics before greed, before comfort even.
Lester looked at Hilda for a moment. “Hilda, this is probably something that Perry and I should talk about alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Imind, Lester. There’s nothing you can’t say in front of her.”
Lester apparently had nothing to say to that, and the silence made Perry uncomfortable. Lester had tears in his eyes, and that hit Perry in the chest like a spear. His friend didn’t cry often.
He crossed the room and hugged Lester. Lester was wooden and unyielding.
“Please, Lester. Please. I hate to make you choose, but you have to choose. We’re on the same side. We’ve always been on the same side. Neither of us are the kind of people who send lawyers after kids in hospital. Never. I want to make it good again. We can have the kind of gig where we do the right thing and the cool thing. Come on, Lester. Please.”
He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he’d won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.
Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone—his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked.
“Hello?” he said. Not many people had this number—he didn’t like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first.
“Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?” He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. Shit. He’d given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face.
“It’s not a good time, Freddy,” he said. “If you call my secretary—”
“I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers—your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C.”
Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride assholes would have known about the printers. That’s what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn’t had time to look for it, though, and he didn’t want to use the Disney Parks competitive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a fuck-up) he didn’t want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.
“I’m not familiar with any response,” Sammy said. “I’m afraid I can’t comment—”
“Oh, it’ll only take a moment to explain it,” Freddy said and then launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had passed out last week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on, so that anyone’s goop could print to it.
“So, what I’m looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you condone this? Did you anticipate it? What if someone prints an AK-47 with it?”
“No one’s going to print a working AK-47 with this,” Sammy said. “It’s too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it—” He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “As to the rest of it, that would be something you’d have to speak to one of my legal colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?”
Freddy laughed. “Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background, no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?”
Sammy felt his face go white. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked out of the organization—no one around to call the lawyers out on their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike.”
Sammy seethed. He’d been concentrating on making new stuff, great stuff. Competitive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made and the world would be a more fun place once it was.
Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those ride shit-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He’d brought his own destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. God, he was a total fuck-up.
Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly—not humming like a fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley of magic-users’ songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to hell and back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the versioning system, and he’d been able to choose from among them and pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt’s 1955 Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool.
“I’ll just say you declined to comment, then?”
Asshole.
“You write whatever you need to write, Freddy,” he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn’t fuck it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to.
“Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week.”
He wasn’t ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn’t walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he’d had all the treatment he needed—even if his doctor hadn’t been able to look him in the eye when this was explained—and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere.
He’d put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he’d had with Perry and the idea he’d had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn’t even know if his apartment was still there—he hadn’t been back in weeks and the rent was overdue.
And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights—some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!)—side-conversations, philosophical arguments.
Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune—half-a-year’s wages at his old job—waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him.
The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. “Your friends are here,” she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn’t have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants—the first pair he’d worn in weeks—and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent.
“You will use canes?” she asked. He’d had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes? No way.
“I can’t,” he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall.
“Wheelchair,” she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in pushing a chair with a squeaky wheel—though the chair itself was a pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney, which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where the nurse’s station, the elevators, the common area and hisfanswere.
They weren’t just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but also a big crowd of people he’d never met, didn’t recognize. There were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a wild cheer. The orderly stopped pushing his chair and the nurse rushed forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two very pretty girls—he hadn’t thought about “pretty” anything in a long, long time—unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS.
The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands, but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear, something about getting security to get rid of these people if they were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was athreatand that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced off in a deeply Slavic huff.
And then he was among his welcoming party, and itwasa party—there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they’d seen the story he’d described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was something that was as personal as the twin language they’d developed to communicate with one another when they were little girls.
His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery, girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey’s makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him—one girl had gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it all started.
Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells that weren’t sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs.
“Now, it’s all arranged,” one of the straight-looking ones told him. He’d figured out that these were the pure story people, who’d read his descriptions and concluded that he’d seen something more than anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn’t seem too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old mates. “Don’t worry about a thing.” Car after car appeared, taking away more of the party. “Here you go.”
Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge cargo space. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. “My mom was in a wheelchair for ten years before she passed,” a hippie told him. He was older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went.
They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic—Death marveling at buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital—when the English teacher dude looked shyly at Death.
“You think it’s real—the Story, I mean—don’t you?”
Death thought about this for a second. He’d been very focused on the Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a meditative state he’d found easy to attain with all the painkillers.
“It’s real,” he said.
The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a little. “We think so too.”
They pulled up to his condo—how’d they know where he lived?—and parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of fucked-up the rear bumper, but other than that, it was just as he remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash, too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his building, pushing—
A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward him, handling the curb easily, hardly a bump, and the two pretty girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived to brush their breasts and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that he’d felt since before his beating.
He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator.
The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the night talking about the story that they’d seen in the ride, where they’d seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether they had any business rating things now that the story had shown itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and it should be left to unconscious effort.
But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story, or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who couldn’t see it or wouldn’t see it.
At first Death didn’t know what to make of all this talk. At first he found it funny and more than a little weird to be taking the story this seriously. It was beautiful, but it was an accidental beauty. The ride was the important thing, the story was its effect.
But these people convinced him that they were right, that the storyhadto be important. After all, it had inspired all of them, hadn’t it? The ride was just technology—the story was what the ride wasfor.
His head swam with it.
“We’ve got to protect it,” he said finally, after listening to the argument, after eating the food with which they’d filled his fridge, after talking intensely with Tracey (or possibly Lacey) about their parents’ unthinking blandness, after letting the English teacher guy (whose name was Jim) take him to the toilet, after letting his old goth pals play some music some mutual friends had just mixed.
“We’ve got to protect it and sharpen it. The story wants to get out and there will be those who can’t see it.” He didn’t care that his speech was mangled by his fucked-up face. He’d seen his face in the mirror and Tracey and Lacey had done a nice job in making it up—he looked like a latter-day Marilyn Manson, his twisted mouth a ghoulish smear. The doctors had talked about giving him another series of surgeries to fix his lip, a set of implanted dentures to replace the missing teeth, had even mentioned that there were specialist clinics where he could get a new set budded and grown right out of his own gums. That had been back when the mysterious forces of the lawsuit and the ride were paying his bills.
Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he’d get used to this, he’d come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one of the weird ones, like the old-timers who’d come to Disney with their teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths’ kids were never goths, it seemed—more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the grave.
“We’ll let everyone know about it,” he said, thinking not ofeveryonebut of all the cool subculture kids he’d grown up with and worshipped and been rejected by and dated and loved and hated—“and we’ll make it part ofeveryone’s story. We’ll protect it, guys. Of course we’ll protect it.”
That settled the argument. Death hadn’t expected that. Since when did he get the last word on any subject? Since now. They were following his lead.
And then the girls put him to bed, shyly helping him undress, each of them leaning over him to kiss him good night. Tracey’s kiss was sisterly, on the cheek, her spicy perfume and her jet-black hair caressing him. Lacey’s kiss was anything but sisterly. She mashed her breasts to his chest and thrust her tongue into his mouth, keeping her silver eyes open and staring deep into his, her fingers working busily in his hair.
She broke the kiss off with a gasp and a giggle. She traced the ruin of his mouth with a fingertip, breathing heavily, and let it slide lower, down his chest. He found himself actuallyhard, the first pleasurable sensation he’d had in his dick since that fateful night. From the corridor came an impatient cough—Tracey, waiting for Lacey to get going.
Lacey rolled her eyes and giggled again and then slid her hand the rest of the way down, briefly holding his dick and then encircling his balls with her fingers before kissing him again on the twist of his lips and backing out of the room, whispering, “Sleep well, see you in the morning.”
Death lay awake and staring at the ceiling for a long time after they had gone. The English teacher dude had left him with a bedpan for the night and many of them had promised to return in rotations indefinitely during the days, helping him out with dressing and shopping and getting him in and out of his marvelous chair.
He stared and stared at that ceiling, and then he reached for his laptop, there beside the bed, the same place it had lived when he was in the hospital. He fired it up and went straight to today’s fly-throughs of the ride and ran through them from different angles—facing backward and sideways, looking down and looking up, noting all the elements that felt likestoryand all the ones that didn’t, wishing he had his plus-one/minus-one joystick with him to carve out the story he was seeing.
Lester wouldn’t work the ride anymore, so Perry took it on his own. Hilda was in town buying groceries—his chest-freezer of gourmet surplus food had blown its compressor and the contents had spoiled in a mess of venison and sour blueberry sauce and duck pancakes—and he stood alone. Normally he loved this, being the carnival barker at the middle of the three-ring circus of fans, tourists and hawkers, but today his cast itched, he hadn’t slept enough, and there were lawyers chasing him. Lots of lawyers.
A caravan of cars pulled into the lot like a Tim Burton version of a funeral, a long train of funnycar hearses with jacked-up rear wheels and leaning chimney-pots, gargoyles and black bunting with super-bright black-light LEDs giving them a commercially eldritch glow. Mixed in were some straight cars, and they came and came and came, car on car. The hawkers got out more stuff, spread it out further, and waited while the caravan maneuvered itself into parking spots, spilling out into the street.
Riders got out of the cars, mostly super-skinny goths—a line of special low-calorie vegan versions of Victorian organ-meat delicacies had turned a mom-and-pop cafe in Portland, Oregon, into a Fortune 500 company a few years before—in elaborate DIY costumery. It shimmered darkly, petticoats and toppers, bodices and big stompy boots and trousers cut off in ribbons at the knees.
The riders converged on one of the straight cars, a beige mini-van, and crowded around it. A moment later, they were moving toward Perry’s ticket-taking stand. The crowd parted as they approached and in Perry saw whom they’d been clustered around. It was a skinny goth kid in a wheelchair like the ones they kept in the ride—they’d get that every now and again, a guest in his own chair, just needing a little wireless +1/-1 box. His hair was shaggy and black with green highlights, stuck out like an anime cosplayer’s. He was white as Wonder Bread, with something funny about his mouth. His legs were in casts that had been wrapped with black gauze, and a pair of black pointy shoes had been slid over his toes, tipped with elaborate silver curlicues.
The chair zipped forward and Perry recognized him in a flash: Death Waits! He felt his mouth drop open and he shut it and came around the stand.
“No way!” he said, and grabbed Death’s hand, encrusted in chunky silver jewelry, a different stylized animal skull on each finger. Death’s ruined mouth pulled up in a kind of smile.
“Nice to see you,” he said, limply squeezing Perry’s hand. “It was very kind of you to visit me in the hospital.”
Perry thought of all the things that had happened since then and wondered how much of it, if any, Death had a right to know about. He leaned in close, conscious of all the observers. “I’m out of the lawsuit. We are. Me and Lester. Fired those guys.” Behind his reflective contacts, Death’s eyes widened a touch.
He slumped a little. “Because of me?”
Perry thought some. “Not exactly. But in a way. It wasn’t us.”
Death smiled. “Thank you.”
Perry straightened up. “Looks like you brought down a good crowd,” he said. “Lots of friends!”
Death nodded. “Lots of friends these days,” he said. An attractive young woman came over and squeezed his shoulder.
They were such a funny bunch in their DIY goth-frocks, micro-manufactured customized boots, their elaborate tattoos and implants and piercings, but for all that, cuddly and earnest with the shadows visible of the geeks they’d been. Perry felt he was smiling so broadly it almost hurt.
“Rides are on me, gang,” he said. “In you go. Your money’s no good here. Any friend of Death Waits rides for free today.”
They cheered and patted him on the back as they went through, and Death Waits looked like he’d grown three inches in his wheelchair, and the pretty girl kissed Perry’s cheek as she went by, and Death Waits had a smile so big you could hardly tell there was anything wrong with his mouth.
They rode it through six times in a row, and as they came back around for another go and another, they talked intently about the story, the story, the story. Perry knew about the story, he’d seen it, and he and Lester had talked it over now and again, but he was still constantly amazed by its ability to inspire riders.
Paying customers slipped in and out, too, and seemed to catch some of the infectious intensity of the story group. They went away in pairs, talking about the story, and shopped the market stalls for a while before coming back to ride again, to look for more story.
They’d never named the ride. It had always been “the ride.” Not even a capital “R.” For a second, Perry wondered if they’d end up calling it “The Story” in the end.
Perry got his Disney-in-a-Box through a circuitous route, getting one of the hawkers’ brothers to order it to a PO box in Miami, to which Perry would drive down to pick it up and take it back.
Lester roused himself from the apartment when Perry told him it had arrived. Lester and Suzanne had been AWOL for days, sleeping in until Perry left, coming back after Perry came back, until it felt like they were just travelers staying in the same hotel.
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.