snoring back in the theater, and woke him. Hegrunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.
"They did it -- they killed me." I knew they had, and I was glad. Itmade what I had to do next easier.
"Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you -- they offered their backups,remember? They couldn't have done it."
"Bullshit!" I shouted into the empty night. "Bullshit! They did it, andthey fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's all tooneat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall sofast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they movedin. Tell me that you think they just had these plans lying around andmoved on them when they could."
Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have beenstretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crewsscurrying in the night. "I do believe that. Clearly, you don't. It's notthe first time we've disagreed. So now what?"
"Now we save the Mansion," I said. "Now we fight back."
"Oh, shit," Dan said.
I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.
#
My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating,announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs thatworked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencersin the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth runwould garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteed continuedsupport while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them. Therewere plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachment tothe Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra's people came up with wouldhave to answer their longing.
"I'm going to do it during the demo," I told Dan, while I piloted therunabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him togauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.
"I'm not going to tell Lil," I continued. "It's better that she doesn'tknow -- plausible deniability."
"And me?" he said. "Don't I need plausible deniability?"
"No," I said. "No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the casethat you were working on your own -- gone rogue." I knew it wasn't fair.Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in mydirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, butI didn't care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. "It'sgood versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want tostay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our ownexperience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us throughour senses. What Debra's people are building -- it's hive-mind shit.Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it'sbrainwashing! You gotta know that." I was pleading, arguing with myselfas much as with him.
I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, linedwith sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was lookingthoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of mytension dissipated. He was thinking about it -- I'd gotten through tohim.
"Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas." My chest tightened, and hepatted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even whenhe was telling me that I was an idiot. "Even if Debra was behind yourassassination -- and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even ifthat's the case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving theMansion, competing with her head to head, that's smart. Give it a littlewhile and we can come back at her, take over the Hall -- even thePirates, that'd really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she wasbehind the assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage isnot going to do you any good. You've got lots of other options."
"But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionallysatisfying. This way has some goddamn _balls_."
We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot andstalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. Iheard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind.
We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing thatmy image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timingof my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to mytraditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made apoint of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, and ofdawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delay between myarrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not bediscrepant.
Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then huggedthe wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park,when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumaticwaste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew upin the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which stillwhiffed faintly of the garbage bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to thedump on the property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubeswere a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediatedexperiences of the Park lost their luster.
I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. "If they hadn'tkilled me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't beflexible enough to fit in," I hissed at Dan. "Ironic, huh?"
I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching myway under the Hall of Presidents.
#
My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn'toccur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms heldbefore me and legs angled back like a swimmer's.
How was I going to reach into my pockets?
Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my backpants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was thecrux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with adirectional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of theHall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshieldedelectronics on the premises. I'd gotten the germ of the idea duringTim's first demo, when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread outbackstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.
"Dan," I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls.
"Yeah?" he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of hispainful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my onlyindicator of his presence.
"Can you reach my back pocket?"
"Oh, shit," he said.
"Goddamn it," I said, "keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can youreach it or not?"
I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt hishand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into thetube's floor and his hand was pawing around my ass.
"I can reach it," he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't toohappy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider anapology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did hisslow burn.
He fumbled the gun -- a narrow cylinder as long as my palm -- out of mypocket. "Now what?" he said.
"Can you pass it up?" I asked.
Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage metmy glutes. "I can't get any further," he said.
"Fine," I said. "You'll have to fire it, then." I held my breath. Wouldhe do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the authorof the destruction.
"Aw, Jules," he said.
"A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you." I wasboiling with anger -- at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamnthing.
"Fine," he said.
"Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up."
I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, andthen it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated froma mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue.
"Hang on to it," I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damningbit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the nextservice hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identicalchange of clothes for both of us.
#
We made it back just as the demo was gett
ing underway. Debra's ad-hocswere ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, acollection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling thepre-show area to capacity.
Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behindthe crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiledback, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down inflames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into theauditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and freshelectronics.
We took our seats