Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

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

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

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

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

  Nothing.

  I was offline.

  #

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

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

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

  "Tell you?" I said, dumbly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Lil groaned and glared at me.

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

  #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when Iwas hormonally enhanced, anyway. "What's wrong, honey?" she said, goinginto helpful castmember mo
de. Now I wanted to hit something besides thewall.

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

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

  Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of herparents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19 --apparent and real -- and