whilemuttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock ofcurly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubbyfingers while he thought.
"About eight weeks," he said. "Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelfparts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability. . ."He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up aHUD and started making a list.
"Wait," Lil said, alarmed. "How do you get from five years to eightweeks?"
Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when theywere on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups -- I knewthat the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, theever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissionedtheir work.
Suneep looked sheepish. "Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myselfthat my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make ithappen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll behalfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish orapproach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's backto the drawing board. . . So I stay at the drawing board for a long timeat the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, fromfocus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage ofconstruction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven'tthought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.
"It's slow, but it works."
Lil was flustered. "But if you can do a complete revision in eightweeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do _that_ onein eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ridethe thing?"
"Because that's how it's done," I said to Lil. "But that's not how it_has_ to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion."
I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right.Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organizationneeded to turn on a dime -- that would be even _more_ Bitchun.
"Lil," I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her."We have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds tocome to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll give every Mansion nut onthe planet a shot at joining up, then we'll recruit them again to workat it, to run the telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggestsuper-recommenders in the world, and we'll build something better andfaster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the originalImagineers' vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun."
Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor,hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry withme, but excited and scared and yes, passionate.
"It's not up to me, you know," she said at length, still pacing. Dan andI exchanged wicked grins. She was in.
"I know," I said. But it was, almost -- she was a real opinion-leader inthe Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth,someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in acrisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. Thisplan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it,in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd have plenty ofWhuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.
"I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans thatImagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs --"
I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, butshe beat me to it.
"But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm in."
She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss me and tell me everything wasforgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.
#
My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, Iwas so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it everaudacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no onehad ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Parisversion, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it wasjust a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time.No one wanted to screw up the legend.
What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney Worldany number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told,it had never been my absolute favorite.
But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly boredstupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd foundmyself crowd-driven to it.
I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was apunk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling intothe only seat on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.
In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack player,a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy,unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderatelysuccessful high-tech startup that had done something arcane withsoftware agents. While he was only moderately successful, he wasfabulously wealthy: he'd never raised a cent of financing for hiscompany, and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtubfull of money. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he'dpilgrim off to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count themonkey-cards and calculate the odds and Beat The House.
Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut,he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grindingout hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of BeatingThe House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juiceevery time the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on adeckfull of face cards.
Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately gothis compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path ofleast resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodgingthe traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare -- moving withprecision and grace and, above all, _expedience_.
On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground,pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge overto the Main Gate.
Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketingqueues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one,beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortestwait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosksand evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'dhave been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and lessa measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefullyexamined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything,their burdens.
You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate thecomplexities of a queue through what they carry than through any othermeans -- if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is theunladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag ormarsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought ofas a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study andcome to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often theflightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, pattingdown their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, apiece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.
No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such aperson is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of onedescription or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing towatch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: dothey balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum easeof access? Someone who's given that much consideration to their gear islikely spending their time in line determining which bits and piecesthey'll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at readyfor fastest-possible processing.
This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigswho pack _everything_ because they lack the organizational smarts tofigure out what they should pack -- they're just as apt to be burdenedwith bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of
that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, jugglingthis and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.
I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queuethat was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticcednervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots Icould've chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World,and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates.
Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents hadbrought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the firstinklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone'sconsciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggleto rejig an economy that