Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

tenyears. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led upto my third death as seen from various third-party POVs: securityfootage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extractedfrom Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of thescene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowingthat I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitterpresets that had been put in place when I was restored.

  Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned withhairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissedthe smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized witha warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who reallyloved me. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it,opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, "I have to pee."

  Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, andthumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with abrand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold ofmy ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelousflexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee wasmissing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When Ilooked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller andperkier. The familiar crow's-feet and the frown-lines between myeyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over -- head, face, pubis,arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklishnewness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just tokeep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presetswere evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping upon me.

  I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. Thesmells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose,effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room andhelped me to the bed. "Well, this _sucks_," I said.

  I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors -- three quickcuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor,and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square andAdventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from thedoor, and began to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind ofsinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-workon my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowdtoward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips ofshimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.

  Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passingclose to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearingenvironmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Centerlogomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Tradersshop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the TikiRoom's entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back,just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organicpistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually,grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly likeLil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lungesforward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungsbursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinalgristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of mynametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him toblink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but thegirl with the pistol is long gone.

  The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and thegirl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the SwissFamily Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts tomove towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near groundlevel, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below thespeed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into myspine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity.

  The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward theAdventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up,following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking andweaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping BeautyCastle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, inTomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappearsagain.

  "Has anyone ID'd the girl?" I asked, once I'd finished reliving theevents. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fistsclenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.

  Dan shook his head. "None of the girls she was with had ever seen herbefore. The face was one of the Seven Sisters -- Hope." The SevenSisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenagegirl wore one of them.

  "How about Jungle Traders?" I asked. "Did they have a record of the pithhelmet purchase?"

  Lil frowned. "We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months:only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis.Chances are she stole it."

  "Why?" I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting outof my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying likeshrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulledthe trigger on me.

  "It wasn't random," Lil said. "The slug was definitely keyed to you --that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point."

  Right -- which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last tenyears. That narrowed it down, all right.

  "What happened to her after Tomorrowland?" I said.

  "We don't know," Lil said. "Something wrong with the cameras. We losther and she never reappeared." She sounded hot and angry -- she tookequipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.

  "Who'd want to do this?" I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. Itwas the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it.

  Dan's eyes got a far-away look. "Sometimes, people do things for reasonsthat seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the worldcouldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and theynever made sense afterwards." He stroked his chin. "Sometimes, it'sbetter to look for temperament, rather than motivation: who _could_ dosomething like this?"

  Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'dvisited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it downconsiderably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been fourdays since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles atthe Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month,just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while Iwas churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-controlsimulations.

  I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.

  "_What_ are you doing?" Lil asked, alarmed.

  "I've got a shift. I'm running late."

  "You're in no shape to work," Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerkedfree of her.

  "I'm fine -- good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going tolet those bastards disrupt my life any more."

  _Those bastards_? I thought -- when had I decided that there was morethan one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was allplanned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, toothoroughly.

  Dan moved to block the bedroom door. "Wait a second," he said. "You needrest."

  I fixed him with a doleful glare. "I'll decide that," I said. He steppedaside.

  "I'll tag along, then," he said. "Just in case."

  I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles -- sympathy Whuffie-- but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em.

  I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I putit in gear and sped out.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" Dan said as I nearly rolled therunabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac.

  "Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "I'm as good as new."

  "Funny choice of words," he said. "Some would say that you _were_ new."

  I groaned. "Not
this argument again," I said. "I feel like me and no oneelse is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from abackup?"

  "All I'm saying is, there's a difference between _you_ and an exact copyof you, isn't there?"

  I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, butI couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, itactually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a personwho knew you better than you knew yourself. "So you're saying that ifyou were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that youwouldn't be you