Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

***

The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations and the like.

So a rehab it would be.

'Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,' I explained, 'Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.'

Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained-tending bar, mopping toilets-commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off- hours.

'But that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. You'd get a slightly different show every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren't so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.'

'You're going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?' Dan asked, shaking his head.

I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. 'No,' I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. 'Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators-telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them … We'll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace 'em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion … We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.'

'That's pretty good,' Dan said. 'Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world-'

'And those are the very fans Debra'll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?'

***

The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.

We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands.

Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone-shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisible screens.

Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab, leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted by what he saw.

I nudged him with an elbow. 'Make a hardcopy,' I hissed.

Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner. Anyone else would have made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into the discussion.

If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough. She'd been thinking just the way I had-souvenirs that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors-the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year's stylish lines.

It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my mind's eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world 'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area …

Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.

'Passionate enough for you?' she snapped.

I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature. Also, I'd started the fight.

'This is fucking fantastic, Lil,' I said. Her look didn't soften. 'Really choice stuff. I had a great idea-' I ran it down for her, the avatars, the robots, the rehab. She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners.

'This isn't easy,' she said, finally. Suneep, who'd been politely pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.

'I know that,' I said. The flush burned hotter. 'But that's the point-what Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc better-it made them sharper.' Sharper than us, that's for sure. 'They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.'

Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped out, but I saw that I'd been right-we'd have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.

'I understand what you're saying,' Lil said. I could tell she was upset-she'd reverted to castmemberspeak. 'It's a very good idea. I think that we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach the group and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from some of them.'

I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements reviews while Debra's people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic.

'Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?'

Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being drawn into a political discussion.

'Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull together a production schedule- one that didn't have any review, just take the idea and run with it-and then pull it off, how long would it take you to execute it?'

Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before.

'About five years,' he said, almost instantly.

'Five years?' I squawked. 'Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the Hall in a month!'

'Oh, wait,' he said. 'No review at all?'

'No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts around the clock.'

He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingers while he thought.

'About eight weeks,' he said. 'Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable