Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

by Cory Doctorow

had grown up focused on nothing but scarcityand death. My memories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Floridaclimate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkenedmoments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama.

  I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the richnessof detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week therestunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, Iknew, I'd come to live there.

  The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world whereeverything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, groundingmyself, communing with all the people I'd been.

  That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the shortlines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity. I'dtake high ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do avisual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currentsin the flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time.Truth be told, I probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as Iwould've spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more funand got more exercise.

  The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow CrashSpectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route toFantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to theJapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of thebrave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghosttown, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in arow, walking on every time.

  The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion,but to tell the truth it was the other way around.

  The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive airconditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. Buton the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thingwas. There wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loopprojector in the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived thatthe illusion of a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirledthrough the ballroom were _ghosts_, three-dimensional and ethereal andphantasmic. The ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through thegraveyard were equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneouslycreepy.

  My fourth pass through, I noticed the _detail_, the hostile eyes workedinto the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, thechandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to "GrimGrinning Ghosts," the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whetherin sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or thespritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.

  It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, thistime noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysteriouschills that blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made theirpresence felt. By the time I debarked for the fifth time, I waswhistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a mixed-up tempo.

  That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up adiscarded ice-cream wrapper -- I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking uptrash that day, seen it so frequently that I'd started doing it myself.She grinned slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleasedwith myself for having so completely _experienced_ a really fine hunk ofart.

  I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of theWhuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenlyentertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.

  "That's really, really Bitchun," I said to her, admiring the titanicmountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her.

  She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembersof her generation can't help but be friendly. She compromised betweenghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me,thumped through a zombie's curtsey, and moaned "Thank you -- we _do_ tryto keep it _spirited_."

  I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute shewas, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's uniform andher feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed andhappy about everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch hercheeks -- either set.

  The moment was on me, and so I said, "When do they let you ghouls off?I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary."

  Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for acouple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process andlosing my nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could possiblyhave to say to each other across a century-wide gap.

  While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, thereverse is indeed true. But it's also true -- and I never told her this-- that the thing I love best about the Mansion is:

  It's where I met her.

  #

  Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for thetelepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in atotally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribeit. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-timecould be.

  I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down.

  She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking amongthe rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and shedidn't want the appearance of impropriety that would come from havingoutsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc.

  Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around -- it was a skill I'd neverreally mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I thinkthat I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as apeacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I wassmarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things inshort words for mouth-breathers who just didn't get it.

  The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly agenius. Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from BeatingThe Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass -- the enemy ofexpedience.

  I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lilmade it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'dassumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joiningup, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to paymuch attention to a newcomer like me.

  Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talkingme up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work.And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of theothers I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them andcouldn't help but treat them as individuals.

  In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around withLil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world.The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesybut not much friendliness.

  I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, theywere a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchyworld of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.

  Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for addresslists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe,spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, ofcourse, their Whuffie.

  "That's weird," I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I wasusing -- my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up anddown for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, butI'd never gotten 'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgencywhen I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but theMansion always took precedence.

  "Huh?" he said.

  I tapped the display. "See these?" It was a fan-site, displaying acollection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion,part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades,to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd usedthose meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.

  "Those are terrific," Dan said
. "That guy must be a total _fiend_." Themeshes' author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated everyghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary forfull motion. Where a "normal" fan-artist might've used a standard humankinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written hisown from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectralfluidity that was utterly unhuman.

  "Who's the author?" Dan asked. "Do we have him on our list yet?"

  I scrolled down to display the credits. "I'll be damned," Dan breathed.

  The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs aweek before my assassination.

  "What do you think it means?" I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideason the subject myself.

  "Tim's a Mansion nut," Dan said.