Cory Doctorow's short stories and novels grab you very early on, and you just kinda don't want to put them down until they're finished. He gives you just enough of a glimpse of his worlds to sear images of them into your brain forever -- leaving you ready and waiting for the next voyage to begin.
Here's an excerpt if you want to check it out first before purchasing the novel at 30% off:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
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Here is the full text of the excerpt in case the link goes bad:
http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/excerpts/down_and_out1.html
The Infinite Matrix
an excerpt from
down and out in
the magic kingdom
by Cory Doctorow
illustration
The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of it.
It fell to my girlfriend Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers.
Lil was second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in the animatronics that are in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.
I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead 'bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit.
It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.
"You just missed Dan," she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. "He's looking better."
His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. "What did he want?"
"He's been hanging out with Debra he wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to."
Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.
The problem was that she was really good at coding sims. Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking the Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits.
"So, what's she up to?"
Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. "She's rehabbing the Pirates and doing an incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves." The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry.
She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kicked in low: "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author and its finisher." She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again.
"You said it, Mr. President," she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket.
I put my arm around her shoulders. "You're doing all you can and it's good work," I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze and let her go.
She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. "It'll be fine, of course," she said. "I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job very, very well, and make things even better than they are now. That's not so bad."
This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not to.
My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it.
"Yes," I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a backup one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.
"It's Dan." I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. "Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important."
"Can it wait for fifteen?" I asked.
"Sure see you in fifteen."
I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before my eyes.
After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years since my last death. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in place when I was restored.
Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her pony-tail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. 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, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were surprisingly limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar crows-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows 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 ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up on me.
I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells 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 and helped me to the bed. "Well, this sucks," I said. I ran the bare, soft soles of my new feet over the tile and considered the circumstances of my latest death.
After the backup uplink, I'd headed straight for Liberty Square through the utilidors. Three quick cuts of security cam footage told the story, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.
Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logos. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room'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 organic pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol is gone.
The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl are grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends, Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. A self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground-level, weaving among the feet of the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my chest-cavity.
The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again.
"Has anyone ID'd the girl?" I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.
Dan shook his head. "None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters Hope." The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them.
"How about Jungle Traders?" I asked. "Did they have a record of the pith helmet 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 out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me.
"It wasn't random," Lil said. "The slug was definitely keyed to you that means that she'd gotten close enough to sample you at some point."
Right which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That sure narrowed it down.
"What happened to her after Tomorrowland?" I said.
"We don't know," Lil said. "Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared." She sounded hot and angry she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom very personally.
"Who'd want to do this?" I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was 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 reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards." He stroked his chin. "Sometimes, it's better look for temperament, rather than motivation: who could do something like this?"
Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the 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 I was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.
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 jerked free of her.
"I'm fine good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more."
Those bastards? I thought when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly.
Dan moved to block the bedroom door. "Wait a second," he said. "You need rest."
I fixed him with a doleful glare. "I'll decide that," I said. He stepped aside.
"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 put it in gear and sped out.
[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]
Cory Doctorow has been writing and selling science fiction for a dozen years or so, and after a blizzard of stories appeared, in 1998, 1999, and 2000, in Asimovs Science Fiction, SF Age, Interzone, Amazing, On Spec, and other magazines, a grateful public awarded him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is the author, with Karl Schroeder, of The Complete Idiots Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, and his articles have appeared in Wired, Speculations, and other magazines. Cory blogs for boingboing, evangelizes for OpenCola, and generally keeps busy. You can find out more on his website, Craphound.com, if he ever gets around to updating it.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will be published by Tor Books in Fall, 2002.
The Infinite Matrix
an excerpt from
down and out in
the magic kingdom
by Cory Doctorow
part 2
illustration
The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me. . . I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the other castmembers.
He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. "They did it already," he said.
I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. "Excuse our mess!" the sign declared. "We're renovating to serve you better!"
I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat northern Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood Debra had established a toe-hold in Liberty Square.
"They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour after you got shot" Dan explained. "The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They're promising not to touch the Mansion."
"You didn't mention this," I said, hotly.
"We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for proof."
"Right," I said. "Right. So they just happened to have plans for a new Hall standing by. And they just happened to file them after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big coincidence."
Dan shook his head. "We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a murderer."
I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.
Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning wryly. "Posit," he said, "for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you up so that she could take over."
I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the old days. "All right, I've posited it."
"Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?"
"All right," I said, warming to the challenge. "One: I'm important enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real important."
"Sure," Dan said, "sure." Then he launched an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed.
With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience.
It was a delicate process, this business of increasing through-put without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenes more quickly.
I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out.
It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the pre-show area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.
The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, "Master Gracey requests more bodies."
As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips.
The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best show I knew how.
It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, the most-recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck.
The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.
He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his sidelong glances as we rode through past the floating chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes tracked us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly through-put cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty.
He was nervous! He was nervous. What did he have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: "Get ready to jump out on my signal." Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride-system. I would keep a close watch on Debra's crony.
We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic staircase the next sequence seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.
He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamor of voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quaking groundskeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride-system shuddered to a stop.
"Jules?" came Dan's voice in my cochlea. "You all right?"
He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and pity.
"It's all right, it's all right. False alarm." I paged Lil and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right.
I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety-bar, my eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle instead of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty.
I debarked from the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked.
I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing the elf.
He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running a language module. "Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung."
I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the close heat of the Florida night. "Julius," I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. Careful, I thought, no need to escalate the hostilities. "It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates."
He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile. "Really? I think it's pretty good the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the vision. Beijing well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show."
I knew about this, of course Beijing had been a real struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuing expedience.
"I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure," I said, and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look embarrassed, then horrified.
"We would never touch the Mansion," he said. "It's perfect!"
Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte.
Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.
"Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing."
Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. "That was some hard work," Dan said.
It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf Tim, I had to remember to call him Tim would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.
"So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?" I asked Tim.
Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. "We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President inside you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to flash-bake the Presidents on your mind!" His eyes glittered in the twilight.
"Wow," I said. "That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?" The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars.
"That's not really my area," Tim said. "I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want."
"That would be fine," Lil said, taking my elbow. "I think we should be heading home, now, though." She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow.
"That's too bad," Tim said. "My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by."
The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. "That would be great!" I said, too loudly.
[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]
Cory Doctorow has been writing and selling science fiction for a dozen years or so, and after a blizzard of stories appeared, in 1998, 1999, and 2000, in Asimovs Science Fiction, SF Age, Interzone, Amazing, On Spec, and other magazines, a grateful public awarded him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is the author, with Karl Schroeder, of The Complete Idiots Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, and his articles have appeared in Wired, Speculations, and other magazines. Cory blogs for boingboing, evangelizes for OpenCola, and generally keeps busy. You can find out more on his website, Craphound.com, if he ever gets around to updating it.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will be published by Tor Books in Fall, 2002.
