Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Page 3

death of the workplace and of work.

  I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan woulddecide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.

  Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him,sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, allrawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitelycomfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate,and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus inToronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at theGrad Students' Union -- the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew -- on abusy Friday night, spring-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for astool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the pressof bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by alitter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.

  Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-bleached eyebrow. "You get any closer, son, and we're going to have toget a pre-nup."

  I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being calledson, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtimethat he could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little andapologized.

  He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender'shead. "Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed topersonal space."

  I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk aboutpersonal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate atnon-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people,even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population. "You'vebeen jaunting?" I asked -- his eyes were too sharp for him to havemissed an instant's experience to deadheading.

  He chuckled. "No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheaderythat you only come across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work."The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.

  I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had toresize the window -- he had too many zeroes to fit on my standarddisplay. I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyesand then their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery,gave it up and let a prideful grin show.

  "I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful."He must've seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history."Wait, don't go doing that -- I'll tell you about it, you really got toknow.

  "Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't."

  And it clicked for me. He was a missionary -- one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benightedcorners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die,starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that thesecommunities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Societyproper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't havesuch a high success rate -- you have to be awfully convincing to getthrough to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly acentury's worth of propaganda -- but when you convert a whole village,you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionariesend up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from fora decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before.

  "How many successful missions have you had?" I asked.

  "Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years --counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORADsite, still there a generation later." He sandpapered his whiskers withhis fingertips. "Their parents went to ground after their life's savingsvanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle.Plenty of those, though."

  He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance ofthe mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it insubtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses,then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowlyinching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn't rememberwhy they hadn't wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they weremostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy andunlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.

  "I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. Theythink of us as the enemy, you know -- they had all kinds of plans drawnup for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth,booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. Theyjust can't get over hating us, even though we don't even know theyexist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still living rough andhard." He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over hiswhiskers. "But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. Thelittle enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity --what if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we'dtaken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people whodidn't want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, noadhocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful."

  I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myselfsaying, "Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's see, dying,starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and painand misery. I know I sure miss it."

  Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. "You think a junkie misses sobriety?"

  I knocked on the bar. "Hello! There aren't any junkies anymore!"

  He struck another cig. "But you know what a junkie _is_, right? Junkiesdon't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everythingwas, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it waslike to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be_enough_, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't rememberwhat it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit don't rememberwhat it felt like to have them pay off."

  He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, andalready ready to toss it all in and do something, _anything_, else. Hehad a point -- but I wasn't about to admit it. "So you say. I say, Itake a chance when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall inlove. . . And what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they justwent deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not taking achance!" Truth be told, almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-someyears were deadheading or jaunting or just _gone_. Lonely days, then.

  "Brother, that's committing half-assed suicide. The way we're going,they'll be lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off when it comestime to reanimate. In case you haven't noticed, it's getting a littlecrowded around here."

  I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin --the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. "Uh-huh, just like the worldwas getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free Energy.Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. Wefixed it then, we'll fix it again when the time comes. I'm gonna be herein ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I'll do it the longway around."

  He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been anyof the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for somebolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knewhe was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.

  "I think that if I'm still here in ten thousand years, I'm going to becrazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, thestate-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you're going to beanything recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm notinterested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up one day, and I'mgoing to say, 'Well, I guess I've seen about enough,' and that'll be mylast day."

  I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped payingattention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid moreattention. "But why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see ifthere's anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for afew more? Why do anything so _final_?"

  He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making mefeel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. "I suppose it'sbecause
nothing else is. I've always known that someday, I was going tostop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There'llcome a day when I don't have anything left to do, except stop."

  #

  On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because of his cowboy vibeand because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over everyconversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a fewtimes, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as heaccumulated more esteem from the people he met.

  I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie -- all the savings fromthe symphonies and the first three theses -- drinking myself stupid atthe Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'dexpended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan,who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies.

  I got to feeling like I was someone special -- not everyone had a chumas exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited theonly places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't sayfor sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice thathe'd liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applyingtheme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what Ihad to say there. But I think it came down to us having a good timeneedling each other.

  I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us,of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day,of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me thatdeadheading was a strong indicator that one's personal reservoir ofintrospection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, thereis no real victory.

  This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times withoutresolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the trueessence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, youwouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum couldbuy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money reallyrepresented -- your personal capital with your friends and neighbors --you more accurately gauged your success.

  And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led tomy allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien specieswith wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightlydepressing homogeneity to the world.

  On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans andone prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness waspresent via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. Theyall liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan inthe sweet, flower-stinking streets.

  He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his war-storiessaid that they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd headed to the walledcity of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon ofUS Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from the BitchunSociety.

  So I went to Disney World.

  In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minusculecabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen andstacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one takingthe trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me aurine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. Istared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot bankedaround the turbulence, and wondered when I'd see Dan next.

  ========= CHAPTER 1 =========

  My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enoughthat it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was second-generationDisney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that tookover the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was,quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed.

  It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, fromher shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog inthe animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jarsin Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.

  On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the LibertyBelle's riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag over FortLanghorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was allclosed up and every last guest had been chased out the gate underneaththe Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sighof relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together while thecicadas sang.

  I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic inhaving my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight,hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles,breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulderand gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw.

  "Her name was McGill," I sang, gently.

  "But she called herself Lil," she sang, warm breath on my collarbones.

  "And everyone knew her as Nancy," I sang.

  I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles. They'd been oldnews in my youth, after all. But her parents had given her a thorough --if eclectic -- education.

  "Want to do a walk-through?" she asked. It was one of her favoriteduties, exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lightson, after the horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see theunderpinnings of the magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at therelationship.

  "I'm a little pooped. Let's sit a while longer, if you don't mind."

  She heaved a dramatic sigh. "Oh, all right. Old man." She reached up andgently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I thinkthe age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for lettingit get to me.

  "I think I'll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, ifyou just give me a moment to rest my bursitis." I felt her smile againstmy shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghostsand dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try andstare down the marble busts in the library that followed your gaze asyou passed.

  I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watchingthe water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard asoft _ping_ inside my cochlea. "Damn," I said. "I've got a call."

  "Tell them you're busy," she said.

  "I will," I said, and answered the call subvocally. "Julius here."

  "Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a minute?"

  I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately, thoughit'd been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. Imuted the subvocal and said, "Lil, I've got to take this. Do you mind?"

  "Oh, _no_, not at all," she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled outher crack pipe and lit up.

  "Dan," I subvocalized, "long time no speak."

  "Yeah, buddy, it sure has been," he said, and his voice cracked on asob.

  I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. "How can Ihelp?" she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched thephone to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in thecricket-punctuated calm.

  "Where you at, Dan?" I asked.

  "Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on Pleasure Island."

  "All right," I said. "Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club, upstairs onthe couch by the door. I'll be there in --" I shot a look at Lil, whoknew the castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers atme. "Ten minutes."

  "Okay," he said. "Sorry." He had his voice back under control. Iswitched off.

  "What's up?" Lil asked.

  "I'm not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he's got aproblem."

  Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture."There," she said. "I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure Islandto your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?"

  I set off for the utilidoor entrance near the Hall of Presidents andbooted down the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. Itook the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out toPleasure Island.

  #

  I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-uptrophy shots with humorous capt
ions. Downstairs, castmembers wereworking the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests.

  Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He hadraccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As Iapproached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it haddropped to nearly zero.

  "Jesus," I said, as I sat down next to him. "You look like hell, Dan."

  He nodded. "Appearances can be deceptive," he said. "But in this case,they're bang-on."

  "You want to talk about it?" I asked.

  "Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year every night atmidnight; I think that'd be a little too much for me right now."

  I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared withLil, out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minuteride, hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my runaboutwith stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He hadhis eyes closed, and in repose he looked dead. I could hardly believethat this was my vibrant action-hero pal of yore.

  Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. "I'm bringing him home," Isubvocalized. "He's