Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom

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Down and Out
in the
Magic Kingdom
Cory Doctorow
© 2003 Cory Doctorow
doctorow@craphound.com
http://www.craphound.com/down
Tor Books, January 2003
ISBN: 0765304368
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 1
Blurbs
He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science
fiction needs Cory Doctorow!
Bruce Sterling
Author, The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction
— • —
In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our common
culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new set
of memes that will be with us for a generation at least.
Lawrence Lessig
Author, The Future of Ideas
— • —
Cory Doctorow doesn’t just write about the future - I think he lives there.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn’t just a really good read, it’s also,
like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland of
Tomorrow today, and while you’re there, why not drop by Frontierland, and
the Haunted Mansion as well? (It’s the Mansion that’s the haunted heart of
this book.) Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future - a dizzying, yet
rather pleasant sensation, as if I’m spiraling down the tracks of Space
Mountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever!
Kelly Link
Author, Stranger Things Happen
— • —
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and exciting
science fiction story I’ve read in the last few years. I love page-turners,
especially when they are as unusual as this novel. I predict big things for
Down and Out—it could easily become a breakout genre-buster.
Mark Frauenfelder
Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine
Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world.
Not only that, but money’s been abolished and somebody’s developed the
Cure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society—and make sure you’re
strapped in tight, because it’s going to be a wild ride. In a world where
everyone’s wishes can come true, one man returns to the original,
crumbling city of dreams—Disney World. Here in the spiritual center of the
Bitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve the original, human face
of the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly
alien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated,
human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny,
mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a
precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, the
true from the false.
Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early
Adopter—uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yet
behind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay
heed to. The future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it’s hard
to see where we’re going. But at least with this book Doctorow has given us
a map of the park.
Karl Schroeder
Author, Permanence
— • —
Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I’ve come across in
years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers’ speculations end.
It’s a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie.
Rudy Rucker
Author, Spaceland
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 2
Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he’s
always one of the first to notice a major incursion from the social-
technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle for
news from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about a
world that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from
reputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to
look, and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture.
Howard Rheingold
Author, Smart Mobs
— • —
Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions of
those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though that should be enough
recommendation to read his work. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is
black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our
consensual hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep
afterwards.
Douglas Rushkoff
Author of Cyberia and Media Virus!
— • —
“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation
economy, and Ray Kurzweil’s transhuman future. As much fun as Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas about
social changes cascading from the frontiers of science.”
Tim O’Reilly
Publisher and Founder, O’Reilly and Associates
— • —
Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and then
wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn’t put the book down.
Bruce Schneier
Author, Secrets and Lies
Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,
entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world
of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you’re going to
find.
Gardner Dozois
Editor, Asimov’s SF
— • —
Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping,
fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from
today’s technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines
the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake
ourselves and our world.
Mitch Kapor
Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 3
A Note About This Book
“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It’s an actual, no-
foolin’ words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in
New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by following
links like this one:
http://www.craphound.com/down/buy.php
So, what’s with this file? Good question.
I’m releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable e-
book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it
to a friend, and, if you’re addicted to dead trees, you can even print it.
Why am I doing this thing? Well, it’s a long story, but to shorten it up: first-
time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of
promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise
and fall based on word-of-mouth. I’m not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a
blog, Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net), where I do a lot of word-of-
mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things that I like.
And telling people about stuff I like is way, way easier if I can just send it to
’em. Way easier.
What’s more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and
movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In
the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the
Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more,
they’ve done it for cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I’m
a stone infovore and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson
of futurosity.
Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are
gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a
serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic
end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer,
end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.
I’m especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books (http://www.tor.com)
and my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
(http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite) for being hep enough to let me try out
this experiment.
All that said, here’s the deal: I’m releasing this book under a license
developed by the Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/).
This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license agreements for
the distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employed
by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It’s a great project, and I’m
proud to be a part of it.
Here's a summary of the licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0
Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy,
distribute, display, and perform the work. In return,
licensees must give the original author credit.
Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy,
distribute, display, and perform the work. In return,
licensees may not use the work for commercial
purposes—unless they get the licensor's permission.
No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to
copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered
copies of the work—not derivative works based on it.
The full terms of the license are here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 4
Prologue
I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun
Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my
boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of
the workplace and of work.
I never thought I’d live to see the day when Keep A-Movin’ Dan would
decide 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, all
rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitely
comfortable. 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 in
Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at
the Grad Students’ Union—the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on a
busy Friday night, spring-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at
the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodies
shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter 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 to get
a pre-nup.”
I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called
son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime that
he could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little and
apologized.
He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender’s
head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m probably a little over accustomed to
personal space.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard anyone on-world talk about
personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero,
the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the
migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You’ve been jaunting?”
I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant’s
experience to deadheading.
He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I’m into the kind of macho shitheadery
that 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 to
resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I
tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and 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 to know.
“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 benighted
corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve,
and choke on petrochem waste. It’s amazing that these communities survive
more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive
our detractors. The missionaries don’t have such a high success rate—you
have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that’s already
successfully resisted nearly a century’s worth of propaganda—but when
you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give.
More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they
aren’t heard from for a 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
NORAD site, still there a generation later. ” He sandpapered his whiskers
with his fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life’s savings
vanished, 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 of
the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle,
beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 5
gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them
toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn’t remember why they hadn’t
wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world,
exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited 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. They
think of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up
for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth,
booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just
can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know they exist. Off-
world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough and hard. ” He rubbed
his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the
real rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an
alternate history of humanity—what if we’d taken the Free Energy, but not
deadheading? What if we’d taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill,
not for people who didn’t want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no
hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and
wonderful.”
I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself
saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let’s see, dying,
starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and
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? Junkies
don’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everything
was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can’t remember what it was
like 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 remember what it was like
to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it felt like to have
them pay off.”
He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and
already ready to toss it all in and do something, anything, else. He had a
point—but I wasn’t about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance
when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love . . . And what
about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten
thousand years! Tell me that’s not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almost
everyone I’d known in my eighty-some years 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 comes time
to reanimate. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a little crowded
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 world was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free
Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold.
We fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. I’m gonna be here
in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I’ll do it the long way
around.”
He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any
of the other grad students, I’d have assumed he was grepping for some
bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he
was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.
“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy
as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art
was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably
human in a hundred centuries? Me, I’m not interested in being a post-
person. I’m going to wake up one day, and I’m going to say, ’Well, I guess
I’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”
I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying
attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid more
attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see if
there’s anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few
more? Why do anything so final?”
He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making
me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I suppose it’s because
nothing else is. I’ve always known that someday, I was going to stop
moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There’ll come 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 vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take
over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie
a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he
accumulated more esteem from the people he met.
I’d pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings from
the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at the
Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I’d expended all the
respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 6
reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies.
I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum as
exotic as Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the
only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can’t say for sure
why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he’d liked
my symphonies, and he’d read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-
park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to say
there. But I think it came down to us having a good time needling 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 that deadheading
was a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspection and
creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory.
This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without
resolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence
of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t
starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you
security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really
represented—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 to
my allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien species
with wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressing
homogeneity to the world.
On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and
one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was
present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They all
liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in the sweet,
flower-stinking streets.
He’d gone. The Anthro major he’d been torturing with his war-stories
said that they’d wrapped up that morning, and he’d headed to the walled
city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US
Marines who’d settled there and cut themselves off from the Bitchun
Society.
So I went to Disney World.
In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabin
reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen and stacked
like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one taking the trip in
realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized
orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the
windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around the
turbulence, and wondered when I’d see Dan next.
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 7
Chapter 1
My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enough
that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she 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.
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 were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in
Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.
On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the
Liberty Belle’s riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag over
Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The Magic Kingdom
was all closed up and every last guest had been chased out the gate
underneath the Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe a
heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together while
the cicadas sang.
I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in
having 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 shoulder and 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 old
news 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 favorite
duties, exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after
the horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of
the magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship.
“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
and gently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the
age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting it get to
me.
“I think I’ll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, if
you just give me a moment to rest my bursitis. ” I felt her smile against my
shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghosts and
dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try and stare down
the marble busts in the library that followed your gaze as you passed.
I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watching the
water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard a soft 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, though
it’d been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. I muted
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 out her
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 a sob.
I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can I
help?” she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone
to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-
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 on
the couch by the door. I’ll be there in—” I shot a look at Lil, who knew the
castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me. “Ten
minutes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. ” He had his voice back under control. I
switched off.
“What’s up?” Lil asked.
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 8
“I’m not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he’s got a
problem.”
Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture.
“There,” she said. “I’ve just dumped the best route to Pleasure Island to
your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?”
I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and booted
down the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. I took the
slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out to Pleasure Island.
— • —
I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-up
trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmembers were
working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests.
Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had
raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I
approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had dropped
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 at
midnight; 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 with Lil,
out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minute ride,
hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my runabout with
stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He had his eyes
closed, and in repose he looked dead. I could hardly believe that this was
my vibrant action-hero pal of yore.
Surreptitiously, I called Lil’s phone. “I’m bringing him home,” I
subvocalized. “He’s in rough shape. Not sure what it’s all about.”
“I’ll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love
you.”
“Back atcha, kid,” I said.
As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he opened
his eyes. “You’re a pal, Jules. ” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think
of who I could call, and you were the only one. I’ve missed you, bud.”
“Lil said she’d put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need
it.”
Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow on the
side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs beside them.
She stood and extended her hand. “I’m Lil,” she said.
“Dan,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”
I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surprised
disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it’s important; but
to the kids, it’s the world. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I
watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand on
her jeans. “Coffee?” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, and slumped on the sofa.
She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table. “I’ll let
you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom.
“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don’t mind. I think it’d help if I could talk
to someone . . . younger, too.”
She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the second-gen
castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair. She
pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crack period before she
was born, just after they made it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her
and her friends light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and
taking the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back.
Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped his
coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to start.
“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils down to,”
he said.
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I’d run out of things
to do, things to see. I knew that I’d finish some day. You remember, we
used to argue about it. I swore I’d be done, and that would be the end of it.
And now I am. There isn’t a single place left on-world that isn’t part of the
Bitchun Society. There isn’t a single thing left that I want any part of.”
“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.”
“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I’m done. It’s over.”
“So do it,” Lil said.
“I can’t,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a
baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went into the
kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat alongside him and
awkwardly patted his back.
“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.”
“Dan?” I said, quietly.
He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands. “Thanks,”
he said. “I’ve tried to make a go of it, really I have. I’ve spent the last eight
years in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I
Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 9
did some followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me.
I smoked a lot of hash. It didn’t help. So, one morning I woke up and went
to the bazaar and said good bye to the friends I’d made there. Then I went to
a pharmacy and had the man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me
good luck and I went back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all
afternoon, then I decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and
did it all over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn’t have the
guts. I just didn’t have the guts. I’ve stared down the barrels of a hundred
guns, had a thousand knives pressed up against my throat, but I didn’t have
the guts to press that button.”
“You were too late,” Lil said.
We both turned to look at her.
“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You’re pathetic. If you killed
yourself right now, you’d just be a washed-up loser who couldn’t hack it. If
you’d done it ten years earlier, you would’ve been going out on top—a
champion, retiring permanently. ” She set her mug down with a harder-
than-necessary clunk.
Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes, it’s
like she’s on a different planet. All I could do was sit there, horrified, and
she was happy to discuss the timing of my pal’s suicide.
But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it, too.
“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed.
“Well, don’t just sit there,” she said. “You know what you’ve got to do.”
“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone.
She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He’s got to get
back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get that
Whuffie up, too. Then he can kill himself with dignity.”
It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking an
eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How old did you say you were?” he
asked.
“Twenty-three,” she said.
“Wish I’d had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a sigh,
straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job done?”
I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded.
“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.”
“Beat doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said.
“Good night, then,” I said.
摘要：

DownandOutintheMagicKingdomCoryDoctorow©2003CoryDoctorowdoctorow@craphound.comhttp://www.craphound.com/downTorBooks,January2003ISBN:0765304368CoryDoctorowDownandOutintheMagicKingdom1BlurbsHesparkles!Hefizzes!Hedoesbackflipsandbreaksthefurniture!SciencefictionneedsCoryDoctorow!BruceSterlingAuthor,The...

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