the bitchun society has had much experience with restores frombackup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly.

some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.

not me. i hate the process. not so much that i won’t participate in it.

everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just,you know, died, a generation before. the bitchun society didn’t need toconvert its detractors, just outlive them.

the first time i died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. i wasscuba diving at playa coral, near veradero, cuba. of course, i don’t rememberthe incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-siteand having read the dive-logs of my scuba-buddies, i’ve reconstructedthe events.

i was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottleand mask. i’d also borrowed a wetsuit, but i wasn’t wearing it—theblood-temp salt water was balm, and i hated erecting barriers between itand my skin. the caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiledand twisted like intestines. through each hole and around each corner,there was a hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. giant lobstersskittered over the walls and through the holes. schools of fish asbright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision maneuversas i disturbed their busy days. i do some of my best thinking under water,and i’m often slipping off into dangerous reverie at depth. normally,my diving buddies ensure that i don’t hurt myself, but this time i gotaway from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole.

where i got stuck.

my diving buddies were behind me, and i rapped on my bottle withthe hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. mybuddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottleand buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. the others exchangedhand signals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. suddenly, i27was thrashing and kicking, and then i disappeared into the cave, minusmy vest and bottle. i’d apparently attempted to cut through my vest’sstraps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. after inhaling ajolt of sea water, i’d thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrouspatch of spindly fire-coral. i’d inhaled another lungful of water andkicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave’s ceiling, whence my buddies retrievedme shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy redwelts from the stinging coral.

in those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the proceduretook most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic.

luckily, i’d had one made just before i left for cuba, a few weeks earlier.

my next-most-recent backup was three years old, dating from the completionof my second symphony.

they recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone attoronto general. as far as i knew, i’d laid down in the backup clinic onemoment and arisen the next. it took most of a year to get over the feelingthat the whole world was putting a monstrous joke over on me, that thedrowned corpse i’d seen was indeed my own. in my mind, the rebirthwas figurative as well as literal—the missing time was enough that ifound myself hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends.

i told dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediatelypounced on the fact that i’d gone to disney world to spend a week sortingout my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying acrazy lady. he found it very curious that i always rebooted myself atdisney world. when i told him that i was going to live there someday,he asked me if that would mean that i was done reinventing myself. sometimes,as i ran my fingers through lil’s sweet red curls, i thought ofthat remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled thatmy friend dan had been so prescient.

the next time i died, they’d improved the technology somewhat. i’dhad a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice inthe middle of a house-league hockey game. by the time they cut my helmetaway, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sottedmess. i’d been lax in backing up, and i lost most of a year. but theywoke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of themissing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until i feltat home again in my skin. again, my life rebooted, and i found myself indisney world, methodically flensing away the relationships i’d built andstarting afresh in boston, living on the ocean floor and working the28heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my chem thesisat u of t.

after i was shot dead at the tiki room, i had the opportunity to appreciatethe great leaps that restores had made in the intervening tenyears. i woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up tomy third death as seen from various third-party povs: security footagefrom the adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted fromdan’s own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. iwoke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that i feltthat way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that hadbeen put in place when i was restored.

dan and lil sat at my bedside. lil’s tired, smiling face was limnedwith hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. she took my hand andkissed the smooth knuckles. dan smiled beneficently at me and i wasseized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by peoplewho really loved me. i dug for words appropriate to the scene, decidedto 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, andthumped to the bathroom. my muscles were wonderfully limber, with abrand-new spring to them. after i flushed i leaned over and took hold ofmy ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelousflexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. a scar on my knee wasmissing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. when ilooked in the mirror, i saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller andperkier. the familiar crow’s-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrowswere 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 newnessof it all. i was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feelingof newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporatingand 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 inmy nose, effervescent as camphor. dan and lil stood when i came intothe room and helped me to the bed. “well, this sucks,” i said.

i’d gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quickcuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, andone at the exit in the underpass between liberty square and adventureland.

i seemed bemused and a little sad as i emerged from the door, andbegan to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous,29darting shuffle that i’d developed when i was doing field-work on mycrowd-control thesis. i cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd towardthe long roof of the tiki room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminumcut 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 epcotcenter logomarks. one of them is wearing a pith helmet, from thejungle 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 organicpistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. casually,grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like lildoes 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 burstingout of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle andviscera showering the guests before me. a piece of my nametag, nowshrapnel, strikes dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. when helooks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol islong gone.

the fly-through is far less confused. everyone except me, dan and thegirl is grayed-out. we’re limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slowmotion.

i emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the swissfamily robinson treehouse to the group of her friends. dan starts tomove towards me. the girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. the selfguidingsmart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near groundlevel, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below thespeed of sound. when it reaches me, it screams upwards and into myspine, 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, followingher as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weavingbetween them, moving toward the breezeway at sleeping beautycastle. 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 theevents. the anger was starting to boil within me now. my new fistsclenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.

30dan shook his head. “none of the girls she was with had ever seen herbefore. the face was one of the seven sisters—hope.” the seven sisterswere a trendy collection of designer faces. every second teenage girlwore one of them.

“how about jungle traders?” i asked. “did they have a record of thepith helmet purchase?”

lil frowned. “we ran the jungle traders purchases back for sixmonths: 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 burstingout of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying likeshrapnel. i saw the girl’s smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled thetrigger on me.

“it wasn’t random,” lil said. “the slug was definitely keyed toyou—that means that she’d gotten close to you at some point.”

right—which meant that she’d been to disney world in the last tenyears. that narrowed it down, all right.

“what happened to her after tomorrowland?” i said.

“we don’t know,” lil said. “something wrong with the cameras. welost her and she never reappeared.” she sounded hot and angry—shetook equipment failures in the magic kingdom personally.

“who’d want to do this?” i asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. itwas the first time i’d been murdered, but i didn’t need to be a dramaqueenabout it.

dan’s eyes got a far-away look. “sometimes, people do things for reasonsthat seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the worldcouldn’t hope to understand. i’ve seen a few assassinations, and theynever made sense afterwards.” he stroked his chin. “sometimes, it’s betterto look for temperament, rather than motivation: who could dosomething like this?”

right. all we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who’dvisited the magic kingdom in ten years. that narrowed it down considerably.

i pulled up a hud and checked the time. it had been four dayssince my murder. i had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at thehaunted mansion. i liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just tokeep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while i waschurning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.

i stood and went to my closet, started to dress.

31“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 jerkedfree of her.

“i’m fine—good as new.” i barked a humorless laugh. “i’m not goingto let those bastards disrupt my life any more.”

those bastards? i thought—when had i decided that there was morethan one? but i knew it was true. there was no way that this was allplanned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, toothoroughly.

dan moved to block the bedroom door. “wait a second,” he said. “youneed rest.”

i fixed him with a doleful glare. “i’ll decide that,” i said. he steppedaside.

“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 iput it in gear and sped out.

“are you sure you’re all right?” dan said as i nearly rolled the runabouttaking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac.

“why wouldn’t i be?” i said. “i’m as good as new.”

“funny choice of words,” he said. “some would say that you werenew.”

i groaned. “not this argument again,” i said. “i feel like me and no oneelse is making that claim. who cares if i’ve been restored from abackup?”

“all i’m saying is, there’s a difference between you and an exact copyof you, isn’t there?”

i knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights,but i couldn’t resist the bait, and as i marshalled my arguments, it actuallyhelped calm me down some. dan was that kind of friend, a personwho knew you better than you knew yourself. “so you’re saying that ifyou were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that youwouldn’t be you anymore?”

32“for the sake of argument, sure. being destroyed and recreated is differentfrom not being destroyed at all, right?”

“brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. you’re being destroyedand recreated a trillion times a second.”

“on a very, very small level—”

“what difference does that make?”

“fine, i’ll concede that. but you’re not really an atom-for-atom copy.

you’re a clone, with a copied brain—that’s not the same as quantumdestruction.”

“very nice thing to say to someone who’s just been murdered, pal.

you got a problem with clones?”

and we were off and running.

the mansion’s cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. each ofthem made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starchedshoulder of my butler’s costume, letting me know that if there was anythingthey could do for me. … gave them all a fixed smile and tried toconcentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, howthey dispersed through the exit gate. dan hovered nearby, occasionallytaking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interferencefor me with the other castmembers.

he was nearby when my break came up. i changed into civvies andwe walked over the cobbled streets, past the hall of the presidents, notingas i rounded the corner that there was something different about thequeue-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 ourmess!” the sign declared. “we’re renovating to serve you better!”

i spotted one of debra’s cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfiedsmile 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 helooked almost elfin. i took one look at his smile and understood—debrahad established a toehold in liberty square.

“they filed plans for the new hall with the steering committee anhour after you got shot. 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.

33“we thought you’d jump to conclusions. the timing was bad, butthere’s no indication that they arranged for the shooter. everyone’s gotan alibi; furthermore, they’ve all offered to submit their backups forproof.”

“right,” i said. “right. so they just happened to have plans for a newhall 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 bigcoincidence.”

dan shook his head. “we’re not stupid, jules. no one thinks that it’s acoincidence. debra’s the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standingby, just in case. but that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, nota murderer.”

i felt nauseated and exhausted. i was enough of a castmember that isought out a utilidor before i collapsed against a wall, head down. defeatseeped through me, saturating me.

dan crouched down beside me. i looked over at him. he was grinningwryly. “posit,” he said, “for the moment, that debra really did do thisthing, set you up so that she could take over.”

i smiled, in spite of myself. this was his explaining act, the thing hewould do whenever i fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the olddays. “all right, i’ve posited it.”

“why would she: one, take out you instead of lil or one of the realold-timers; two, go after the hall of presidents instead of tom sawyer islandor 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 importantenough 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 withoutpeople seeing the dust from shore. three, debra’s coming off of a decadein beijing, where subtlety isn’t real important.”

“sure,” dan said, “sure.” then he launched an answering salvo, andwhile i was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walkedme out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time i noticedwe weren’t at the park anymore, i was home and in bed.

with all the hall’s animatronics mothballed for the duration, lil hadmore time on her hands than she knew what to do with. she hungaround the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring34blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheatedflorida air. i had my working notes on queue management forthe mansion, and i pecked at them aimlessly. sometimes, lil mirroredmy hud so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based onher long experience.

it was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughputwithout harming the guest experience. but for every second i couldshave off of the queue-to-exit time, i could put another sixty gueststhrough and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. and the more guestswho got to experience the mansion, the more of a whuffie-hit debra’speople would suffer if they made a move on it. so i dutifully pecked atmy notes, and found three seconds i could shave off the graveyard sequenceby swiveling the doom buggy carriages stage-left as they descendedfrom the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, i couldexpose the guests to all the scenes more quickly.

i ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing andinvited the other liberty square ad-hocs to come and test it out.

it was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. the ad-hocshad enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulatean off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshowarea, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries andassorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.

the doors swung open, revealing lil in a rotting maid’s uniform, hereyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. she gave usa cold, considering glare, then intoned, “master gracey requests morebodies.”

as we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, lil contrivedto give my ass an affectionate squeeze. i turned to return the favor, andsaw debra’s elfin comrade looming over lil’s shoulder. my smile diedon my lips.

the man locked eyes with me for a moment, and i saw something inthere—some admixture of cruelty and worry that i didn’t know what tomake of. he looked away immediately. i’d known that debra wouldhave spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, i resolvedto make this the best show i knew how.

it’s subtle, this business of making the show better from within. lilhad already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room numbertwo, the most recently serviced one. once the crowd had moved inside, itried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle35attention directed at the new spotlights. when the newly remasteredsoundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at thecorners of the octagonal room, i leaned my body slightly in the directionof the moving stereo-image. and an instant before the lights snappedout, i ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting thatothers had taken my cue, so they were watching when the uv-lit corpsedropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck.

the crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded thedoom buggies. there was a low buzz of marveling conversation as wemade our way onto the moving sidewalk. i boarded my doom buggyand 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 hissidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelierand into the corridor where the portraits’ eyes watched us. two years before,i’d accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to thedoom buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourlythroughput cap from 2365 to 2600. it was the proof-of-concept that led toall the other seconds i’d shaved away since. the violent pitching of thebuggy 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 itwas cold and sweaty.

he was nervous! he was nervous. what did he have to be nervousabout? i was the one who’d been murdered—maybe he was nervous becausehe was supposed to finish the job. i cast my own sidelong looks athim, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the doombuggy’s pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. dan was in thebuggy behind us, with one of the mansion’s regular castmembers. i ranghis cochlea and subvocalized: “get ready to jump out on my signal.”

anyone leaving their buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stopthe ride system. i knew i could rely on dan to trust me without a lot ofexplaining, which meant that i could keep a close watch on debra’scrony.

we went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors,where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining againstthe hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. i thought aboutit—if i wanted to kill someone on the mansion, what would be the bestplace to do it? the attic staircase— the next sequence—seemed like agood bet. a cold clarity washed over me. the elf would kill me in thegloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn36toward the graveyard, and that would be it. would he be able to do it if iwere staring straight at him? he seemed terribly nervous as it was. iswiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.

he quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. i kept on staringat him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. we rode down thestaircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the cemeteryand the squawk of the red-eyed raven. i caught sight of the quakinggroundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. i letout a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride systemshuddered 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 thebuggy, stopping the ride. the elf was looking at me with a mixture ofsurprise and pity.

“it’s all right, it’s all right. false alarm.” i paged lil and subvocalizedto 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 eyesfixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. i checked the timer i’dbeen running. the demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off threeseconds, i’d added thirty. i wanted to cry.

i debarked the buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaningheavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. myhead swam: i was out of control, jumping at shadows. i was spooked.

and i had no reason to be. sure, i’d been murdered, but what had itcost me? a few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted mybackup into my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departureat the backup terminal up until my death. i wasn’t one of those nuts whotook death seriously. it wasn’t like they’d done something permanent.

in the meantime, i had done something permanent: i’d dug lil’s gravea little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the mansion.

i’d acted like an idiot. i tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger,and swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.

i sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was lil, come to ask mewhat had gone on, i turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facingthe elf.

37he stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone runninga language module. “hi there. we haven’t been introduced, but iwanted to tell you how much i enjoy your work. i’m tim fung.”

i pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy inthe close heat of the florida night. “julius,” i said, startled at how muchlike 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 thepirates.”

he smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he’d just been givenhigh praise from one of his heroes. “really? i think it’s prettygood—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 anotherpack of squatters who wanted to tear the park down. debra usedto send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep ourwhuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. it was good to have theopportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show.”

i knew about this, of course—beijing had been a real struggle for thead-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 aseries of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. it wasfaster than revising the cad simulations. debra had a reputation forpursuing 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 lookembarrassed, then horrified.

“we would never touch the mansion,” he said. “it’s perfect!”

dan and lil sauntered up as i was preparing a riposte. they bothlooked concerned—now that i thought of it, they’d both seemed incrediblyconcerned about me since the day i was revived.

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 throughme. i was an emotional wreck. still, i took lil’s big, scarred hand in mineas soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. she hadchanged out of her maid’s uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whosemicropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.

“lil, dan, i want you to meet tim fung. he was just telling me warstories from the pirates project in beijing.”

38lil waved and dan gravely shook his hand. “that was some hardwork,” dan said.

it occurred to me to turn on some whuffie monitors. it was normallyan instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but i was still disoriented.

i pinged the elf. he had a lot of left-handed whuffie; respectgarnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. i expectedthat. what i didn’t expect was that his weighted whuffie score, the onethat lent extra credence to the rankings of people i respected, was alsohigh—higher than my own. i regretted my nonlinear behavior evenmore. respect from the elf—tim, i had to remember to call himtim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.

dan’s score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile.

he had accrued a good deal of left-handed whuffie, and i curiouslybacktraced it to the occasion of my murder, when debra’s people had accordedhim a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he hadscraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbancein front of their wondrous pirates.

i was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that gotme killed on the reef at playa coral, and i came out of it with a start, realizingthat the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. i couldhave run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist ofthe conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. screw it.

“so, how’re things going over at the hall of the presidents?” i asked tim.

lil shot me a cautioning look. she’d ceded the hall to debra’s ad-hocs,that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattentionto the almighty whuffie. now she had to keep up the fiction of goodnaturedcooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing debra, lookingfor excuses to pounce on her work.

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 goodstuff, i think. debra’s had her eye on the hall for years, back in the olddays, before she went to china. we’re replacing the whole thing withbroadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the presidents’ lives: newspaperheadlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. it’ll belike having each president inside you, core-dumped in a few seconds.

debra said we’re going to flash-bake the presidents on your mind!” hiseyes glittered in the twilight.

having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, tim’sdescription struck a chord in me. my personality seemed to be rattling39around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. itmade the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some presidents squashed inalong with it perversely appealing.

“wow,” i said. “that sounds wild. what do you have in mind forphysical plant?” the hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignitycribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead usa. messing withit would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars.

“that’s not really my area,” tim said. “i’m a programmer. but i couldhave 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 beheading home, now, though.” she began to tug me away. dan took myother elbow. behind her, the liberty belle glowed like a ghostly weddingcake in the twilight.

“that’s too bad,” tim said. “my ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on thenew 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, sitby their fire, learn their secrets. “that would be great!” i said, too loudly.

my head was buzzing slightly. lil’s hands fell away.

“but we’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” lil said. “you’ve got ashift at eight, and i’m running into town for groceries.” she was lying,but she was telling me that this wasn’t her idea of a smart move. but myfaith was unshakeable.

“eight a.m. shift? no problem—i’ll be right here when it starts. i’ll justgrab a shower at the contemporary in the morning and catch the monorailback in time to change. all right?”

dan tried. “but jules, we were going to grab some dinner at cinderella’sroyal table, remember? i made reservations.”

“aw, we can eat any time,” i said. “this is a hell of an opportunity.”

“it sure is,” dan said, giving up. “mind if i come along?”

he and lil traded meaningful looks that i interpreted to mean, if he’sgoing to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him. i was pastcaring—i was going to beard the lion in his den!

tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “then it’s settled! let’sgo.”

on the walk to the hall, dan kept ringing my cochlea and i kept sendinghim straight to voicemail. all the while, i kept up a patter of small-40talk with him and tim. i was determined to make up for my debacle inthe mansion with tim, win him over.

debra’s people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronicpresidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. debra wassprawled in lincoln’s armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extendedbefore her. the hall’s normal smells of ozone and cleanliness wereoverridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling anall-nighter. the hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and acouple of days to tear down.

she was au-naturel, still wearing the face she’d been born with, albeitone that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. it waspatrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. shewas at least as old as i was, though she was only apparent 22. i got thesense that she picked this age because it was one that afforded boundlessreserves of energy.

she didn’t deign to rise as i approached, but she did nod languorouslyat me. the other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched overterminals. they all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics,even debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously.

did you have me killed? i wondered, staring at debra. after all, she’dbeen killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. it might not be such a bigdeal for her.

“hi there,” i said, brightly. “tim offered to show us around! youknow dan, right?”

debra nodded at him. “oh, sure. dan and i are pals, right?”

dan’s poker face didn’t twitch a muscle. “hello, debra,” he said. he’dbeen hanging out with them since lil had briefed him on the peril to themansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. they knewwhat he was up to, of course, but dan was a fairly charming guy and heworked like a mule, so they tolerated him. but it seemed like he’d violateda boundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction thathe was more a part of debra’s ad-hoc than lil’s was shattered by mypresence.

tim said, “can i show them the demo, debra?”

debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “sure, why not. you’ll like this,guys.”

tim hustled us backstage, where lil and i used to sweat over the animatronicsand cop surreptitious feels. everything had been torn loose,41packed up, stacked. they hadn’t wasted a moment—they’d spent a weektearing down a show that had run for more than a century. the scrimthat the projected portions of the show normally screened on wasground into the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil.

tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. its housing wasoff, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves laystrewn about it. it had the look of a prototype.

“this is it—our uplink. so far, we’ve got a demo app running on it:

lincoln’s old speech, along with the civil-war montage. just switch onguest access and i’ll core-dump it to you. it’s wild.”

i pulled up my hud and switched on guest access. tim pointed a fingerat the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of lincoln:

every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movementtics, his warts and beard and topcoat. it almost felt like i was lincoln,for a moment, and then it passed. but i could still taste the lingeringcoppery flavor of cannon-fire and chewing tobacco.

i staggered backwards. my head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions,rich and detailed. i knew on the spot that debra’s hall of the presidentswas going to be a hit.

dan took a shot off the uplink, too. tim and i watched him as his expressionshifted from skepticism to delight. tim looked expectantly atme.

“that’s really fine,” i said. “really, really fine. moving.”

tim blushed. “thanks! i did the gestalt programming—it’s myspecialty.”

debra spoke up from behind him—she’d sauntered over while danwas getting his jolt. “i got the idea in beijing, when i was dying a lot.

there’s something wonderful about having memories implanted, likeyou’re really working your brain. i love the synthetic clarity of it all.”

tim sniffed. “not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “it’s niceand soft, right?”

i sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply whendebra said: “tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, lesscomputer-y. he’s wrong, of course. we don’t want to simulate the experienceof watching the show—we want to transcend it.”

tim nodded reluctantly. “sure, transcend it. but the way we do that isby making the experience human, a mile in the presidents’ shoes.

42empathy-driven. what’s the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry factson someone’s brain?”