when i finally returned to the park, 36 hours had passed and lil had notcome back to the house. if she’d tried to call, she would’ve gotten myvoicemail—i had no way of answering my phone. as it turned out, shehadn’t been trying to reach me at all.

i’d spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible,irrational vengeance on debra for killing me, destroying my relationship,taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) hall of presidents andthreatening the mansion. even in my addled state, i knew that this waspretty unproductive, and i kept promising that i would cut it out, take ashower and some sober-ups, and get to work at the mansion.

i was working up the energy to do just that when dan came in.

“jesus,” he said, shocked. i guess i was a bit of a mess, sprawled on thesofa in my underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot.

“hey, dan. how’s it goin’?”

he gave me one of his patented wry looks and i felt the same weird reversalof roles that we’d undergone at the u of t, when he had becomethe native, and i had become the interloper. he was the together onewith the wry looks and i was the pathetic seeker who’d burned all hisreputation capital. out of habit, i checked my whuffie, and a momentlater i stopped being startled by its low score and was instead shockedby the fact that i could check it at all. i was back online!

“now, what do you know about that?” i said, staring at my dismalwhuffie.

“what?” he said.

i called his cochlea. “my systems are back online,” i subvocalized.

he started. “you were offline?”

i jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance.

“i was, but i’m not now.” i felt better than i had in days, ready to beatthe world—or at least debra.

58“let me take a shower, then let’s get to the imagineering labs. i’ve gota pretty kickass idea.”

the idea, as i explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab ofthe mansion. sabotaging the hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and i’dgotten what i deserved for it. the whole point of the bitchun society wasto be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery,despite assassinations and the like.

so a rehab it would be.

“back in the early days of the disneyland mansion, in california,” i explained,“walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first doombuggy curve, he’d leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as theywent by. it didn’t last long, of course. the poor bastard kept gettingpunched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn’t too comfortablefor long shifts.”

dan chuckled appreciatively. the bitchun society had all but doneaway with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded whuffie aplentyand a life of leisure in your off-hours.

“but that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. you’d get aslightly different show every time. it’s like the castmembers who spiel onthe jungleboat cruise. they’ve each got their own patter, their ownjokes, and even though the animatronics aren’t so hot, it makes the showworth seeing.”

“you’re going to fill the mansion with castmembers in armor?” danasked, shaking his head.

i waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifyinga pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around theproperty. “no,” i said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-facedguests. “not at all. but what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? we’ll let them interact withthe guests, talk with them, scare them … we’ll get rid of the existing animatronics,replace ’em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts overthe net. think of the whuffie! you could put, say, a thousand operatorsonline at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our mansion… we’ll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts’ll bebased on popular vote. in effect, we’ll be adding another ten thousand59guests to the mansion’s throughput every day, only these guests will behonorary castmembers.”

“that’s pretty good,” dan said. “very bitchun. debra may have aiand flash-baking, but you’ll have human interaction, courtesy of thebiggest mansion-fans in the world—”

“and those are the very fans debra’ll have to win over to make a playfor the mansion. very elegant, huh?”

the first order of business was to call lil, patch things up, and pitchthe idea to her. the only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. mymood started to sour, and i had dan call her instead.

we met her up at imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminumbuildings painted go-away green that had thronged with mad inventorssince the bitchun society had come to walt disney world. thead-hocs who had built an imagineering department in florida and nowran the thing were the least political in the park, classic labcoat-and-clipboardtypes who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool.

not caring about whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty onboth the left and right hands.

lil was working with suneep, aka the merch miracle. he coulddesign, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts,sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. they were collaboratingon their huds, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middleof a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkesand gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisible screens.

dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab,leaving me the only one out on the joke. dan was clearly delighted bywhat he saw.

i nudged him with an elbow. “make a hardcopy,” i hissed.

instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pagesstarted to roll out of a printer in the lab’s corner. anyone else wouldhave made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into thediscussion.

if i needed proof that lil and i were meant for each other, the designsshe and suneep had come up with were more than enough. she’d beenthinking just the way i had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale ofthe mansion. there were miniature animatronics of the hitchhikingghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their60layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by ir, so thatplacing one in proximity with another would unlock its mansion-inspiredbehaviors—the raven cawed, mme. leota’s head incanted, thesinging busts sang. she’d worked up some formal attire based on thecastmember costume, cut in this year’s stylish lines.

it was good merch, is what i’m trying to say. in my mind’s eye, i wasseeing the relaunch of the mansion in six months, filled with roboticavatars of mansion-nuts the world ’round, mme. leota’s gift cart piledhigh with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with theguests in the queue area …lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as i pored overthe hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.

“passionate enough for you?” she snapped.

i felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. it was somewhere betweenanger and shame, and i reminded myself that i was more than a centuryolder than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature. also, i’d startedthe fight.

“this is fucking fantastic, lil,” i said. her look didn’t soften. “reallychoice stuff. i had a great idea—” i ran it down for her, the avatars, therobots, the rehab. she stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling,showing me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners.

“this isn’t easy,” she said, finally. suneep, who’d been politely pretendingnot to listen in, nodded involuntarily. dan, too.

“i know that,” i said. the flush burned hotter. “but that’s thepoint—what debra does isn’t easy either. it’s risky, dangerous. it madeher and her ad-hoc better—it made them sharper.” sharper than us,that’s for sure. “they can make decisions like this fast, and execute themjust as quickly. we need to be able to do that, too.”

was i really advocating being more like debra? the words’d justpopped out, but i saw that i’d been right—we’d have to beat debra ather own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.

“i understand what you’re saying,” lil said. i could tell she was upset—she’d reverted to castmemberspeak. “it’s a very good idea. i thinkthat we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach thegroup and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans,laying out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from someof them.”

61i felt like i was swimming in molasses. at the rate that the libertysquare ad-hoc moved, we’d be holding formal requirements reviewswhile debra’s people tore down the mansion around us. so i tried a differenttactic.

“suneep, you’ve been involved in some rehabs, right?”

suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animalbeing drawn into a political discussion.

“okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you topull together a production schedule—one that didn’t have any review,just take the idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would ittake you to execute it?”

lil smiled primly. she’d dealt with imagineering before.

“about five years,” he said, almost instantly.

“five years?” i squawked. “why five years? debra’s people overhauledthe hall in a month!”

“oh, wait,” he said. “no review at all?”

“no review. just come up with the best way you can to do this, and doit. and we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shiftsaround the clock.”

he rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while mutteringunder his breath. he was a tall, thin man with a shock of curlydark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingerswhile he thought.

“about eight weeks,” he said. “barring accidents, assuming off-theshelfparts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” he trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up ahud and started making a list.

“wait,” lil said, alarmed. “how do you get from five years to eightweeks?”

now it was my turn to smirk. i’d seen how imagineering workedwhen they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptualmockups—i knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review andrevisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc thatcommissioned their work.

suneep looked sheepish. “well, if all i have to do is satisfy myself thatmy plans are good and my buildings won’t fall down, i can make it happenvery fast. of course, my plans aren’t perfect. sometimes, i’ll be62halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approachthat makes the whole thing immeasurably better. then it’s backto the drawing board … so i stay at the drawing board for a long time atthe start, get feedback from other imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focusgroups and the net. then we do reviews at every stage of construction,check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven’t thought ofand incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.

“it’s slow, but it works.”

lil was flustered. “but if you can do a complete revision in eightweeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do that one ineight weeks, and so on? why take five years before anyone can ride thething?”

“because that’s how it’s done,” i said to lil. “but that’s not how it hasto be done. that’s how we’ll save the mansion.”

i felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that i was right.

ad-hocracy was a great thing, a bitchun thing, but the organizationneeded to turn on a dime—that would be even more bitchun.

“lil,” i said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my pov into her.

“we have to do this. it’s our only chance. we’ll recruit hundreds to cometo florida and work on the rehab. we’ll give every mansion nut on theplanet a shot at joining up, then we’ll recruit them again to work at it, torun the telepresence rigs. we’ll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommendersin the world, and we’ll build something better and faster thanany ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original imagineers’ vision.

it will be unspeakably bitchun.”

lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. she paced the floor,hands swinging at her sides. i could tell that she was still angry with me,but excited and scared and yes, passionate.

“it’s not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. dan andi exchanged wicked grins. she was in.

“i know,” i said. but it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader inthe liberty square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back andforth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her headin a crisis. not a hothead. not prone to taking radical switchbacks. thisplan would burn up that reputation and the whuffie that accompaniedit, in short order, but by the time that happened, she’d have plenty ofwhuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.

63“i mean, i can’t guarantee anything. i’d like to study the plans thatimagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs—”

i started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but shebeat me to it.

“but i won’t. we have to move fast. i’m in.”

she didn’t come into my arms, didn’t kiss me and tell me everythingwas forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.

my systems came back online sometime that day, and i hardly noticed,i was so preoccupied with the new mansion. holy shit, was it ever audacious:

since the first mansion opened in california in 1969, no one hadever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. oh, sure, the paris version,phantom manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minorbit of tweakage to satisfy the european market at the time. no onewanted to screw up the legend.

what the hell made the mansion so cool, anyway? i’d been to disneyworld any number of times as a guest before i settled in, and truth betold, it had never been my absolute favorite.

but when i returned to disney world, live and in person, freshlybored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from toronto, i’d foundmyself crowd-driven to it.

i’m a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. since i was apunk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eelinginto the only seat on a packed car, i’d been obsessed with beating thecrowd.

in the early days of the bitchun society, i’d known a blackjack player,a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. he was a pudgy,unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderatelysuccessful high-tech startup that had done something arcane withsoftware agents. while he was only moderately successful, he was fabulouslywealthy: he’d never raised a cent of financing for his company,and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full ofmoney. his secret was the green felt tables of vegas, where he’d pilgrimoff to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkeycardsand calculate the odds and beat the house.

long after his software company was sold, long after he’d made hisnut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grindingout hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of beating64the house. for him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice everytime the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull offace cards.

though i’d never bought so much as a lottery ticket, i immediately gothis compulsion: for me, it was beating the crowd, finding the path ofleast resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging thetraffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precisionand grace and, above all, expedience.

on that fateful return, i checked into the fort wilderness campground,pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch abarge over to the main gate.

crowds were light until i got right up to main gate and the ticketingqueues. suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beatingmy ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortestwait, i stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosksand evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. pre-bitchun, i’dhave been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less ameasure of anything other than outlook, so instead i carefully examinedtheir queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.

you can tell more about someone’s ability to efficiently negotiate thecomplexities of a queue through what they carry than through any othermeans—if only more people realized it. the classic, of course, is the unladencitizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupialpocket. to the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a surebet for a fast transaction, but i’d done an informal study and come to theconclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot,left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in afruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of id, a keycard, a rabbit’sfoot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.

no, for my money, i’ll take what i call the road worrier anytime. sucha person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one descriptionor another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-gradestrap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. the thing to watchfor is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do theybalance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease ofaccess? someone who’s given that much consideration to their gear islikely spending their time in line determining which bits and piecesthey’ll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them atready for fastest-possible processing.

65this is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs whopack everything because they lack the organizational smarts to figure outwhat they should pack—they’re just as apt to be burdened with bags andpockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging.

these pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and thatwhile pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.

i spied a queue that was made up of a group of road worriers, aqueue that was slightly longer than the others, but i joined it and ticcednervously as i watched my progress relative to the other spots i could’vechosen. i was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free world, and i wassauntering down main street, usa long before my ferrymates.

returning to walt disney world was a homecoming for me. my parentshad brought me the first time when i was all of ten, just as the firstinklings of the bitchun society were trickling into everyone’s consciousness:

the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economythat had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. mymemories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy florida climate and asea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding inomnimover cars, past diorama after diorama.

i went again when i graduated high school and was amazed by therichness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. i spent a weekthere stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner.

someday, i knew, i’d come to live there.

the park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world whereeverything changed. again and again, i came back to the park, groundingmyself, communing with all the people i’d been.

that day i bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the shortlines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the park to capacity. i’d takehigh ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do avisual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents inthe flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. truthbe told, i probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as i would’vespent lining up like a good little sheep, but i had more fun and got moreexercise.

the haunted mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: thesnow crash spectacular parade had just swept through liberty squareen route to fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancingto the japrap sounds of the comical sushi-k and aping the movementsof the brave hiro protagonist. when they blew out, liberty square66was a ghost town, and i grabbed the opportunity to ride the mansionfive times in a row, walking on every time.

the way i tell it to lil, i noticed her and then i noticed the mansion,but to tell the truth it was the other way around.

the first couple rides through, i was just glad of the aggressive air conditioningand the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. but onthe third pass, i started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was.

there wasn’t a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projectorin the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusionof a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through theballroom were ghosts, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic.

the ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard wereequally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy.

my fourth pass through, i noticed the detail, the hostile eyes workedinto the wallpaper’s pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers,the photo gallery. i began to pick out the words to “grim grinningghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether insinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or thespritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.

it’s a catchy tune, one that i hummed on my fifth pass through, thistime noticing that the overaggressive ac was, actually, mysterious chillsthat blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presencefelt. by the time i debarked for the fifth time, i was whistling the tunewith jazzy improvisations in a mixed-up tempo.

that’s when lil and i ran into each other. she was picking up adiscarded ice-cream wrapper—i’d seen a dozen castmembers picking uptrash that day, seen it so frequently that i’d started doing it myself. shegrinned slyly at me as i debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectantperfume of the park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with myselffor having so completely experienced a really fine hunk of art.

i smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of thewhuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainmentshould notice how thoroughly i was enjoying her work.

“that’s really, really bitchun,” i said to her, admiring the titanic mountainsof whuffie my hud attributed to her.

she was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembersof her generation can’t help but be friendly. she compromisedbetween ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a67grin at me, thumped through a zombie’s curtsey, and moaned “thankyou—we do try to keep it spirited.”

i groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute shewas, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid’s uniform and herfeather-shedding duster. she was just so clean and scrubbed and happyabout everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch hercheeks—either set.

the moment was on me, and so i said, “when do they let you ghoulsoff? i’d love to take you out for a zombie or a bloody mary.”

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

while i tell lil that i noticed her first and the mansion second, the reverseis indeed true. but it’s also true—and i never told her this—that thething i love best about the mansion is:

it’s where i met her.

dan and i spent the day riding the mansion, drafting scripts for thetelepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. we were in atotally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it.

jamming on ideas with dan was just about as terrific as a pass-timecould be.

i was all for leaking the plan to the net right away, getting hearts-andmindsaction with our core audience, but lil turned it down.

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

talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a skill i’d neverreally mastered. dan was good at it, lil was good at it, but me, i thinkthat i was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker.

in my younger days, i assumed that it was because i was smarter thaneveryone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words formouth-breathers who just didn’t get it.

the truth of the matter is, i’m a bright enough guy, but i’m hardly agenius. especially when it comes to people. probably comes from68beating the crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemyof expedience.

i never would have made it into the liberty square ad-hoc on my own.

lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. i’dassumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joiningup, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay muchattention to a newcomer like me.

lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talkingme up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work.

and she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of theothers i met, so that i knew what there was to respect about them andcouldn’t help but treat them as individuals.

in the years since, i’d lost that respect. mostly, i palled around withlil, and once he arrived, dan, and with net-friends around the world.

the ad-hocs that i worked with all day treated me with basic courtesybut not much friendliness.

i guess i treated them the same. when i pictured them in my mind,they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in thestarchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.

dan and i threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the net for addresslists of mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheetingthem against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course,their whuffie.

“that’s weird,” i said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal iwas using—my systems were back offline. they’d been sputtering upand down for a couple days now, and i kept meaning to go to the doctor,but i’d never gotten ’round to it. periodically, i’d get a jolt of urgencywhen i remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but themansion always took precedence.

“huh?” he said.

i tapped the display. “see these?” it was a fan-site, displaying a collectionof animated 3-d meshes of various elements of the mansion, part ofa giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to buildan accurate 3-d walkthrough of every inch of the park. i’d used thosemeshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.

“those are terrific,” dan said. “that guy must be a total fiend.” themeshes’ author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated everyghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for69full motion. where a “normal” fan-artist might’ve used a standard humankinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written hisown from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluiditythat was utterly unhuman.

“who’s the author?” dan asked. “do we have him on our list yet?”

i scrolled down to display the credits. “i’ll be damned,” dan breathed.

the author was tim, debra’s elfin crony. he’d submitted the designs aweek before my assassination.

“what do you think it means?” i asked dan, though i had a coupleideas on the subject myself.

“tim’s a mansion nut,” dan said. “i knew that.”

“you knew?”

he looked a little defensive. “sure. i told you, back when you had mehanging out with debra’s gang.”

had i asked him to hang out with debra? as i remembered it, it hadbeen his suggestion. too much to think about.

“but what does it mean, dan? is he an ally? should we try to recruithim? or is he the one that’d convinced debra she needs to take over themansion?”

dan shook his head. “i’m not even sure that she wants to take over themansion. i know debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, asfast and as copiously as possible. she picks her projects carefully. she’sacquisitive, sure, but she’s cautious. she had a great idea for presidents,and so she took over. i never heard her talk about the mansion.”

“of course you didn’t. she’s cagey. did you hear her talk about thehall of presidents?”

dan fumbled. “not really. … mean, not in so many words, but—”

“but nothing,” i said. “she’s after the mansion, she’s after the magickingdom, she’s after the park. she’s taking over, goddamn it, and i’mthe only one who seems to have noticed.”

i came clean to lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting.

fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and dan had taken tosleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it.

i’d started it, of course. “we’re going to get killed if we don’t get offour asses and start the rehab,” i said, slamming myself down on the sofa70and kicking at the scratched coffee table. i heard the hysteria and unreasonin my voice and it just made me madder. i was frustrated by not beingable to check in on suneep and dan, and, as usual, it was too late atnight to call anyone and do anything about it. by the morning, i’d haveforgotten again.

from the kitchen, lil barked back, “i’m doing what i can, jules. ifyou’ve got a better way, i’d love to hear about it.”

“oh, bullshit. i’m doing what i can, planning the thing out. i’m readyto go. it was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep tellingme they’re not. when will they be?”

“jesus, you’re a nag.”

“i wouldn’t nag if you’d only fucking make it happen. what are youdoing all day, anyway? working shifts at the mansion? rearrangingdeck chairs on the great titanic adventure?”

“i’m working my fucking ass off. i’ve spoken to every goddamn one ofthem at least twice this week about it.”

“sure,” i hollered at the kitchen. “sure you have.”

“don’t take my word for it, then. check my fucking phone logs.”

she waited.

“well? check them!”

“i’ll check them later,” i said, dreading where this was going.

“oh, no you don’t,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “youcan’t call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” she plantedher hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. she’d gone pale and icould count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, theswell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt i’d given her on a day-tripto nassau.

“well?” she asked. she looked ready to wring my neck.

“i can’t,” i admitted, not meeting her eyes.

“yes you can—here, i’ll dump it to your public directory.”

her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locateme on her network. “what’s going on?”

so i told her. offline, outcast, malfunctioning.

“well, why haven’t you gone to the doctor? i mean, it’s been weeks.

i’ll call him right now.”

71“forget it,” i said. “i’ll see him tomorrow. no sense in getting him outof bed.”

but i didn’t see him the day after, or the day after that. too much todo, and the only times i remembered to call someone, i was too far froma public terminal or it was too late or too early. my systems came onlinea couple times, and i was too busy with the plans for the mansion. lilgrew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, toprinting out her annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favoritechair—to living like the cavemen of the information age had, surroundedby dead trees and ticking clocks.

being offline helped me focus. focus is hardly the word for it—i obsessed.

i sat in front of the terminal i’d brought home all day, every day,crunching plans, dictating voicemail. people who wanted to reach mehad to haul ass out to the house, and speak to me.

i grew too obsessed to fight, and dan moved back, and then it was myturn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn’t keephim up nights. he and lil were working a full-time campaign to recruitthe ad-hoc to our cause, and i started to feel like we were finally in harmony,about to reach our goal.

i went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst intothe living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my originalplan that would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasingthe number of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasingthroughput.

i was mid-babble when my systems came back online. the public chatterin the room sprang up on my hud.

and then i’m going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.

and then what?

i’m going to bang you till you limp.

jesus, lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.

my eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters.

quickly, they vanished. i opened my eyes again, looking at lil, who wasflushed and distracted. dan looked scared.

“what’s going on, dan?” i asked quietly. my heart hammered in mychest, but i felt calm and detached.

“jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at lil.

72lil had, by that time, figured out that i was back online, that theirsecret messaging had been discovered.

“having fun, lil?” i asked.

lil shook her head and glared at me. “just go, julius. i’ll send yourstuff to the hotel.”

“you want me to go, huh? so you can bang him till he limps?”

“this is my house, julius. i’m asking you to get out of it. i’ll see you atwork tomorrow—we’re having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on therehab.”

it was her house.

“lil, julius—” dan began.

“this is between me and him,” lil said. “stay out of it.”

i dropped my papers—i wanted to throw them, but i dropped them,flump, and i turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to closethe door behind me.

dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after i did and rapped on mydoor. i was all-over numb as i opened the door. he had a bottle oftequila—my tequila, brought over from the house that i’d shared withlil.

he sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. itook the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom andpoured.

“it’s my fault,” he said.

“i’m sure it is,” i said.

“we got to drinking a couple nights ago. she was really upset. hadn’tseen you in days, and when she did see you, you freaked her out. snappingat her. arguing. insulting her.”

“so you made her,” i said.

he shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “i did. it’s been a longtime since i …”

“you had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while i was away,working.”

“jules, i’m sorry. i did it, and i kept on doing it. i’m not much of afriend to either of you.

73“she’s pretty broken up. she wanted me to come out here and tell youit was all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.”

we sat in silence for a long time. i refilled his glass, then my own.

“i couldn’t do that,” he said. “i’m worried about you. you haven’tbeen right, not for months. i don’t know what it is, but you should get toa doctor.”

“i don’t need a doctor,” i snapped. the liquor had melted the numbnessand left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “i need afriend who doesn’t fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.”

i threw my glass at the wall. it bounced off, leaving tequila-stains onthe wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. dan started, but stayed seated.

if he’d stood up, i would’ve hit him. dan’s good at crises.

“if it’s any consolation, i expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. hegave me a wry grin. “my whuffie’s doing good. this rehab should takeit up over the top. i’ll be ready to go.”

that stopped me. i’d somehow managed to forget that dan, my goodfriend dan, was going to kill himself.

“you’re going to do it,” i said, sitting down next to him. it hurt tothink about it. i really liked the bastard. he might’ve been my bestfriend.

there was a knock at the door. i opened it without checking the peephole.

it was lil.

she looked younger than ever. young and small and miserable. asnide remark died in my throat. i wanted to hold her.

she brushed past me and went to dan, who squirmed out of herembrace.

“no,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring downat the seven seas lagoon.

“dan’s just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in acouple months,” i said. “puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn’tit, lil?”

tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself.

“i’ll take what i can get,” she said.

i choked on a knob of misery, and i realized that it was dan, not lil,whose loss upset me the most.

lil took dan’s hand and led him out of the room.

74i guess i’ll take what i can get, too, i thought.