Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  “But here…” He waved his hands. They were coming around the bend for the Contemporary now, and she could see it in all its absurd glory. It had been kept up so that it looked like it might have been erected yesterday, but the towering white A-frame structure with the monorail running through its midriff was clearly of another era. It was like a museum piece, or a bit of artillery on the field at a civil war reenactment.

  “I see.”

  “It’s about the grandiosity, the permanence. The belief in doing something—anything—that will endure.”

  “You didn’t need to bring me someplace private to tell me that.”

  “No, I didn’t.” He swallowed. “It’s hard because I want to tell you something that will compromise me if I say it.”

  “And I won’t let you off the hook by promising to keep it confidential.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, you’re on the horns of a dilemma then, aren’t you?” The sun was nearly set now, and stones at their feet glittered from beneath, sprinkled with twinkling lights. It made the evening, scented with tropical flowers and the clean smell of the lake, even more lovely. A cool breeze fluffed her hair.

  He groaned. She had to admit it, she was enjoying this. Was it any less than this man deserved?

  “Let me try this again. I have some information that, if I pass it on to you, could save your friends down in Hollywood from terrible harm. I can only give you this information on the condition that you take great pains to keep me from being identified as the source.”

  They’d come to the Magic Kingdom now. Behind them, the main gates loomed, and a pufferbelly choo-choo train blew its whistle as it pulled out of the station. Happy, exhausted children ran across the plaza, heading for the ferry docks and the monorail ramps. The stones beneath her feet glittered with rainbow light, and tropical birds called to each other from the Pirates of the Caribbean Adventure Island in the middle of the lake.

  “Hum,” she said. The families laughed and jostled each other. “Hum. OK, one time only. This one is off the record.”

  Sammy looked around nervously. “Keep walking,” he said. “Let’s get past here and back into the private spots.”

  But it’s the crowds that put me in a generous mood. She didn’t say it. She’d give him this one. What harm could it do? If it was something she had to publish, she could get it from another source.

  “They’re going to sue your friends.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “No, personally. They’re going to the mattresses. Every trumped up charge they can think of. But the point here isn’t to get the cops to raid them, it’s to serve discovery on every single communication, every document, every file. Open up everything. Root through every email until they find something to hang them with.”

  “You say ’they’—aren’t you ’they’?”

  It was too dark to see his face now, but she could tell the question made him uncomfortable.

  “No. Not anymore.” He swallowed and looked out at the lake. “Look, I’m doing something now—something… amazing. The DiaB, it’s breaking new ground. We’re putting three-dee printers into every house in America. What your friend Lester is doing, it’s actually helping us. We’re inventing a whole new—”

  “Business?”

  “No, not just a business. A world. It’s what the New Work was missing—a three-dee printer in every living room. A killer app. There were personal computers and geeks for years before the spreadsheet came along. Then there was a reason to put one in every house. Then we got the Internet, the whole software industry. A new world. That’s where we’re headed. It’s all I want to do. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life suing people. I want to do stuff.”

  He kicked at the rushes that grew beside the trail. “I want to be remembered for that. I want that to be my place in the history books—not a bunch of lawsuits.”

  Suzanne walked along beside him in silence for a time. “OK, so what do you want me to do about it?”

  “I thought that if—” He shut up. “Look, I tried this once before. I told that Freddy bastard everything in the hopes that he’d come onto my side and help me out. He screwed me. I’m not saying you’re Freddy, but—”

  Suzanne stopped walking. “What do you want from me, sir? You have hardly been a friend to me and mine. It’s true that you’ve made something very fine, but it’s also true that you helped sabotage something every bit as fine. You’re painting yourself as the victim of some mysterious ‘them.’ But as near as I can work out, the only difference between you and ’them’ is that you’re having a little disagreement with them. I don’t like to be used as part of your corporate head-games and power-struggles.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine. I deserve that. I deserve no better. Fine. Well, I tried.”

  Suzanne refused to soften. Grown men sulking did not inspire any sympathy in her. Whatever he wanted to tell her, it wasn’t worth going into his debt.

  He gave a shuddering sigh. “Well, I’ve taken you away from your evening of fun. Can I make it up to you? Would you like to come with me on some of my favorite rides?”

  This surprised her a little, but when she thought about it, she couldn’t see why not. “Sure,” she said.

  Taking a guest around Disney World was like programming a playlist for a date or a car-trip. Sammy had done it three or four times for people he was trying to win over (mostly women he was trying to screw) and he refined his technique every time.

  So he took her to the Carousel of Progress. It was the oldest untouched ride in the park, a replica of the one that Walt himself had built for GE at the 1964 World’s Fair. There had been attempts to update it over the years, but they’d all been ripped out and the show restored to its mid-sixties glory.

  It was a revolving theater where robots danced and sang and talked through the American Century, from the last days of the coal stove up to the dawn of the space age. It had a goofy, catchy song, cornball jokes, and he relished playing guide and telling his charges about the time that the revolving theater had trapped a careless castmember in its carousel and crushed her to death. That juxtaposition of sunny, goofy American corporate optimism and the macabre realities of operating a park where a gang of half-literate minimum-wage workers spent their days shovelling the world’s rich children into modified threshing machines—it was delicious.

  Suzanne’s body language told him the whole story from the second she sat down, arms folded, a barely contained smirk on her lips. The lights played over the GE logo, which had acquired an even more anachronistic luster since the last time he’d been. Now that GE had been de-listed from the NYSE, it was only a matter of time before they yanked the sponsorship, but for now, it made the ride seem like it was part time-machine. Transported back to the corporate Pleistocene, when giant dinocorps thundered over the plains.

  The theater rotated to the first batch of singing, wise-cracking robots. Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head bemusedly. Out came the second batch, the third—now they were in the fabulous forties and the Andrews Sisters played while grandma and grandpa robot watched a bulging fish-eye TV and sister got vibrated by an electric slimming belt. The jokes got worse, the catchy jingle—“There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every daaaaay!”—got repeated with more vigor.

  “It’s like an American robot performance of Triumph of the Will” she whispered to him, and he cracked up. They were the only two in the theater. It was never full, and he himself had taken part in spitball exercises brainstorming replacements, but institutionally, Disney Parks couldn’t bring itself to shut it down. There was always some excuse—rabid fans, historical interest, competing priorities—but it came down to the fact that no one wanted to bring the axe down on the robot family.

  The final segment now, the whole family enjoying a futuristic Christmas with a high-tech kitchen whose voice-activated stove went haywire. All the robots were on stage for the segment, and they exhorted the audience to sin
g and clap along. Sammy gave in and clapped, and a second later, Suzanne did, too, laughing at the silliness of it all. When the house lights came up and the bored—but unsquashed—castmember spieled them out of the ride, Sammy had a bounce in his step and the song in his head.

  “That was terrible!” Suzanne said.

  “Isn’t it great?”

  “God, I’ll never get that song out of my head.” They moved through the flashing lights of Tomorrowland.

  “Look at that—no line on Space Mountain,” Sammy said, pointing.

  So they rode Space Mountain—twice. Then they caught the fireworks. Then Sammy took her over to Tom Sawyer Island on a maintenance boat and they sat up in the tree house and watched as the park heaved and thronged, danced and ran, laughed and chattered.

  “Hear the rustling?”

  “Yeah, what is that, rabbits or something?”

  “Giant rats.” Sammy grinned in the dark. “Giant, feral rats.”

  “Come on, you’re joking.”

  “Cross my heart. We drain the lake every now and then and they migrate to the island. No predators. Lots of dropped french fries—it’s ratopia here. They get as big as cats. Bold little fuckers too. No one likes to be here alone at night.”

  “What about us?”

  “We’re together.”

  The rustling grew louder and they held their breath. A bold rat like a raccoon picked its way across the path below them. Then two more. Suzanne shivered and Sammy did, too. They were huge, feral, menacing.

  “Want to go?”

  “Hell yes,” she said. She fumbled in her purse and came out with a bright little torch that shone like a beacon. You weren’t supposed to use bright lights on the island after hours while the rest of the park was open, but Sammy was glad of it.

  Back on the mainland, they rode Big Thunder Mountain and moseyed over to the new, half-rebuilt Fantasyland. The zombie maze was still open, and they got lost in it amid the groans, animatronic shamblers, and giggling kids running through the hedges.

  Something happened in the maze. Between entering it and leaving it, they lost their cares. Instead of talking about the park and Hackelberg, they talked about ways of getting out of the maze, talked about which zombie was coming next, about the best zombie movies they’d ever seen, about memorable Halloweens. As they neared the exit, they started to strategize about the best ride to go on next. Suzanne had done the Haunted Mansion twice when she first arrived and now—

  “Come on, it’s such a cliche,” Sammy said. “Anyone can be a Haunted Mansion fan. It’s like being a Mickey fan. It takes real character to be a Goofy fan.”

  “You’re a Goofy fan, I take it?”

  “Indeed. And I’m also a Jungle Cruise man.”

  “More corny jokes?”

  “’We’ve been dying to have you’—talk about cornball humor.”

  They rode both. The park was closing, and all around them, people were streaming away from the rides. No lines at all, not even in front of the rollercoasters, not even in front of Dumbo, not even in front of the ultra-violent fly-over of the world of the zombies (nee Peter Pan’s Flight, and a perennial favorite).

  “You know, I haven’t just enjoyed the park like this in years.” He was wearing a huge foam Goofy hat that danced and bobbed on his head, trying to do little pas-de-deux with the other Goofy hats in the vicinity. It also let out the occassional chuckle and snatch of song.

  “Shut up,” Suzanne said. “Don’t talk about magic. Live magic.”

  They closed the park, letting themselves get herded off of Main Street along with the last stragglers. He looked over his shoulder as they moved through the arches under the train-station. The night crew was moving through the empty Main Street, hosing down the streets, sweeping, scrubbing. As he watched, the work lights came on, throwing the whole thing into near-daylight illumination, making it seem less like an enchanted wonderland and more like a movie set, an artifice. A sham.

  It was one in the morning and he was exhausted. And Hackelberg was going to sue.

  “Sammy, what do you want me to do, blackmail him?”

  “I don’t know—sure. Why not? You could call him and say, ’I hear you’re working on this lawsuit, but don’t you think it’s hypocritical when you’ve been doing all this bad stuff—’”

  “I don’t blackmail people.”

  “Fine. Tell your friends, then. Tell some lawyers. That could work.”

  “Sammy, I think we’re going to have to fight this suit on its merits, not on the basis of some sneaky intel. I appreciate the risk you’re putting yourself to—”

  “We ripped off some of Lester’s code for the DiaB.” He blurted it out, not believing he was hearing himself say it. “I didn’t know it at the time. The libraries were on the net and my guys were in a hurry, and they just imported it into the build and left it there—they rewrote it with the second shipment, but we put out a million units running a library Lester wrote for volumetric imaging. It was under some crazy viral open source license and we were supposed to publish all our modifications, and we never did.”

  Suzanne threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. Sammy found himself laughing along with her.

  “OK,” she said. “OK. That’s a good one. I’ll tell Lester about it. Maybe he’ll want to use it. Maybe he’ll want to sue.”

  Sammy wanted to ask her if she’d keep his name out of it, but he couldn’t ask. He’d gone to Hackelberg with the info as soon as he’d found out and they’d agreed to keep it quiet. The Imagineers responsible had had a very firm talking to, and had privately admitted to a curious and aghast Sammy over beers that everyone everywhere did this all the time, that it was so normal as to be completely unremarkable. He was pretty sure that a judge wouldn’t see it that way.

  Suzanne surprised him by giving him a strong, warm hug. “You’re not the worst guy in the world, Sammy Page,” she said. “Thanks for showing me around your park.”

  Kettlewell had been almost pathetic in his interest in helping Lester out. Lester got the impression that he’d been sitting around his apartment, moping, ever since Eva had taken the kids and gone. As Lester unspooled the story for him—Suzanne wouldn’t tell him how she’d found this out, and he knew better than to ask—Kettlewell grew more and more excited. By the time Lester was through, he was practically slobbering into the phone.

  “Oh, oh, oh, this is going to be a fun phoner,” he said.

  “You’ll do it, then? Even after everything?”

  “Does Perry know you’ve called me?”

  Lester swallowed. “No,” he said. “I don’t talk to Perry much these days.”

  Kettlewell sighed. “What the hell am I going to do with you two?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lester said.

  “Don’t be sorry. Be happy. Someone should be happy around here.”

  Herve Guignol chaired the executive committee. Sammy had known him for years. They’d come east together from San Jose, where Guignol had run the entertainment side of eBay. They’d been recruited by Disney Parks at the same time, during the hostile takeover and breakup, and they’d had their share of nights out, golf games, and stupid movies together.

  But when Guignol was wearing his chairman’s hat, it was like he was a different person. The boardroom was filled with huge, ergonomic chairs, the center of the table lined with bottles of imported water and trays of fanciful canapes in the shapes of Disney characters. Sammy sat to Guignol’s left and Hackelberg sat to his right.

  Guignol brought the meeting to order and the rest of the committee stopped chatting and checking email and looked expectant. At the touch of a button, the door swung shut with an authoritative clunk and shutters slid down over the window.

  “Welcome, and thank you for attending on such short notice. You know Augustus Hackelberg; he has something to present to you.”

  Hackelberg climbed to his feet and looked out at them. He didn’t look good.

  “An issue has arisen—” Sammy loved the
third person passive voice that dominated corporate meetings. Like the issue had arisen all on its own, spontaneously. “A decision that was taken has come back to bite us.” He explained about the DiaBs and the code, laying it out more or less as it happened, though of course he downplayed his involvement in advising Sammy to go ahead and ship.

  The committee asked a few intense questions, none directed at Sammy, who kept quiet, though he instinctively wanted to defend his record. They took a break after an hour, and Sammy found himself in a corner with Guignol.

  “What do you think?” Sammy asked him.

  Guignol grimaced. “I think we’re pretty screwed. Someone is going to have to take a fall for this, you know. It’s going to cost us a fortune.”

  Sammy nodded. “Well, unless we just settle with them,” he said. “You know—we drop the suit we just filed and they drop theirs….” He had hoped that this would come out on its own, but it was clear that Hackelberg wasn’t going to offer it up himself. He was too in love with the idea of getting his hands on Perry and Lester.

  Guignol rocked his head from side to side. “You think they’d go for it?”

  Sammy dropped his voice to a whisper and turned away from the rest of the room to confound any lip-readers. “I think they’ve offered to do that.”

  Guignol cut his eyes over to Hackelberg and Sammy nodded, imperceptibly.

  Guignol moved away, leaving Sammy to eat a Mickey head built from chunks of salmon and hamachi. Guignol moved among the committee, talking to a few members. Sammy recognized the behavior—consolidating power. Hard to remember that this was the guy he’d played savage, high-stakes games of putt-putt golf with.

  The meeting reconvened. No one looked at Sammy. They all looked at Hackelberg.

  “What about trying to settle the suit?” Guignol said.

  Hackelberg flushed. “I don’t know if that’s possible—”

  “What about if we offer to settle in exchange for dropping the suit we’ve just filed?”

  Hackelberg’s hands squeezed the side of the table. “I don’t think that that would be a wise course of action. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for—the chance to crack them wide open and see what’s going on inside. Discover just what they’ve taken from us and how. Out them for all their bad acts.”