He slowed his step on Main Street, USA, and forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings. The stores on Main Street had been co-opted into helping him dump all the superfluous goth merchandise, and it was in their windows and visible through their doors. The fatkins pizza-stands and ice-cream wagons were doing a brisk trade around the castle roundabout. The crowd was predominantly veering to the left, toward Adventureland and Frontierland and Liberty Square, while the right side of the plaza, which held the gateways to Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, was conspicuously spa.r.s.e. He'd known that his numbers were down, but standing in the crowd's flow, he could feel it.

He cleared the castle and stood for a moment at the brink of Fantasyland. It should be impossible to stand here at one in the afternoon -- there should be busy rushes of people pushing past to get on the rides and to eat and to buy stuff, but now there were just a few kids in eyeliner puffing cloves in smokeless hookahs and a wasteland of h.o.a.rdings painted a shade Imagineering called "go-away green" for its ability to make the eye slide right past it.

He'd left the two big coasters open, and they had decent queues, but that was it. No one was in the stores, and no one was bothering with the zombie maze. Clouds of dust and loud destruction noises rose over the h.o.a.rdings, and he slipped into a staff door and threaded his way onto one of the sites, pausing to pick up a safety helmet with mouse-ears.

At least these crews were efficient. He'd long ago impressed on the department that hired construction contractors the necessity of decommissioning old rides with extreme care so as to preserve as much of the collectible value of the finishings and trim as possible. It was a little weird -- Disney customers howled like stuck pigs when you shut down their rides, then fought for the chance to spend fortunes buying up the dismembered corpses of their favored amus.e.m.e.nts.

He watched some Cuban kids carefully melting the hot glue that had held the skull trim-elements to the pillar of the Dia de los Muertos facade, setting them atop a large pile of other trim -- scythes, hooded figures, tombstones -- with a layer of aerogel beneath to keep the garriture from scratching. The whole area behind the h.o.a.rdings was like this -- rides in pieces, towers of fibergla.s.s detritus sandwiched between layers of aerogel.

They'd done this before, when he'd taken Fantasyland down, and he'd fretted every moment about how long the tear-down was taking. There were exciting new plans lurking in the wings then, waiting to leap onstage and take shape. He'd had some of the ride components fabricated by a contractor in Kissimmee, but large chunks of the construction had to take place onsite. The advantage had been his: cheap fabricators, new materials, easy collaboration between remote contractors and his people on-site. No one had ever executed new rides as fast and as well as he had. The things had basically built themselves.

Now the compet.i.tion was using the same tech and it was a f.u.c.king disaster for him. Worse and worse: he had no plans for what was to come afterward. He'd thought that he'd just grab some of the audience research people, throw together a fatkins focus group or two, and give Imagineering two weeks to come up with some designs they could put up fast. He knew from past experience that design expanded to fill the time available to it, and that the best stuff usually emerged in the first ten days anyway, and after that it was all committee group-think.

But no one from audience research wanted to return his calls, no one from Imagineering was willing to work for him, and no one wanted to visit a section of the park that was dominated by construction h.o.a.rdings and demolition dust.

What the h.e.l.l was happening at the Miami ride, anyway? He could follow it online, run the three-d flythroughs of the ride as it stood, even download and print his own versions of the ride objects, but none of that told him what it *felt like* to get on the ride, to be in its clanking bowels, surrounded by other riders, pointing and marveling and laughing at the scenes and motion.

Rides were things that you had to ride to understand. Describing a ride was like talking about a movie -- so abstract and remote. Like talking about s.e.x versus having s.e.x.

Sammy loved rides. Or he used to, anyway. So much more than films, so much more than books -- so immersive and human, and the whole crowd thing, all the other people waiting to ride it or just getting off it. It had started with coasters -- doesn't every kid love coasters?

-- but he'd ended up a connoisseur, a gourmand who loved every species of ride, from thrill-rides to monorails, carousels to dark-rides.

There'd been a time when he'd ridden every ride in the park once a week, and every ride in every nearby park once a month. That had been years before. Now he sat in an office and made important decisions and he was lucky if he made it onto a ride once a week.

Not that it mattered anymore. He'd screwed up so bad that it was only a matter of time until he ended up on the bread-line. Or in jail.

He realized he was staring glumly at the demolition, and pulled himself upright, sucked in a few breaths, mentally kicked himself in the a.s.s and told himself to stop feeling sorry for himself.

A young woman pried loose another resin skull finial and added it to the pile, placed another sheet of aerogel on top of it.

People loved these little tchotchkes. They had a relationship with Disney Parks that made them want to come again and again, to own a piece of the place. They came for visits and then they visited in their hearts and they came back to bring their hearts home. It was an extremely profitable dynamic.

That's what those ride people up in the Wal-Mart were making their hay on -- anyone could replicate the ride in their back-yard. You didn't have to fly from Madison to Orlando to have a little refresher experience. It was right there, at the end of the road.

If only there was some way to put his rides, his park, right there in the riders' homes, in their literal back-yards. Being able to look at the webcams and take a three-d fly-through was one thing, but it wasn't the physical, visceral experience of being there.

The maintenance crew had finished all the trim and now they were going after the props and animatronics. They never used to sell these off, because manufacturing the guts of a robot was too finicky to do any more than you had to -- it was far better to repurpose them, like the America Sings geese that had all their skin removed and found a new home as smart-talking robots in the pre-show for the old Star Tours.

But now it all could be printed to order, fabbed and shipped in. They weren't even doing their own machining at Imagineering anymore -- that was all mail-order fulfillment. Just email a three-d drawing to a shop and you'd have as many as you wanted the next day, FedEx guaranteed. Sammy's lips drew back from his teeth as he considered the possibility that the Wal-Mart ride people had ordered their parts from the same suppliers. Christ on a bike, what a mess.

And there, in the pit of despair, at the bottom of his downward arc, Sammy was. .h.i.t by a bolt of inspiration:

Put Disney into people's living rooms! Put printers into their homes that decorated a corner of their rooms with a replica of a different ride every day. You could put it on a coffee table, or scale it up to fill your bas.e.m.e.nt rumpus-room. You could have a magic room that was a piece of the park, a souvenir that never let go of Disney, there in your home. The people who were willing to spend a fortune on printed skull finials would cream for this! It would be like actually living there, in the park. It would be Imagineering Eye for the Fan Guy.

He could think of a hundred ways to turn this into money. Give away the printers and sell subscriptions to the refresh. Sell the printers and give away the refreshes. Charge sponsors to modify the plans and target different product placements to different users. The possibilities were endless. Best of all, it would extend the reach of Disney Parks further than the stupid ride could ever go -- it would be there, on the coffee table, in the rumpus room, in your school gym or at your summer place.

He loved it. Loved it! He actually laughed aloud. What a *great* idea!

Sure he was in trouble -- big trouble. But if he could get this thing going -- and it would go, *fast* -- then Hackelberg would get his back. The lawyer didn't give a s.h.i.t if Sammy lived or died, but he would do anything to protect the company's interests.

Sure, no one from Imagineering had been willing to help him design new rides. They all had all the new ride design projects they could use. Audience research too. But this was new, *new new*, not old new, and new was always appealing to a certain kind of novelty junkie in Imagineering. He'd find help for this, and then he'd pull together a business-plan, and a timeline, and a critical path, and he'd start executing. He wanted a prototype out the door in a week. Christ, it couldn't be that hard -- those Wal-Mart ride a.s.sholes had published the full schematics for their toys already. He could just rip them off. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

Hilda left Perry after a couple hours working the ticket-booth together. She wanted to go for a shower and a bit of an explore, and it was a secret relief to both of them to get some time apart after all that time living in each others' pockets. They were intimate strangers still, not yet attuned to each others' moods and needs for privacy, and a little separation was welcome.

Welcome, too, was Perry's old post there at the ticket counter, like Lucy's lemonade stand in Peanuts. The riders came on thick, a surprising number of them knew his name and wanted to know how his arm was. They were all watching the drama unfold online. They knew about the Brazilian rides coming online and the patch Lester had run. They all felt a proprietary interest in this thing. It made him feel good, but a little weird. He could deal with having friends, and customers, but fans?

When he got off work, he wandered over to the shantytown with a bunch of the vendors, to have a customary after-work beer and plate of ribs. He was about to get his phone out and find Hilda when he spotted her, gnawing on a greasy bone with Suzanne and Eva.

"Well, *h.e.l.lo*!" he said, delighted, skipping around the barbecue pit to collect a greasy kiss from Hilda, and more chaste but equally greasy pecks on the cheek from Suzanne and Eva. "Looks like you've found the best place in town!"

"We thought we'd show her around," Suzanne said. She and Eva had positioned each other on either side of Hilda, using her as a buffer, but it was great to see that they were on something like speaking terms. Perry had no doubt that Suzanne hadn't led Kettlewell on (they all had crushes on her, he knew it), but that didn't mean that Eva wouldn't resent her anyway. If their positions were reversed, he would have had a hard time controlling his jealousy.

"They've been wonderful," Hilda said, offering him a rib. He introduced her to the market-stall sellers who'd come over with him and there was more greasy handshaking and hugging, and the proprietor of the joint started handing around more ribs, more beers, and someone brought out a set of speakers and suction-cupped their induction-surfaces to a nearby wall, and Perry dropped one of his earbuds into them and set it to shuffle and they had music.

Kids ran past them in shrieking hordes, playing some kind of big game that they'd all been obsessed with. Perry saw that Ada and Lyenitchka were with them, clutching brightly colored mobiles and trying to read their screens while running away from another gang of kids who were clearly "it," taking exaggerated care not to run into invisible obstacles indicated on the screens.

"It was great to get back into the saddle," Perry said, digging into some ribs, getting sauce on his fingers. "I had no idea how much I'd been missing it."

Hilda nodded. "I could tell, anyway. You're a junkie for it. You're like the ones who show up all googly-eyed about the 'story' that's supposedly in there. You act like that's a holy box."

Suzanne nodded solemnly. "She's right. The two of you, you and Lester, you're so into that thing, you're the biggest fanboys in the world. You know what they call it, the fans, when they get together to chat about the stuff they love? Drooling. As in, 'Did you see the drool I posted this morning about the new girl's bedroom scene?' You drool like no one's business when you talk about that thing. It's a holy thing for you."

"You guys sound like you've been comparing notes," Perry said, making his funny eyebrow dance.

Eva arched one of her fine, high eyebrows in response. In some ways, she was the most beautiful of all of them, the most self-a.s.sured and poised. "Of course we were, sonny. Your young lady here needed to know that you aren't an axe-murderer." The women's camaraderie was almost palpable. Suzanne and Eva had clearly patched up whatever differences they'd had, which was probably bad news for Kettlewell.

"Where is Lester, anyway?" He hadn't planned on asking, but Suzanne's mention of his name led him to believe he could probably get away with it.

"He's talking to Brazil," Suzanne said. "It's all he's done, all day long."

Talking to Brazil. Wow. Perry'd thought of Brazil as a kind of abstract thing, fifty rogue nodes on the network that had necessitated a hurried software patch. Not as a bunch of people. But of course, there they were, in Brazil, real people by the dozens, maybe even hundreds, building rides.

"He doesn't speak Spanish, though," Perry said.

"Neither do they, dork," Hilda said, giving him an elbow in the ribs. "Portuguese."

"They all speak some English and he's using automated translation stuff for the hard concepts."

"Does that work? I mean, any time I've tried to translate a web-page in j.a.panese or Hebrew, it's kind of read like noun noun noun noun verb noun random."

Suzanne shook her head. "That's how most of the world experiences most of the net, Perry. Anglos are just about the only people on earth who don't read the net in languages other than their own."

"Well, good for Lester then," he said.

Suzanne made a sour face that let him know that whatever peace prevailed between her and Lester, it was fragile. "Good for him," she said.

"Where are the boys?"