He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he'd won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.

Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone -- his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked.

"h.e.l.lo?" he said. Not many people had this number -- he didn't like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first.

"Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?" He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. s.h.i.t. He'd given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face.

"It's not a good time, Freddy," he said. "If you call my secretary --"

"I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers -- your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C."

Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride a.s.sholes would have known about the printers. That's what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn't had time to look for it, though, and he didn't want to use the Disney Parks compet.i.tive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a f.u.c.k-up) he didn't want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.

"I'm not familiar with any response," Sammy said. "I'm afraid I can't comment --"

"Oh, it'll only take a moment to explain it," Freddy said and then launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had pa.s.sed out last week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on, so that anyone's goop could print to it.

"So, what I'm looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you condone this? Did you antic.i.p.ate it? What if someone prints an AK-47 with it?"

"No one's going to print a working AK-47 with this," Sammy said. "It's too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it --" He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. "As to the rest of it, that would be something you'd have to speak to one of my legal colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?"

Freddy laughed. "Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background, no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?"

Sammy felt his face go white. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about --"

"Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked out of the organization -- no one around to call the lawyers out on their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike."

Sammy seethed. He'd been concentrating on making new stuff, great stuff. Compet.i.tive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made and the world would be a more fun place once it was.

Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those ride s.h.i.t-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He'd brought his own destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. G.o.d, he was a total f.u.c.k-up.

Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly -- not humming like a fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley of magic-users' songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to h.e.l.l and back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the versioning system, and he'd been able to choose from among them and pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt's 1955 Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool.

"I'll just say you declined to comment, then?"

a.s.shole.

"You write whatever you need to write, Freddy," he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn't f.u.c.k it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to.

"Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week."

He wasn't ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn't walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he'd had all the treatment he needed -- even if his doctor hadn't been able to look him in the eye when this was explained -- and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere.

He'd put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he'd had with Perry and the idea he'd had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn't even know if his apartment was still there -- he hadn't been back in weeks and the rent was overdue.

And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights -- some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!) -- side-conversations, philosophical arguments.

Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune -- half-a-year's wages at his old job -- waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him.

The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. "Your friends are here,"

she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn't have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants -- the first pair he'd worn in weeks -- and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent.

"You will use canes?" she asked. He'd had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes?

No way.

"I can't," he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall.

"Wheelchair," she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in pushing a chair with a squeaky wheel -- though the chair itself was a pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney, which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where the nurse's station, the elevators, the common area and his *fans*

were.

They weren't just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but also a big crowd of people he'd never met, didn't recognize. There were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a wild cheer. The orderly stopped pushing his chair and the nurse rushed forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two very pretty girls -- he hadn't thought about "pretty" anything in a long, long time -- unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS.

The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands, but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear, something about getting security to get rid of these people if they were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was a *threat* and that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced off in a deeply Slavic huff.

And then he was among his welcoming party, and it *was* a party -- there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they'd seen the story he'd described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was something that was as personal as the twin language they'd developed to communicate with one another when they were little girls.

His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery, girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey's makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him -- one girl had gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it all started.

Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells that weren't sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs.

"Now, it's all arranged," one of the straight-looking ones told him. He'd figured out that these were the pure story people, who'd read his descriptions and concluded that he'd seen something more than anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn't seem too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old mates. "Don't worry about a thing." Car after car appeared, taking away more of the party. "Here you go."

Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge cargo s.p.a.ce. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. "My mom was in a wheelchair for ten years before she pa.s.sed," a hippie told him. He was older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went.

They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic -- Death marveling at buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital -- when the English teacher dude looked shyly at Death.

"You think it's real -- the Story, I mean -- don't you?"

Death thought about this for a second. He'd been very focused on the Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a meditative state he'd found easy to attain with all the painkillers.

"It's real," he said.

The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a little. "We think so too."

They pulled up to his condo -- how'd they know where he lived? -- and parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of f.u.c.ked-up the rear b.u.mper, but other than that, it was just as he remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash, too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his building, pushing --

A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward him, handling the curb easily, hardly a b.u.mp, and the two pretty girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived to brush their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that he'd felt since before his beating.

He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator.

The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the night talking about the story that they'd seen in the ride, where they'd seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether they had any business rating things now that the story had shown itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and it should be left to unconscious effort.

But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story, or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who couldn't see it or wouldn't see it.