Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me.

“That’s really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.”

Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming—it’s my specialty.”

Debra spoke up from behind him—she’d sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There’s something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you’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 nice and soft, right?”

I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He’s wrong, of course. We don’t want to simulate the experience of watching the show—we want to transcend it.”

Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by making the experience human, a mile in the presidents’ shoes. Empathy-driven. What’s the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone’s brain?”

CHAPTER 4

One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:

  1. That Debra’s people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,
  2. That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion,
  3. That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.