“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. You’d get a slightly different show every time. It’s like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They’ve each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren’t so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.”
“You’re going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan asked, shaking his head.
I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We’ll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them … We’ll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace ’em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online 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 be based on popular vote. In effect, we’ll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion’s throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.”
“That’s pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but you’ll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world—”
“And those are the very fans Debra’ll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”
The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.
We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands.
Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and 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 by what he saw.