Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while I was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations. I stood and went to my closet, started to dress. "_What_ are you doing?" Lil asked, alarmed. "I've got a shift. I'm running late." "You're in no shape to work," Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her. "I'm fine -- good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more." _Those bastards_? I thought -- when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly. Dan moved to block the bedroom door. "Wait a second," he said. "You need rest." I fixed him with a doleful glare. "I'll decide that," I said. He stepped aside. "I'll tag along, then," he said. "Just in case." I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles -- sympathy Whuffie -- but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em. I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in gear and sped out. "Are you sure you're all right?" Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac. "Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "I'm as good as new." "Funny choice of words," he said. "Some would say that you _were_ new." I groaned. "Not this argument again," I said. "I feel like me and no one else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a backup?" "All I'm saying is, there's a difference between _you_ and an exact copy of you, isn't there?" I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. "So you're saying that if you were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't be you anymore?" "For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?" "Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second." "On a very, very small level --" "What difference does that make?" "Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a copied _brain_ -- that's not the same as quantum destruction." "Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?" And we were off and running. #