Florida -- Fiction; Immortalism -- Fiction; Science fiction; Walt Disney World (Fla.) -- Fiction
If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone.
It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends,
sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend's arms.
I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the rehab
past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight.
I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail station
in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and
cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried to
make myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept
turning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform
to keep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.
The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in
Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned into a road-pizza
by the still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the
Liberty Square crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf,
so they had given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida
sun streamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-
filled shafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-
drums and the spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a
low-key ambient buzz from two of the Park's oldest rides.
There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almost
all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the
room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before the
meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was too small for
the _de rigeur_ ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand
at a podium and command a smidge of respect.
"Hi there!" she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present
around her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at
putting on a brave face no matter what the ache.
The ad-hocs roared back a collective, "Hi, Lil!" and laughed at their
own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the Magic
Kingdom.
"Everybody knows why we're here, right?" Lil said, with a self-
deprecating smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. "Does
anyone have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start executing
right away."
A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in the
air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. "When you say 'right away,' do you
mean --"
I cut in. "Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week
production schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be
finished."
The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I shrugged.
Politics was not my game.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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