Sammy plodded through the rest of the market with his paper bag. It
was all so depressing. The numbers at Disney World were down, way
down, and it was his job to figure out how to bring them up again,
without spending too much money. He'd done it before a couple of
times, with the live-action role-playing stuff, and with the rebuild
of Fantasyland as an ironic goth hangout (being a wholly separate
entity from the old Walt Disney Company had its advantages). But to do
it a third time -- Christ, he had no idea how he'd get there. These
weird-ass Wal-Mart squatters had seemed promising, but could you
possibly transplant something like this to a high-throughput,
professional location-based entertainment product?
The urchins were still in the parking lot with their Roman emperor
busts. He held his hands out to ward them off and found himself
holding onto a bust of his own head. One of the little rats had gotten
a three-d scan of his head while he was walking by and had made the
bust on spec. He looked older in Roman emperor guise than he did in
his mind's eye, old and tired, like an emperor in decline.
"Twenty dollah man, twenty, twenty," the kid said. He was about 12,
and still chubby, with long hair that frizzed away from his head in a
dandelion halo.
"Ten," Sammy said, clutching his tired head. It was smooth as epoxy
resin, and surprisingly light. There was a lot of different goop you
could run through those three-d printers, but whatever they'd used for
this, it was featherweight.
The kid looked shrewd. "Twenty dollah and I get rid of these other
kids, OK?"
Sammy laughed. He passed the kid a twenty, taking care to tuck his
wallet deep into the inside pocket of his jacket. The kid whistled
shrilly and the rest of the kids melted away. The entrepreneur made
the twenty disappear, tapped the side of his nose, and took off
running back into the market stalls.
It was hot and muggy and Sammy was tired, and the drive back to
Orlando was another five hours if the traffic was against him -- and
these days, everything was against him.
#
Perry's funny eyebrow twitched as he counted out the day's take. This
gig was all cream, all profit. His overheads amounted to a couple
hundred a month to Jason and his crew to help with the robot and
machinery maintenance in the Wal-Mart, half that to some of the
shantytown girls to dust and sweep after closing, and a retainer to a
bangbanger pack that ran security at the ride and in the market. Plus
he got the market-stall rents, and so when the day was over, only the
first hundred bucks out of the till went into overheads and the rest
split even-steven with Lester.
Lester waited impatiently, watching him count twice before splitting
the stack. Perry rolled up his take and dropped it into a hidden
pocket sewn into his cargo shorts.
"Someday you're going to get lucky and some chick is going to reach
down and freak out, buddy," Lester said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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