Tjan had short hair and sallow skin, and dressed like an accountant, but his eyes were bright and sharp as they took Sammy in, looking him up and down quickly. "Well that's certainly flattering." He reached into his creased blazer and pulled out a slip of paper. "Have a couple comp tickets then -- the least we can do for your loyalty." The paper was festooned with holograms and smart-cards and raised bumps containing RFIDs, but Sammy knew that you could buy standard anti-counterfeiting stock like it from a mail-order catalog. "That's mighty generous of you," he said, shaking Tjan's dry, firm hand. "Our pleasure," the other guy said. "Better get in line, though, or you're gonna be waiting a long, long time." He had a satisfied expression. Sammy saw that what he'd mistaken for a crowd of people was in fact a long, jostling queue stretching all the way around the escalator mezzanine and off one of the mall's side corridors. Feeling like he'd averted a disaster, Sammy followed the length of the queue until he came to its end. He popped in a headphone and set up his headline reader to text-to-speech his day's news. He'd fallen behind, what with the air travel and all. Most of the stuff in his cache came in from his co-workers, and it was the most insipid crap anyway, but he had to listen to it or he'd be odd man out at the watercooler when he got back. He listened with half an ear and considered the gigantic crowd stretching away as far as the eye could see. Compared with the re-opening of Fantasyland, it was nothing -- goths from all over the world had flocked to central Florida for that, Germans and Greeks and Japanese and even some from Mumbai and Russia. They'd filled the park to capacity, thrilled with the delightful perversity of chirpy old Disney World remade as a goth theme park. But a line this long in Boston, in the dead of winter, for something whose sole attraction was that there was another one like it by a shitty forgotten b-road outside of Miami? Christ on an Omnimover. The line moved, just a little surge, and there was a cheer all down the mall's length. People poured past him headed for the line's tail, vibrating with excitement. But the line didn't move again for five minutes, then ten. Then another surge, but maybe that was just people crowding together more. Some of the people in line were drinking beers out of paper bags and getting raucous. "What's going on?" someone hollered from behind him. The cry was taken up, and then the line shuddered and moved forward some. Then nothing. Thinking, *screw this*, Sammy got out of line and walked to the front. Tjan was there, working the velvet rope, letting people through in dribs and drabs. He caught sight of Sammy and gave him a solemn nod. "They're all taking too long to ride," he said. "I tell them fifteen minutes max, get back in line if you want to see more, but what can you do?"