The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised
she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice's car and
cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn't until Perry got back with
her to her apartment -- every stick of furniture made from clever
cardboard -- and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch
his phone on again.
He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with sexy cowgirls
printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers,
lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent
bleats.
"Shit," he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back
and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded
at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left
hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it
for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going
on.
A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the
injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a
source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco
the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that
had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San
Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with
overreacting cops.
Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down.
"Right, what's the game-plan?"
"How should I know?" Perry said. He could hear the whine in his
voice. "I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we
can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal
defenses, but Disney's denial-of-service attacking us in the
courtroom. They're also getting all this destruction dealt to us by
the cops."
"You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's break
this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them,
then call up the troops and let them know what's going on. I'll get a
conference call set up while we chat."
She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put
down her laptop and rest, but she wasn't having any of it.
And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces:
incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word
out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together
scrapbooks of the carnage wrought.
It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component
parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and
Kettlewell in.
"Perry, do you think it's a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan
to respond to them?"
Hilda shook her head and put a hand on Perry's good arm to calm him
down before he answered Kettlewell. "That's how we do it over on our
side. Their side is all about secrecy. Our side trades the advantage
of surprise for the advantage of openness. You watch -- by tonight
we'll have by-laws drafted, press-releases, exhaustive
documentation. You watch."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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