There it was -- irrefutable and indefinable. When you rode through there was an escalating tension, a sense of people who belonged to these exhibits going through hard changes, growing up and out. Once he'd seen it, he couldn't un-see it. When he and his pals had started to add their own stuff to the ride, the story people had been giant pains in the ass, accusing them of something they called "narricide" -- destroying the fragile story that humanity had laid bare there. Now that he'd seen it too, he wanted to protect it. But he could see by skimming forward and back through the change-log and trying different flythroughs that the story wasn't being undermined by the goth stuff they were bringing in; it was being enhanced. It was telling the story he knew, of growing up with an indefinable need to be *different*, to reject the mainstream and to embrace this subculture and aesthetic. It was the story of his tribe and sub-species and it got realer the more he played it. God, how could he have *missed it*? It made him want to cry, though that might have been the meds. Some of it made him want to laugh, too. He tried, laboriously, to compose a message-board post that expressed what he was feeling, but every attempt came out sounding like those story mystics he'd battled. He understood now why they'd sounded so hippy-trippy. So he rode the ride, virtually, again and again, spotting the grace-notes and the sly wit and the wrenching emotion that the collective intelligence of all those riders had created. Discovered? It was like the story was there all along, lurking like the statue inside a block of marble. Oh, it was wonderful. He was ruined, maybe forever, but it was wonderful. And he'd been a part of it. He went back to writing that message-board post. He'd be laid in that bed for a long time yet. He had time to rewrite. # IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM, RIP THEM OFF A new initiative from the troubled Disney Parks corporation shows how a little imagination can catapult an ambitious exec to the top of the corporate ladder. Word has it that Samuel R.D. Page, the Vice President for Fantasyland (I assure you, I am NOT making that up) has been kicked upstairs to Senior Vice President for Remote Delivery of Park Experience (I'm not making that up, either). Insiders in the company tell us that "Remote Delivery of Park Experience" is a plan to convince us to give The Mouse a piece of our homes which will be constantly refreshed via a robot three-dimensional printer with miniatures of the Disney park. If this sounds familiar, it should. It's a pale imitation of the no-less-ridiculous (if slightly less evil) "rides" movement pioneered by Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, previously the anti-heroes of the New Work pump-and-dump scandal. Imitation is meant to be the sincerest form of flattery, and if so, Gibbons and his cultists must be blushing fire-engine red.