Now it was paying off. Judging from the device he was looking at, a
breadbox-sized, go-away-green round-shouldered smooth box that it took
two of them to carry in.
"Watch this," one of them said. He knocked a complicated pattern on
the box's top and a hidden hatch opened out of the side, yawning out
and forming a miniature staircase from halfway down the box's surface
to the ground. There was soft music playing inside the box: a jazzy,
uptempo futuristic version of *When You Wish upon a Star*.
A little man appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was made of
pipe-cleaners and he took the stairs in three wobbling strides. He
ignored them as he lurched around the box's perimeter until he came to
a far corner, then another hatch slid away and the little man reached
inside and tugged out the plug and the end of the power-cord. He
hugged the plug to his chest and began to wander around Sammy's desk,
clearly looking for an electrical outlet.
"It's a random-walk search algorithm," one of the Imagineers
said. "Watch this." After a couple of circuits of Sammy's desk the
little robot went to the edge and jumped, hanging on to the
power-cable, which unspooled slowly from the box like a belay-line,
gently lowering the man to the ground. A few minutes later, he had
found the electrical outlet and plugged in the box.
The music inside stilled and a fanfare began. The trumpeting reached a
joyous peak -- "It's found a network connection" -- and then subsided
into marching-band music. There was a smell like Saran-Wrap in the
microwave. A moment later, another pipe-cleaner man emerged from the
box, lugging a chunk of plastic that looked like the base of a rocket
in an old-timey science fiction movie.
The first pipe-cleaner man was shinnying up the power cable. He
crested the desktop and joined his brother in ferrying out more
parts. Each one snapped into the previous one with a Lego-like
*click*. Taking shape on the desktop in slow stages, the original,
1955 Tomorrowland, complete with the rocket to the moon, the Clock of
the World and --
"Dairy Farmers of America Present the Cow of Tomorrow?" Sammy said,
peering at the little brass plaque on the matchbox-sized diorama,
which showed a cow with an IV in her hock, watching a video of a
pasture. "You're kidding me."
"No!" one Imagineer said. "It's all for real -- the archives have all
these tight, high-rez three-d models of all the rides the Park's ever
seen. This is totally historically accurate."
The Kaiser Aluminum Hall of Fame. The Monsanto Hall of
Chemistry. Thimble Drome Flight Circle, with tiny flying miniature
airplanes.
"Holy crap," Sammy said. "People *paid* to see these things?"
"Go on," the other Imagineer said. "Take the roof off the Hall of
Chemistry."
Sammy did, and was treated to a tiny, incredibly detailed three-d
model of the Hall's interior exhibits, complete with tiny people in
1950s garb marveling at the truly crappy exhibits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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