Part 38 (1/2)

”They're all in there already,” he said. ”I've been running the whole fleet for two weeks and I've got ten more on order.”

Perry whistled. ”You shoulda said,” he said, then turned back to the tour guide. ”It might be a little bit of a wait.”

”Ten, fifteen minutes,” Lester said.

”No *problem*,” she said. ”They'll wait till kingdom come, provided there's good shopping to be had.” Indeed the tour group was at the center of a pack of vendor-kids, hawking busts and tattoos, contacts and action-figures, kitchenware and cigarette lighters.

Once she was gone, Lester gave his shoulder another squeeze. ”I hired two more kids to bring the ride cars back around to the entrance.”

When Perry had left, that had been a once-daily ch.o.r.e, something you did before shutting down for the night.

”Holy c.r.a.p,” Perry said, watching the tour group edge toward the entrance, slip inside in ones and twos.

”It's amazing, isn't it?” Lester said. ”And wait till you see the ride!”

Perry didn't get a chance to ride until much later that day, once the sun had set and the last market-stall had been shut and the last rider had been chased home, when he and Lester slugged back bottles of flat distilled water from their humidity-still and sat on the ticket counter to get the weight off their tired feet.

”Now we ride,” Lester said. ”You're going to *love* this.”

The first thing he noticed was that the ride had become a lot less open. When he'd left, there'd been the sense that you were in a giant room -- all that dead Wal-Mart -- with little exhibits spread around it, like the trade-floor at a monster-car show. But now the exhibits had been arranged out of one another's sight-lines, and some of the taller pieces had been upended to form baffles. It was much more like a carny haunted house trade-show floor now.

The car circled slowly in the first ”room,” which had acc.u.mulated a lot of junk that wasn't mad inventions from the heyday of New Work. There was a chipped doll-cradle, and a small collection of girls' dolls, a purse spilled on the floor with photos of young girls clowning at a birthday party. He reached for the joystick with irritation and slammed it toward minus one -- what the h.e.l.l was this c.r.a.p?

Next was a room full of boys' tanks and cars and trading cards, some in careful packages and frames, some lovingly scuffed and beaten up. They were from all eras, and he recognized some of his beloved toys from his own boyhood among the mix. The items were arranged in concentric rings -- one of the robots' default patterns for displaying materials -- around a writhing tower of juddering, shuddering domestic robots that had piled one atop the other. The vogue for these had been mercifully brief, but it had been intense, and for Perry, the juxtaposition of the cars and the cards, the tanks and the robots made something catch in his throat. There was a statement here about the drive to automate household ch.o.r.es and the simple pleasure of rolling an imaginary tank over the imaginary armies of your imaginary enemies. So, too, something about the collecting urge, the need to get every card in a set, and then to get each in perfect condition, and then to arrange them in perfect order, and then to forget them altogether.

His hand had been jerking the joystick to plus one all this time and now he became consciously aware of this.

The next room had many of the old inventions he remembered, but they were arranged not on gleaming silver tables, but were mixed in with heaps of clothing, mountains of the brightly colored ubiquitous t-s.h.i.+rts that had gone hand in hand with every New Work invention and crew. Mixed in among them were some vintage tees from the dotcom era, and perched on top of the mountain, staring gla.s.sily at him, was a little girl-doll that looked familiar; he was almost certain that he'd seen her in the first doll room.

The next room was built out of pieces of the old ”kitchen” display, but there was disarray now, dishes in the sink and a plate on the counter with a cigarette b.u.t.ted out in the middle of it. Another plate lay in three pieces on the linoleum before it.

The next room was carpeted with flattened soda tins that crunched under the chair's wheels. In the center of them, a neat workbench with ranked tools.

The ride went on and on, each room utterly different from how he'd left it, but somehow familiar too. The ride he'd left had celebrated the New Work and the people who'd made it happen, and so did this ride, but this ride was less linear, less about display more --

”It's a story,” he said when he got off.

”I think so too,” Lester said. ”It's been getting more and more story-like. The way that doll keeps reappearing. I think that someone had like ten of them and just tossed them out at regular intervals and then the plus-oneing snuck one into every scene.”

”It's got scenes! That's what they are, scenes. It's like a Disney ride, one of those dark rides in Fantasyland.”

”Except those suck and our ride rocks. It's more like Pirates of the Caribbean.”

”Have it your way. Whatever, how freaking weird is that?”

”Not so weird. People see stories like they see faces in clouds. Once we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and reinforce the stuff that felt right, it was only natural that they'd anthropomorphize the world into a story.”

Perry shook his head. ”You think?”

”We have this guy, a cultural studies prof, who comes practically every day. He's been telling me all about it. Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories.