Part 72 (1/2)
”So here's my idea: what if you could get them to build non-Disney stuff? What if you could send them plans for stuff from the rides?
What if you could just download your friends' designs? What if this was opened wide.”
Perry chuckled on the other end of the line, then laughed, full-throated and full of merriment. ”I like the way you think, kid,”
he said, once he'd caught his breath.
And then this amazing thing happened. Perry Gibbons *brainstormed*
with him about the kinds of designs they could push out to these things. It was like some kind of awesome dream come true. Perry was treating him like a peer, loving his ideas, keying off of them.
Then a dismal thought struck him. ”Wait though, wait. They're using their own goop for the printers. Every design we print makes them richer.”
Perry laughed again, really merry. ”Oh, that kind of thing never works. They've been trying to tie feedstock to printers since the inkjet days. We go through that like wet kleenex.”
”Isn't that illegal?”
”Who the f.u.c.k knows? It shouldn't be. I don't care about illegal anymore. Legal gets you lawyers. Come on, dude -- what's the point of being all into some anti-authoritarian subculture if you spend all your time sucking up to the authorities?”
Death laughed, which actually hurt quite a bit. It was the first laugh he'd had since he'd ended up in the hospital, maybe the first one since he'd been fired from Disney World, and as much as it hurt, it felt good, too, like a band being loosened from around his broken ribs.
His roommates stirred and one of them must have pushed the nurse call b.u.t.ton, because shortly thereafter, the formidable Ukrainian nurse came in and savagely told him off for disturbing the ward at five in the morning. Perry heard and said his goodbyes, like they were old pals who'd chatted too long, and Death Waits rang off and fell into a light doze, grinning like a maniac.
Hilda eyed Perry curiously. ”That sounded like an interesting conversation,” she said. She was wearing a long t-s.h.i.+rt of his that didn't really cover much, and she looked delicious in it. It was all he could do to keep from grabbing her and tossing her on the bed -- of course, the cast meant that he couldn't really do that. And Hilda wasn't exactly smiling, either.
”Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up,” he said.
”It wasn't the talking that did it, it was you not being there in the first place. Gave me the toss-and-turns.”
She came over to him then, the lean muscles in her legs flexing as she crossed the living room. She took his laptop away and set it down on the coffee-table, then took off his headset. He was wearing nothing but boxers, and she reached down and gave his d.i.c.k a companionable honk before sitting down next to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek, the throat and the lips.
”So, Perry,” she said, looking into his eyes. ”What the f.u.c.k are you doing sitting in the living room at 5 am talking to your computer? And why didn't you come to bed last night? I'm not going to be hanging out in Florida for the rest of my life. I woulda thought you'd want to maximize your Hilda-time while you've got the chance.”
She smiled to let him know she was kidding around, but she was right, of course.
”I'm an idiot, Hilda. I fired Tjan and Kettlewell, told them to get lost.”
”I don't know why you think that's such a bad idea. You need business-people, probably, but it doesn't need to be those guys. Sometimes you can have too much history with someone to work with him. Besides, anything can be un-said. You can change your mind in a week or a month. Those guys aren't doing anything special. They'd come back to you if you asked 'em. You're Perry motherf.u.c.kin'
Gibbons. You rule, dude.”
”You're a very nice person, Hilda Hammersen. But those guys are running our legal defense, which we're going to need, because I'm about to do something semi-illegal that's bound to get us sued again by the same pack of a.s.sholes as last time.”
”Disney?” She snorted. ”Have you ever read up on the history of the Disney Company? The old one, the one Walt founded? Walt Disney wasn't just a racist creep, he was also a mad inventor. He kept coming up with these cool high-tech ways of making cartoons -- sticking real people in them, putting them in color, adding sync-sound. People loved it all, but it drove him out of business. It was all too expensive.
”So he recruited his brother, Roy Disney, who was just a banker, to run the business. Roy turned the business around, watching the income and the outgo. But all this came at a price: Roy wanted to tell Walt how to run the business. More to the point, he wanted to tell Walt that he couldn't just spend millions from the company coffers on weird-a.s.s R&D projects, especially not when the company was still figuring out how to exploit the *last* R&D project Walt had chased. But it was Walt's company, and he'd overrule Roy, and Roy would promise that it was going to put them in the poorhouse and then he'd figure out how to make another million off of Walt's vision, because that's what the money guy is supposed to do.
”Then after the war, Walt went to Roy and said, 'Give me -17 million, I'm going to build a theme-park. And Roy said, 'You can't have it and what's a theme-park?' Walt threatened to fire Roy, the way he always had, and Roy pointed out that Disney was now a *public* company with shareholders who weren't going to let Walt cowboy around and p.i.s.s away their money on his toys.”
”So how'd he get Disneyland built?”
”He quit. He started his own company, WED, for Walter Elias Disney. He poached all the geniuses away from the studios and turned them into his 'Imagineers' and cashed in his life-insurance policy and raised his own dough and built the park, and then made Roy buy the company back from him. I'm guessing that that felt pretty good.”