Part 73 (1/2)

He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he'd won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.

Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone -- his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked.

”h.e.l.lo?” he said. Not many people had this number -- he didn't like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first.

”Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?” He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. s.h.i.+t. He'd given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face.

”It's not a good time, Freddy,” he said. ”If you call my secretary --”

”I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers -- your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C.”

Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride a.s.sholes would have known about the printers. That's what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn't had time to look for it, though, and he didn't want to use the Disney Parks compet.i.tive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a f.u.c.k-up) he didn't want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.

”I'm not familiar with any response,” Sammy said. ”I'm afraid I can't comment --”

”Oh, it'll only take a moment to explain it,” Freddy said and then launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had pa.s.sed out last week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on, so that anyone's goop could print to it.

”So, what I'm looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you condone this? Did you antic.i.p.ate it? What if someone prints an AK-47 with it?”

”No one's going to print a working AK-47 with this,” Sammy said. ”It's too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it --” He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. ”As to the rest of it, that would be something you'd have to speak to one of my legal colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?”

Freddy laughed. ”Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background, no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?”

Sammy felt his face go white. ”I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about --”

”Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked out of the organization -- no one around to call the lawyers out on their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike.”

Sammy seethed. He'd been concentrating on making new stuff, great stuff. Compet.i.tive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made and the world would be a more fun place once it was.

Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those ride s.h.i.+t-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He'd brought his own destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. G.o.d, he was a total f.u.c.k-up.

Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly -- not humming like a fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley of magic-users' songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to h.e.l.l and back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the versioning system, and he'd been able to choose from among them and pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt's 1955 Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool.

”I'll just say you declined to comment, then?”

a.s.shole.

”You write whatever you need to write, Freddy,” he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn't f.u.c.k it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to.

”Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week.”

He wasn't ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn't walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he'd had all the treatment he needed -- even if his doctor hadn't been able to look him in the eye when this was explained -- and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere.

He'd put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he'd had with Perry and the idea he'd had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn't even know if his apartment was still there -- he hadn't been back in weeks and the rent was overdue.

And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights -- some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!) -- side-conversations, philosophical arguments.

Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune -- half-a-year's wages at his old job -- waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him.