“This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?”
“Yes, sorry, I don’t have a mic. Can you hear me OK?”
“If I turn the volume all the way up I can.”
There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin.
“What’s on your mind, Death?”
“I didn’t expect you to be awake at this hour.”
“I had a rough night,” Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied.
“What happened?”
“Nothing important,” Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly understood that Perry had had a rough night because of him, because of what he’d told Perry. It made him want to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Death said.
“What’s on your mind, Death?” Perry said again.
Death told him what he’d found, about the Disney printers. He read Perry the URLs so he could look them up.
“OK, that’s interesting,” Perry said. Death could tell he didn’t really think it was that interesting.
“I haven’t told you my idea yet.” He groped for the words. His mouth had gone dry. “OK, so Disney’s going to ship these things to tons of people’s houses, they’ll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two, there’s going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country.”
“Right.”
“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 fuck 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 button, 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-shirt 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 dick 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 fuck 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 motherfuckin’ 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 assholes 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-ass 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 piss 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.”
“It sounds like it must’ve,” Perry said. He was feeling thoughtful, and buzzed from the sleepless night, and jazzed from his conversation with Death Waits. He had an idea that they could push designs out to the printers that were like the Disney designs, but weird and kinky and subversive and a little disturbing.
“I can understand why you’d be nervous about ditching your suits, but they’re just that, suits. At some level, they’re all interchangeable, mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not someone who’ll run the show. If that’s not these guys, hey, that’s cool. Find a couple more suits and run them.”