Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

sh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in

d picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her attention f

la's Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling te

hind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dan

e sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky da

ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. That's what

ed to Dan's i

of this," he said, hauling

t," I

I mean, I may be done here for now, but w

want to bef

. The finality and all. But hell, I

said, magn

g is, how long can I deadhead for? There are folks w

king, what, a mi

ing too small, son. Try this on for

of the univers

elliferous Period-it's when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupend

sant to me," I

teroid-and a lot of solitude when the time comes around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just to

tty cool,"

s," Da

idding, are y

ure ain't,

t was. Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and running in a week. Sunee

then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he'd picked up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with

ertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the

tethered to a guitar and a set o

he mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and dea

," Da

ping his laconic

at time,

. I'd developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye her

id, and headed to the airlock. I starte

ng good-byes

said, and wa

stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a clon

e bit of "Grim Grinning Ghosts," and a nod to "It's a Small World

good, but what does she

of living to do befor

wledg

ally Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Gr

atrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozo

Hayden and my agent Donald Maass, who believed

ders, the geeks and the Imagi

Doc

Fran

embe

the

or of the popular weblog Boing Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at th

ks by Cor

Foreign and

om Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003

ng, O'Reilly and

t Johnson, Shelley Powers, Be

e to Publishing Science F

en with Ka