Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom | Page 5

never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would decide to
deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.
Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him, sometime late-XXI.

He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, all rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck,
boots worn thin and infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my
fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus
in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at the Grad
Students' Union -- the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew -- on a busy Friday night,
spring-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my
way closer every time the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats,
surrounded by a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun- bleached
eyebrow. "You get any closer, son, and we're going to have to get a pre-nup."
I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called son, but I looked
into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime that he could call me son anytime
he wanted. I backed off a little and apologized.
He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender's head. "Don't worry
about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to personal space."
I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk about personal space.
With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the world was inexorably
accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the
population. "You've been jaunting?" I asked -- his eyes were too sharp for him to have
missed an instant's experience to deadheading.
He chuckled. "No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheadery that you only come
across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work." The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to resize the
window -- he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I tried to act cool, but he
caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary widening. He tried a little
aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin show.
"I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful." He must've seen
my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. "Wait, don't go doing that -- I'll tell
you about it, you really got to know.
"Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd
really miss 'em, but you don't."
And it clicked for me. He was a missionary -- one of those fringe- dwellers who act as
emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for
whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing
that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we
usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate -- you
have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already successfully
resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda -- but when you convert a whole village,
you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting
refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one
in the flesh before.
"How many successful missions have you had?" I asked.
"Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years -- counterrevolutionaries
hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a generation later." He
sandpapered his whiskers with his fingertips. "Their parents went to ground after their
life's savings vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle.

Plenty of those, though."
He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of the
mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways:
introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then
curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they
couldn't remember why they hadn't wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they
were mostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited
supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.
"I guess it'd be too much of a shock