Makers Part 61

The man slammed his head against the pavement.

"Just. Shut. The. f.u.c.k. Up." Bang, bang, bang. Death thought he'd lose consciousness soon -- he'd had no idea that pain could be this intense. But he didn't lose consciousness for a long, long time. And the pain could be a lot more intense, as it turned out.

Sammy didn't want the writer meeting him at his office. His organization had lots of people who'd been loyal to the old gothy park and even to Death Waits. They plotted against him. They wrote about him on the f.u.c.king Internet, reporting on what he'd eaten for lunch and who'd shouted at him in his office and how the numbers were declining and how none of the design crews wanted to work on his new rides.

The writer couldn't come to the office -- couldn't come within miles of the park. In fact, if Sammy had had his way, they would have done this all by phone, but when he'd emailed the writer, he'd said that he was in Florida already and would be happy to come and meet up.

Of course he was in Florida -- he was covering the ride.

The trick was to find a place where no one, but no one, from work would go. That meant going as touristy as possible -- something overpriced and kitschy.

Camelot was just the place. It had once been a demolition derby stadium, and then had done turns as a skate-park, a dance-club and a discount wicker furniture outlet. Now it was Orlando's number two Arthurian-themed dining experience, catering to package-holiday consolidators who needed somewhere to fill the gullets of their busloads of tourists. Watching men in armor joust at low speed on glue-factory nags took care of an evening's worth of entertainment, too.

Sammy parked between two giant air-conditioned tour coaches, then made his way to the entrance. He'd told the guy what he looked like, and the guy had responded with an obvious publicity shot that made him look like Puck from a boys'-school performance of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* -- unruly hair, mischievous grin.

When he turned up, though, he was ten years older, a cigarette jammed in the yellowing crooked stumps of his teeth. He needed a shower and there was egg on the front of his denim jacket.

"I'm Sammy," Sammy said. "You must be Freddy."

Freddy spat the cigarette to one side and shook with him. The writer's palms were clammy and wet.

"Pleasure to meet you," Freddy said. "Camelot, huh?"

"Taste of home for you, I expect," Sammy said. "Tally ho. Pip pip."

Freddy scrunched his face up in an elaborate sneer. "You are joking, right?"

"I'm joking. If I wanted to give you a taste of home, I'd have invited you to the Rose and Crown Pub in Epcot: 'Have a jolly ol' good time at the Rose and Crown!'"

"Still joking, I trust?"

"Still joking," Sammy said. "This place does a decent roast beef, and it's private enough."

"Private in the sense of full of screaming stupid tourists stuffing their faces?"

"Exactly." Sammy took a step toward the automatic doors.

"Before we go in, though," Freddy said. "Before we go in. Why are you talking to me at all, Mr Disney Parks Executive?"

He was ready for this one. "I figured that sooner or later you'd want to know more about this end of the story that you've been covering. I figured it was in my employer's best interest to see to it that you got my version."

The reporter's grin was wet and mean. "I thought it was something like that. You understand that I'm going to write this the way I see it, not the way you spin it, right?"

Sammy put a hand on his heart. "Of course. I never would have asked anything less of you."

The reporter nodded and stepped inside the air-conditioned, horsey-smelling depths of Camelot. The greeter had acne and a pair of tights that showed off his skinny knock-knees. He took off his great peaked cap with its long plume and made a stiff little bow. "Greetings, milords, to Camelot. Yon feast awaits, and our brave knights stand ready to do battle for their honor and your amus.e.m.e.nt."

Freddy rolled his eyes at Sammy, but Sammy made a little scooting gesture and handed the greeter their tickets, which were ringside. If he was going to go to a place like Camelot, he could at least get the best seats in the house.

They settled in and let the serving wench -- whose fancy contact lenses, piercings, and electric blue pony-tails were seriously off-theme -- take their roast beef orders and serve them gigantic pewter tankards of "ale"; Bud Light, and the logo was stamped into the sides of the tankards.

"Tell me your story, then," Freddy said. The tourists around them were noisy and already a little drunk, their conversation loud to be heard over the looping soundtrack of ren faire polka music.

"Well, I don't know how much you know about the new Disney Parks organization. A lot of people think of us as being just another subsidiary of the Mouse, like back in the old days. But since the IPO, we're our own company. We license some trademarks from Disney and operate rides based on them, but we also aggressively license from other parties -- Warners, Universal, Nintendo. Even the French comic-book publisher responsible for Asterix. That means that we get a lot of people coming in and out of the organization, contractors or consultants working on designing a single ride or show.

"That creates a lot of opportunities for corporate espionage. Knowing what properties we're considering licensing gives the compet.i.tion a chance to get there ahead of us, to land an exclusive deal that sets us back on square one. It's ugly stuff -- they call it 'compet.i.tive intelligence' but it's just spying, plain old spying.

"All of our employees have been contacted, one time or another, by someone with an offer -- get me a uniform, or a pic of the design roughs, or a recording of the soundtrack, or a copy of the contracts, and I'll make it worth your while. From street-sweepers to senior execs, the money is just sitting there, waiting for us to pick it up."

The wench brought them their gigantic pewter plates of roast-beef, Yorks.h.i.+re pudding, parsnips, and a mountain of french fries, presumably to appease the middle-American appet.i.tes of the more unadventurous diners.

Freddy sliced off a throat-plugging lump of beef and skewered it on his fork.

"You're going to tell me that the temptation overwhelmed one of your employees, yes?" He shoved the entire lump into his mouth and began to masticate it, cheeks pouched out, looking like a kid with a mouthful of bubble-gum.

"Precisely. Our compet.i.tors don't want to compete with us on a level playing field. They are, more than anything, imitators. They take the stuff that we carefully build, based on extensive research, design and testing, and they clone it for parking-lot amus.e.m.e.nt rides. There's no attention to detail. There's no attention to safety! It's all cowboys and gypsies."

Freddy kept chewing, but he dug in the pockets of his sports-coat and came up with a small stubby notebook and a ball-point. He jotted some notes, s.h.i.+elding the pad with his body.

"And these cra.s.s imitators enter into our story how?" Freddy asked around his beef.

"You know about these New Work people -- they call themselves 're-mixers' but that's just a smokescreen. They like to cloak themselves in some post-modern, 'Creative Commons' legitimacy, but when it comes down to it, they made their fortune off the intellectual property of others, uncompensated use of designs and technologies that others had invested in and created.

"So when they made a ride, it wasn't much of much. Like some kind of dusty Commie museum, old trophies from their last campaign. But somewhere along the way, they hooked up with one of these brokers who specializes in sneaking our secrets out of the park and into the hands of our compet.i.tors and quick as that, they were profitable -- nationally franchised, even." He stopped to quaff his Bud Light and surrept.i.tiously checked out the journalist to see how much of this he was buying. Impossible to say. He was still masticating a cheekful of rare roast, juice overflowing the corners of his mouth. But his hand moved over his pad and he made an impatient go-on gesture with his head, swallowing some of his payload.

"We fired some of the people responsible for the breaches, but there will be more. With 50,000 castmembers --" The writer snorted a laugh at the Disney-speak and choked a little, was.h.i.+ng down the last of his mouthful with a chug of beer. "-- 50,000 *employees* it's inevitable that they'll find more. These ex-employees, meanwhile, have moved to the last refuge of the scoundrel: Internet message boards, petulant tweets, and whiny blogs, where they're busily running us down. We can't win, but at least we can stanch the bleeding. That's why we've brought our lawsuits, and why we'll bring the next round."

The journalist's hand moved some more, then he turned a fresh page. "I see, I see. Yes, all fascinating, really. But what about these countersuits?"

"More posturing. Pirates love to put on aggrieved airs. These guys ripped us off and got caught at it, and now they want to sue us for their trouble. You know how counter-suits work: they're just a bid to get a fast settlement: 'Well, I did something bad but so did you, why don't we shake hands and call it a day?'"

"Uh huh. So you're telling me that these intellectual property pirates made a fortune knocking off your rides and that they're only counter-suing you to get a settlement out of you, huh?"

"That's it in a nutsh.e.l.l. I wanted to sit down with you, on background, and just give you our side of things, the story you won't get from the press-releases. I know you're the only one trying to really get at the story behind the story with these people."

Freddy had finished his entire roast and was working his way through the fries and limp Yorks.h.i.+re pudding. He waved vigorously at their serving wench and hollered, "More here, love!" and quaffed his beer.

Sammy dug into his cold dinner and speared up a forkful, waiting for Freddy to finish swallowing.

"Well, that's a very neat little story, Mr Disney Executive off the record on background." Sammy felt a vivid twinge of anxiety. Freddy's eyes glittered in the torchlight. "Very neat indeed.

"Let me tell you one of my own. When I was a young man, before I took up the pen, I worked a series of completely rubbish jobs. I cleaned toilets, I drove a taxi, I stocked grocery shelves. You may ask how this qualified me to write about the technology industry. Lots of people have, in fact, asked that.

"I'll tell you why it qualifies me. It qualifies me because unlike all the ivory-tower bloggers, rich and comfortable geeks whose masturbatory rants about Apple not honoring their warranties are what pa.s.ses for corporate criticism online, I've been there. I'm not from a rich family, I didn't get to go to the best schools, no one put a PC in my bedroom when I was six. I worked for an honest living before I gave up honest work to write.

"As much as the Internet circle-jerk disgusts me, it's not a patch on the businesses themselves. You Disney people with your minimum wage and all the s.e.xual hara.s.sment you can eat labor policies in your nice right-to-work state, you get away with murder. Anyone who criticizes you does so on your own terms: Is Disney exploiting its workers too much? Is it being too aggressive in policing its intellectual property? Should it be nicer about it?