Anniversaries are funny things. In an act of supreme love and devotion, I played two games of Scrabble with my wife on our anniversary. The italicized words in the silliness below are all the words from the second game.
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I’d been working as an engineer at PhantasieWorld Funland for about seven months before I experienced my first emergency.
On account of my test scores, I worked in the premium area of the park. That was old Dale Swinty’s true innovation. The basic admission got you into the facility, sure, but if you wanted full interaction, better food (less lipid, more protein), and bigger thrills, you paid a bit more. Why force the gentry to crowd in and mix with the proles if they could afford better? It started in the parking lot where the execs and their broods pulled up their Rovers and Daimlers to valet parking.
One night, during the Pirates of the Barbary Coast show, we had, as was reported eventually in the news, a "malfunction."
I’ve never understood how someone could take anything as violent and degenerate as the Barbary Pirates and mutate them into family entertainment, but maybe that’s why I’m an engineer second class and not a multi-billionaire media tsar with generations after generations of kids to revere me like old Dale.
Every once in a while,during a show, a pseudotronic actor has a bit of its program erode and loses it a little. I mean, quadrillions of instructions a second and something is going to give sometime. Usually it’s like the actor gets a little neurotic, a little twitchy. They drop a line or two, or maybe develop a tic. Usually, the other actors are adaptable enough to cover for the malfunction and the culprit’s self diagnostics send it down to the lab for a hard boot.
That night, all the half-scale schooners, brigantines, and barks blasted away at each other. I monitored the pyrotechnics. Funland had a run-in with a band of lawyers and a toasty patron some years back. Insurers forced the management to implement some human intervention. You want the audience to be close enough to feel the heat of gun blasts and flaming buildings, but not too close. I never understood how posting a crew of stone-bored engineers to stare at displays made any difference… until that night.
So you have all those half-scale ships, milling around in a carefully orchestrated haze of steam and smoke, half-scale actors swarming through rigging, fighting, screaming, plummeting into the water, the audience oohing and aahing, when I saw Dickenson stiffen in the chair next to me.
"What’s up, Dick?" I asked.
Her fingers flew across her panel.
"I’ve got a spike on B4… a swordsman."
I felt Webber, our super, step up behind us.
"What have you got, Dickenson?" he asked.
"A spike, sir, diagnostic axioms aren’t engaging." Everyone in the room could hear the tension in Dick’s voice.
"Cut his power then," Webber suggested.
"I’ve tried that twice, sir." Now Dick was talking through her clenched teeth. It must be a manager’s job to point out the stupidly obvious.
"I’m going to authorize a script intervention. Pick an actor, Dick." Webber reached for his pocket panel. "Jackson, take over visual."
I set my pyrotech panel to auto and brought up the cameras on our rogue actor. As Dickenson feverishly rescripted an actor to bring our boy in, I fed my panel to the big screen.
There he was, bigger than life and twitching up a storm. He looked like a burly, spastic Turk, shirtless, glistening, and wearing a fez. How a pirate is supposed to keep a fez on his head during a naval battle, I have no idea. Must be part of the Funland magic.
Dickenson’s rescripted actor came up behind our twitching Turk and lifted him off the deck.
"Man," I said, "that was a tough one."
I turned to Dickenson hoping to share some camaraderie and noticed that she was looking up at the big screen, her jaw hanging slack.
I looked up to see our boy bashing the remains of an actor against a jib boom. Ouch.
"Holy crap," someone said.
Webber’s frown looked like it was going to slide off his face.
"OK folks," he snapped, "everyone set your panel to auto. Pick an actor within five meters of our guy. Bring this unit in. Jackson, stay on visual."
Coworkers took control of their actors and I assigned cameras to them while keeping our pseudotronic psycho on the big screen.
Webber shouted into his headset "We need perimeter security installed. Yes, isolate the Pirate’s Lake."
I shot a glance at Dickenson next to me. I hoped my fear didn’t show as plainly as hers.
And then our tiny Turk was up on the edge of a railing and catapulting himself into the audience.
It took a moment for the crowd to realize that the satanic garden gnome in their midst laying to with his cutlass wasn’t part of the show. The sword was blunt, of course, but with every yowl of pain, every broken bone, every spray of teeth and blood, I felt a queasy wave rise in my gut.
I didn’t notice when he left, but there was Webber on the big screen, wading through the panicking audience toward the actor. Our mini-Turk had made quite a dint in the crowd.
Webber ran right up to the actor, leveled an EMP gun, and squeezed off a charge. Our panels flickered as the electromagnetic pulse fried the actor’s CPU. Webber knelt over the now-comatose Turk, popped the fez off his head, opened the skull with a trepan, and extracted the CPU, pins and all.
Our group and the pseudotronic lab were the foci of everyone’s attention for weeks during the security audit. In the end, management commended our group on our competent handling of the crisis, the lab boys got a few new protocols to follow, and every single actor in the park was fitted with an EMP gun.
It took several months for our "malfunction" to hit the news. The delay owed everything to pay-offs, the nondisclosure agreement on every ticket to Funland, and the EMP gun that fried the actor and every recording device in the audience. It took some loony born-again Mormon raving about how his digital hymnal had saved his life to get Funland on the evening news. The public relations folks spun it by focusing on Webber’s heroics. The public ovation didn’t do my supervisor any good, but the bonus that management laid on us was enough to smooth any ruffled feathers and still any wagging tongues.
Pakeha