“What was that all about?” Perry whispered to her as they made their way along the sour-smelling ward.

“Told her we would keep it down—and complimented her on her manicure.”

Lester shook his head. “I haven’t been in a place like this in so long. The fatkins places are nothing like it.”

Hilda snorted. “More upscale, I take it?” Lester and Hilda hadn’t really talked about the fatkins thing, but Perry suddenly remembered the vehemence with which Hilda had denounced the kids who were talked into fatkins treatments in their teens and wondered if she and Lester should be clearing the air.

“Not really—but more functional. More about, I don’t know, pursuing your hobby. Less about showing up in an emergency.”

Hilda snorted again and they were at Death’s room. They walked past his roommates, an old lady with her teeth out, sleeping with her jaw sagging down, and a man in a body-cast hammering on a video-game controller and staring fixedly at the screen at the foot of his bed.

Then they came upon Death Waits. Perry had only seen him briefly, and in bad shape even then, but now he was a wreck, something from a horror movie or an atrocity photo. Perry swallowed hard as he took in the boy’s wracked, skinny body, the casts, the sunken eyes, the shaved head, the caved-in face and torn ears.

He was fixedly watching TV, which seemed to be showing a golf show. His thumb was poised over a rocker-switch connected to the IV in his arm.

Death looked at them with dull eyes at first, not recognizing them for a moment. Then he did, and his eyes welled up with tears. They streamed down his face and his chin and lip quivered, and then he opened his mouth and started to bawl like a baby.

Perry was paralyzed—transfixed by this crying wreck. Lester, too, and Suzanne. They all took a minute step backward, but Hilda pushed past them and took his hand and stroked his hair and went shhh, shhh. His bawling become more uncontrolled, louder, and his two roommates complained, calling to him to shut up, and Suzanne moved back and drew the curtains around each of their beds. Strangely, this silenced them.

Gradually, Death’s cries became softer, and then he snuffled and snorted and Hilda gave him a kleenex from her purse. He wiped his face and blew his nose and squeezed the kleenex tight in his hand. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened and shut it.

Then, in a whisper, he told them his story. The man in the parking-lot and his erection. The hospital. Posting on the message boards.

The lawyer.

“What?” Perry said, loud enough that they all jumped and Death Waits flinched pathetically in his hospital bed. Hilda squeezed his arm hard. “Sorry, sorry,” Perry muttered. “But this lawyer, what did he say to you?”

Perry listened for a time. Death Waits spoke in a low monotone, pausing frequently to draw in shuddering breaths that were almost sobs.

“Fucking bastards,” Perry said. “Evil, corporate, immoral, sleazy—”

Hilda squeezed his arm again. “Shh,” she said. “Take it easy. You’re upsetting him.”

Perry was so angry he could barely see, barely think. He was trembling, and they were all staring at him, but he couldn’t stop. Death had shrunk back into himself, squeezed his eyes shut.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Perry said. He felt like he was suffocating. He walked out of the room so fast it was practically a jog, then pounded on the elevator buttons, waited ten seconds and gave up and ran down ten flights of stairs. He got outside into the coolness of the hazy night and sucked in huge lungsful of wet air, his heart hammering in his chest.

He had his phone in his hand and he had scrolled to Kettlewell’s number, but he kept himself from dialing it. He was in no shape to discuss this with Kettlewell. He wanted witnesses there when he did it, to keep him from doing something stupid.

He went back inside. The security guards watched him closely, but he forced himself to smile and act calm and they didn’t stop him from boarding the elevator.

“I’m sorry,” he said to all of them. “I’m sorry,” he said to Death Waits. “Let me make something very, very clear: you are free to use the Internet as much as you want. You are free to tell your story to anyone you want to tell it to. Even if it screws up my case, you’re free to do that. You’ve given up enough for me already.”

Death looked at him with watery eyes. “Really?” he said. It came out in a hoarse whisper.

Perry moved the breakfast tray that covered Death’s laptop, then opened the laptop and positioned it where Death could reach it. “It’s all yours, buddy. Whatever you want to say, say it. Let your freak flag fly.”

Death cried again then, silent tears slipping down his hollow cheeks. Perry got him some kleenex from the bathroom and he blew his nose and wiped his face and grinned at them all, a toothless, wet, ruined smile that made Perry’s heart lurch. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. What the hell was he doing? This kid—he would never get the life he’d had back.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Death said.

“Please don’t be grateful to me,” Perry said. “We owe you the thanks around here. Remember that. We haven’t done you any favors. All the favors around here have come from you.

“Any lawyer shows up here again representing me, I want you to email me.”

In the car back, no one said anything until they were within sight of the shantytown. “Kettlewell isn’t going to like this,” Suzanne said.

“Yeah, I expect not,” Perry said. “He can go fuck himself.”

Imagineering sent the prototype up to Sammy as soon as it was ready, the actual engineers who’d been working on it shlepping it into his office.

He’d been careful to cultivate their friendship through the weeks of production, taking them out for beers and delicately letting them know that they were just the sort of people who really understood what Disney Parks was about, not like those philistines who comprised the rest of the management layer at Disney. He learned their kids’ names and forwarded jokes to them by email. He dropped by their break-room and let them beat him at pinball on their gigantic, bizarre, multi-board homebrew machine, letting them know just how cool said machine was.

Now it was paying off. Judging from the device he was looking at, a breadbox-sized, go-away-green round-shouldered smooth box that it took two of them to carry in.

“Watch this,” one of them said. He knocked a complicated pattern on the box’s top and a hidden hatch opened out of the side, yawning out and forming a miniature staircase from halfway down the box’s surface to the ground. There was soft music playing inside the box: a jazzy, uptempo futuristic version of When You Wish upon a Star.

A little man appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was made of pipe-cleaners and he took the stairs in three wobbling strides. He ignored them as he lurched around the box’s perimeter until he came to a far corner, then another hatch slid away and the little man reached inside and tugged out the plug and the end of the power-cord. He hugged the plug to his chest and began to wander around Sammy’s desk, clearly looking for an electrical outlet.

“It’s a random-walk search algorithm,” one of the Imagineers said. “Watch this.” After a couple of circuits of Sammy’s desk the little robot went to the edge and jumped, hanging on to the power-cable, which unspooled slowly from the box like a belay-line, gently lowering the man to the ground. A few minutes later, he had found the electrical outlet and plugged in the box.

The music inside stilled and a fanfare began. The trumpeting reached a joyous peak—“It’s found a network connection”—and then subsided into marching-band music. There was a smell like Saran-Wrap in the microwave. A moment later, another pipe-cleaner man emerged from the box, lugging a chunk of plastic that looked like the base of a rocket in an old-timey science fiction movie.