Makers (60 page)

“Cross my heart. We drain the lake every now and then and they migrate to the island. No predators. Lots of dropped french fries—it’s ratopia here. They get as big as cats. Bold little fuckers too. No one likes to be here alone at night.”

“What about us?”

“We’re together.”

The rustling grew louder and they held their breath. A bold rat like a raccoon picked its way across the path below them. Then two more. Suzanne shivered and Sammy did, too. They were huge, feral, menacing.

“Want to go?”

“Hell yes,” she said. She fumbled in her purse and came out with a bright little torch that shone like a beacon. You weren’t supposed to use bright lights on the island after hours while the rest of the park was open, but Sammy was glad of it.

Back on the mainland, they rode Big Thunder Mountain and moseyed over to the new, half-rebuilt Fantasyland. The zombie maze was still open, and they got lost in it amid the groans, animatronic shamblers, and giggling kids running through the hedges.

Something happened in the maze. Between entering it and leaving it, they lost their cares. Instead of talking about the park and Hackelberg, they talked about ways of getting out of the maze, talked about which zombie was coming next, about the best zombie movies they’d ever seen, about memorable Halloweens. As they neared the exit, they started to strategize about the best ride to go on next. Suzanne had done the Haunted Mansion twice when she first arrived and now—

“Come on, it’s such a cliche,” Sammy said. “Anyone can be a Haunted Mansion fan. It’s like being a Mickey fan. It takes real character to be a Goofy fan.”

“You’re a Goofy fan, I take it?”

“Indeed. And I’m also a Jungle Cruise man.”

“More corny jokes?”

“’We’ve been dying to have you’—talk about cornball humor.”

They rode both. The park was closing, and all around them, people were streaming away from the rides. No lines at all, not even in front of the rollercoasters, not even in front of Dumbo, not even in front of the ultra-violent fly-over of the world of the zombies (nee Peter Pan’s Flight, and a perennial favorite).

“You know, I haven’t just enjoyed the park like this in years.” He was wearing a huge foam Goofy hat that danced and bobbed on his head, trying to do little pas-de-deux with the other Goofy hats in the vicinity. It also let out the occassional chuckle and snatch of song.

“Shut up,” Suzanne said. “Don’t talk about magic. Live magic.”

They closed the park, letting themselves get herded off of Main Street along with the last stragglers. He looked over his shoulder as they moved through the arches under the train-station. The night crew was moving through the empty Main Street, hosing down the streets, sweeping, scrubbing. As he watched, the work lights came on, throwing the whole thing into near-daylight illumination, making it seem less like an enchanted wonderland and more like a movie set, an artifice. A sham.

It was one in the morning and he was exhausted. And Hackelberg was going to sue.

“Sammy, what do you want me to do, blackmail him?”

“I don’t know—sure. Why not? You could call him and say, ’I hear you’re working on this lawsuit, but don’t you think it’s hypocritical when you’ve been doing all this bad stuff—’”

“I don’t blackmail people.”

“Fine. Tell your friends, then. Tell some lawyers. That could work.”

“Sammy, I think we’re going to have to fight this suit on its merits, not on the basis of some sneaky intel. I appreciate the risk you’re putting yourself to—”

“We ripped off some of Lester’s code for the DiaB.” He blurted it out, not believing he was hearing himself say it. “I didn’t know it at the time. The libraries were on the net and my guys were in a hurry, and they just imported it into the build and left it there—they rewrote it with the second shipment, but we put out a million units running a library Lester wrote for volumetric imaging. It was under some crazy viral open source license and we were supposed to publish all our modifications, and we never did.”

Suzanne threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. Sammy found himself laughing along with her.

“OK,” she said. “OK. That’s a good one. I’ll tell Lester about it. Maybe he’ll want to use it. Maybe he’ll want to sue.”

Sammy wanted to ask her if she’d keep his name out of it, but he couldn’t ask. He’d gone to Hackelberg with the info as soon as he’d found out and they’d agreed to keep it quiet. The Imagineers responsible had had a very firm talking to, and had privately admitted to a curious and aghast Sammy over beers that everyone everywhere did this all the time, that it was so normal as to be completely unremarkable. He was pretty sure that a judge wouldn’t see it that way.

Suzanne surprised him by giving him a strong, warm hug. “You’re not the worst guy in the world, Sammy Page,” she said. “Thanks for showing me around your park.”

Kettlewell had been almost pathetic in his interest in helping Lester out. Lester got the impression that he’d been sitting around his apartment, moping, ever since Eva had taken the kids and gone. As Lester unspooled the story for him—Suzanne wouldn’t tell him how she’d found this out, and he knew better than to ask—Kettlewell grew more and more excited. By the time Lester was through, he was practically slobbering into the phone.

“Oh, oh, oh, this is going to be a fun phoner,” he said.

“You’ll do it, then? Even after everything?”

“Does Perry know you’ve called me?”

Lester swallowed. “No,” he said. “I don’t talk to Perry much these days.”

Kettlewell sighed. “What the hell am I going to do with you two?”

“I’m sorry,” Lester said.

“Don’t be sorry. Be happy. Someone should be happy around here.”

Herve Guignol chaired the executive committee. Sammy had known him for years. They’d come east together from San Jose, where Guignol had run the entertainment side of eBay. They’d been recruited by Disney Parks at the same time, during the hostile takeover and breakup, and they’d had their share of nights out, golf games, and stupid movies together.

But when Guignol was wearing his chairman’s hat, it was like he was a different person. The boardroom was filled with huge, ergonomic chairs, the center of the table lined with bottles of imported water and trays of fanciful canapes in the shapes of Disney characters. Sammy sat to Guignol’s left and Hackelberg sat to his right.

Guignol brought the meeting to order and the rest of the committee stopped chatting and checking email and looked expectant. At the touch of a button, the door swung shut with an authoritative clunk and shutters slid down over the window.

“Welcome, and thank you for attending on such short notice. You know Augustus Hackelberg; he has something to present to you.”

Hackelberg climbed to his feet and looked out at them. He didn’t look good.

“An issue has arisen—” Sammy loved the third person passive voice that dominated corporate meetings. Like the issue had arisen all on its own, spontaneously. “A decision that was taken has come back to bite us.” He explained about the DiaBs and the code, laying it out more or less as it happened, though of course he downplayed his involvement in advising Sammy to go ahead and ship.

The committee asked a few intense questions, none directed at Sammy, who kept quiet, though he instinctively wanted to defend his record. They took a break after an hour, and Sammy found himself in a corner with Guignol.

“What do you think?” Sammy asked him.

Guignol grimaced. “I think we’re pretty screwed. Someone is going to have to take a fall for this, you know. It’s going to cost us a fortune.”

Sammy nodded. “Well, unless we just settle with them,” he said. “You know—we drop the suit we just filed and they drop theirs....” He had hoped that this would come out on its own, but it was clear that Hackelberg wasn’t going to offer it up himself. He was too in love with the idea of getting his hands on Perry and Lester.

Guignol rocked his head from side to side. “You think they’d go for it?”

Sammy dropped his voice to a whisper and turned away from the rest of the room to confound any lip-readers. “I think they’ve offered to do that.”

Guignol cut his eyes over to Hackelberg and Sammy nodded, imperceptibly.

Guignol moved away, leaving Sammy to eat a Mickey head built from chunks of salmon and hamachi. Guignol moved among the committee, talking to a few members. Sammy recognized the behavior—consolidating power. Hard to remember that this was the guy he’d played savage, high-stakes games of putt-putt golf with.

The meeting reconvened. No one looked at Sammy. They all looked at Hackelberg.

“What about trying to settle the suit?” Guignol said.

Hackelberg flushed. “I don’t know if that’s possible—”

“What about if we offer to settle in exchange for dropping the suit we’ve just filed?”

Hackelberg’s hands squeezed the side of the table. “I don’t think that that would be a wise course of action. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for—the chance to crack them wide open and see what’s going on inside. Discover just what they’ve taken from us and how. Out them for all their bad acts.”

Guignol nodded. “OK, that’s true. Now, as I understand it, every DiaB we shipped with this Banks person’s code on it is a separate act of infringement. We shipped a million of them. What’s the potential liability per unit?”

“Courts usually award—”

Guignol knocked quietly on the table. “What’s the potential liability—what’s the size of the bill a court could hand down, if a jury was involved? If, say, this became part of someone’s litigation portfolio.”

Hackelberg looked away. “It’s up to five hundred thousand per separate act of infringement.”

Guignol nodded. “So, we’re looking at a ceiling on the liability at $500 billion, then?”

“Technically, yes. But—”

“I propose that we offer a settlement, quid-pro-quo with this Banks person. We drop our suit if he indemnifies us from damages for his.”

“Seconded,” said someone at the table. Things were picking up steam. Sammy bit the inside of his cheek to keep his smile in check.

“Wait,” Hackelberg said. “Gentlemen and lady, please. While it’s true that damages can technically run to $500,000 per infringement, that simply isn’t done. Not to entities like this firm. Listen, we wrote that law so we could sue people who took from us. It won’t be used against us. We will face, at worst, a few hundred dollars per act of infringement. Still a sizable sum of money, but in the final analysis—”

“Thank you,” Guignol said. “All in favor of offering a settlement?”

It was unanimous—except for Hackelberg.

Sammy got his rematch with Hackelberg when the quarterly financials came out. It was all that black ink, making him giddy.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful,” he said, knowing that in Hackelberg’s books, there could be nothing more disrespectful than challenging him. “But we need to confront some business realities here.”

Hackelberg’s office was nothing like Sammy had expected—not a southern gentleman’s study lined with hunting trophies and framed ancestral photos. It was as spare as the office of a temp, almost empty save for a highly functional desk, built-in bookcases lined with law-books, and a straight-backed chair. It was ascetic, severe, and it was more intimidating than any dark-wood den could hope to be.

Hackelberg’s heavy eyelids drooped a little, the corners of his eyes going down with them. It was like staring down a gator. Sammy resisted the urge to look away.

“The numbers don’t lie. DiaB is making us a fortune, and most of it’s coming from the platform, not the goop and not the increased visitor numbers. We’re making money because other people are figuring out ways to use our stuff. It’s our fastest-growing revenue source and if it continues, we’re going to end up being a DiaB company with a side-business in theme-parks.

“That’s the good news. The bad news is that these characters in the ghost mall have us in their crosshairs. They’re prying us open faster than we can lock ourselves down. But here’s another way of looking at it: every time they add another feature to the DiaB, they make owning a DiaB more attractive, which makes it easier for us to sell access to the platform to advertisers.”

Hackelberg held up his hands. “Samuel, I think I’ve heard enough. Your job is to figure out new businesses for us to diversify into. My job is to contain our liability and protect our brand and investors. It sounds a lot to me like you’re saying that you want me to leave off doing my job so that you can do yours.”

Sammy squirmed. “No, that’s not it at all. We both want to protect the business. I’m not saying that you need to give these guys a free ride. What I’m saying is, suing these guys is not good for our business. It costs us money, goodwill—it distracts us from doing our jobs.”

Hackelberg leaned back and looked coolly into Sammy’s eyes. “What are you proposing as an alternative, then?”

The idea had come to Sammy in the shower one morning, as he mentally calculated the size of his coming quarterly bonus. A great idea. Out of the box thinking. The right answer to the question that no one had thought to ask. It had seemed so perfect then. Now, though—

“I think we should buy them out.”

Hackelberg’s thin, mirthless grin made his balls shrivel up.

Sammy held up his hands. “Here, look at this. I drew up some figures. What they’re earning. What we earn from them. Growth estimates over the next five quarters. It’s not just some random idea I had in the shower. This makes sense.” He passed over a sheaf of papers, replete with pie-charts.

Hackelberg set it down in the center of his desk, perfectly square to the corners. He flipped through the first five pages, then squared the stack up again.

“You’ve done a lot of work here, Samuel. I can really see that.”

He got up from his straight-backed chair, lifted Sammy’s papers between his thumb and forefinger, and crossed to the wall. There was a shredder there, its maw a wide rectangle, the kind of thing that you can stick entire hardcover books (or hard drives) into. Calmly, Hackelberg fed Sammy’s paper into the shredder, fastidiously holding the paper-clipped corner between thumb and forefinger, then dropping the corner in once the rest had been digested.