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I got them down off the seat I kept them on in the Carousel and thumbed through them, it wrenched something in my chest. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I cried for a long time.
    Mostly I tried to distract myself from all of this. One good way to do that was to keep the Carousel tuned up. The cultists liked it—it was a relaxing place to sit and watch a show, something they didn’t get much of in Raleigh Durham since the wires went in.
    The Carousel was a four-part show with a prologue and epilogue, “the longest-running stage show in the history of the world,” in which primitive robots told the story of how General Electric and Thomas Edison had rescued them from the dark ages. The robots rotated in and out, appearing behind scrims and delivering corny jokes, singing and tapping their toes, while their electrical appliances clattered, clanked, and showed themselves off.
    Dad had loved the Carousel. Not in the “I love chocolate” sense of love. In the “I love you, darling, and I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you” sense. Disney World, where the Carousel ended up some time after the ’64 World’s Fair, had not fared well in the Mecha Wars. All of the Animal Kingdom and Epcot were fused-glass ruins, and most of the Magic Kingdom had burned down. But the Carousel had been only a little scuffed, its control systems fused from EMP weapons.
    Dad and I spent a week separating the Carousel from its foundations. It was like digging an old tree out of a forest—digging a wide circle around it, taking the whole root ball with it. In the Carousel’s case, it was the control apparatus for the show, spanning two basement levels beneath it. The entire Magic Kingdom was built two stories off the ground, specifically to leave room for the control systems. Over the years, these systems had sprawled sideways and downward, retrofitted solid-state controllers replacing the original mechanicals. We took lots of pictures—visual and millimeter-wave radar—of the whole setup and e-mailed them to a little cluster Dad had that could evolve itself to solve complex vision problems. Overnight, they mailed us back clean architectural as-built diagrams that helped a lot.
    Dad had a lot of older, less collectable mechas he kept around for duty like this. We’d driven down to Florida on the path of the old I-75 in a platoon of these things, each of us driving at the head of a column of lumbering beasts that were slaved to our control units. They weren’t much to look at, they weren’t all that smart, but those big boys were
strong
. Twenty-two of them lifted and carried the Carousel all the way home to Detroit. The pack were in a frenzy once we got back, delighted to have me around again. They’d patrolled the museum-city while we were away, e-mailing me with anything urgent that they didn’t know how to cope with. That was before the wumpuses, so there wasn’t much by way of risk to our humble home.
    Once we got the Carousel home, we set to work restoring it. Dad was insistent that we not fix it
too
well. In a couple of the scenes, the Dad robot was really weird around the neck, its cervical controllers bulging at the flesh like it had swallowed a wheel-rim, sideways. I was pretty sure we could do better than that, but Dad insisted that that was part of the charm, and so I printed a new controller that was an exact match. I even resisted the temptation to replace the glassy, weird eyeballs with something vat-grown from one of my kits.
    “It’s not supposed to be realistic, Jimmy,” he said. “You need to understand that.”
    I didn’t understand it at the time, but I came to understand it eventually. It was the show. It had a dream-like quality, a kind of ethereal logic that seemed perfectly sensible in the show, but which evaporated when the show ended, like the secret technique for levitating evaporating as you wake from sleep.
    Each of the four sequences showed the progress that technology made, generation