Ride the Titanic! (5 page)

‘Almost bottom,’ Joe calls out.

Even though the sun is shining and we are in my backyard in Orlando, my imagination is thousands of miles away in Las Vegas. ‘Okay, folks, it’s night time on the strip. The inside ride’s done, everyone’s out in the lifeboats waiting for the big moment. Sidewalk traffic’s gathered on the boulevard, the last of the distress rockets goes ZOOMING into the air, there’s no rescue ship in sight. It’s all over. . . .gravity wins. . .the ocean wins. . .the dream now becomes. . . a nightmare.’

I wait five seconds, letting the tension build, imagining the ship in its final moments, and then say to Adam, ‘Go!’

Together we slowly shove straight down on the hull, and the stern smoothly pivots upward on its elbow-like hinge.

‘Hang time, hang time,’ I warn, while we fight to keep the forward two-thirds of the ship just beneath the surface.

‘Annnnnnd . . . . . DOWN we go.’

We shove the ship even deeper and its stern section beautifully follows suit until the entire vessel disappears. For a long moment the only sound is the steady breathing of everyone as we stare at each other and then at the
Titanic
shimmering beneath us in her watery grave.

‘Creepy,’ Fiona says softly.

‘Cool,’ Adam adds.

‘Michael!’ Geena shouts from the deck. ‘Just what the hell is going on?’

‘Ride re-set,’ I say quickly.

The ship bobs to the surface. One of her buff-colored smokestacks, loosened by the sinking maneuver, comes loose and tips over with a splash. Embarrassed and guilty, I grab it and twist it back into place.

‘Ah, hi, honey. . .Just checking out something with Pop.’

Geena takes the twins from Marianna and marches down the stairs like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Marianna trails behind, eager to retrieve the babies at a moment’s notice.

‘Did you call Reliant?’ she says.

‘Yes I did.’ I try to sound positive but fail. ‘Tomorrow at ten. Meet-and-greet. On site.’

Her shoulders lower slightly as she arrives at pool’s edge. A good sign.

‘So. . . you and Pop thought you’d play with your toys until then?’

‘Listen, sweetheart, the ride really WILL work in this new configuration. It’s amazing. Your dad and I figured it out. Lewis was a big help, too.’

‘Mrs. Sullivan, a pleasure as always,’ Lewis says with a courtly, Southern gentlemanly bow.

‘Mr. Lewis, long time no see,’ she says evenly. No love lost between these two. Why, I don’t know. We’re like brothers, they’re like oil and water.

Marianna, pained like a martyred saint, says, ‘Mikey and my Joey been at this all day. Barely touched my beautiful lunch.’

Joe says indignantly, ‘What are you talking? I loved your
calamari
.’

‘Only one serving?’

Geena sits at pool’s edge and dangles her slender legs in the water while keeping the squirming twins from jumping in. I wade over, grab them and swoosh and swirl them around until they shriek with laughter.

Geena finally says. ‘Tell me again how much R&D this time around?’

Her question surprises me but I’m ready. ‘Five million start-up, fabrication close to thirty, site prep and installation at least forty, why?’

‘Pop, are his numbers right? Just a two hundred fifty-five million to build this gigantic thing?’

‘Don’t look at me.’ He takes Baby Arturo in his burly arms and cuddles him like a Genoa salami. ‘I’m an artist, not an engineer.’

‘Don’t sing me that song. I’m a Disney brat, remember?’

Marianna chimes in. ‘What’s the real tab, Joey?’

His beaming smile vanishes and he says calmly. ‘
Paisan’s
close. Maybe off by twenty, twenty-five percent. Depends on what we can steal off the shelf.’

Geena say, ‘So for the sake of argument you find, let’s say to round things off, sixty-million dollars from somewhere to get this started and you actually think it will fly?’

‘No, it will sink. And, yes, I do with all my heart.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I know.’

‘But not for the reason you’re thinking.’

A long pause. Then. . . ‘Doing your ride this way is clever and it could be a crowd pleaser. Except for one big problem.’

She pauses. Her olive-skin arms glow rose-red in the sunlight as she winds her thick black hair into an elegant loop, and I imagine her to be a beautiful
principessa
on the Amalfi coast, alone in her solitary world, instead of poolside with a gaggle of geeks like me and a half-sunken ship model.

‘I’m a psychologist,’ she begins.

‘A Ph.D.,’ Marianna proudly adds.

‘And for the next six months NASA is paying me to figure out what makes astronauts tick and then help them tick better.’

My heart skips a beat. ‘Six months?’

She nods. ‘Pink slips went out today. Our department is in the crosshairs and Tommy Ishington pulled the trigger.’

‘But I. . .’

She silences me with a lazy wave. ‘Details to follow. And while your ride might attract customers, it’s nothing more than a glorified carnival ride. A freak show that will generate about as much repeat business as tractor pull at a county fair.’

‘Thank you for your five-star revue.’

She ignores me. ‘All human behavior is learned, and therefore can be changed with applied conditioning. Your guests need to enter that ride thinking they’re traveling from England to America on a reliable ocean liner. But by the time it’s over they need to be so conditioned by escalating emotions that they’re convinced they escaped death at the very last instant by some unexpected miracle of fate.’

‘It’ll do that. I’ve got enough graduated tension scenes to. . .’

‘Your ride can never do that, not in the time you have them under your control – what’s your estimated run time, load-to-exit?’

‘Seven, maybe eight minutes max.’

‘You’ll never do what I’m talking about in eight minutes. And because you can’t, your customer base will deplete to street traffic in about four hours. Who will ever invest in a ride that delivers that kind of crappy revenue?’

‘Branson was in on my first one. Remember
The Virgin Titanic
?’

‘He won’t now, trust me.’

‘But I can’t make the run time much longer. It’s probably too long as it is. We’ve got to have major pass-through for the numbers to work.’

‘I didn’t say make it longer. Make it better.’

‘What are you talking? We’re going to have 4D interactive virtual reality, high rez projection screens, maybe push it to seventy-two frames-per-second – nobody’s doing that.’

‘Stop the geek dump, I’m drowning.’

‘Plus EMV lifeboats that will scare the pants off you because the motion will be so real.’

‘Designed them yet?’

‘Lewis is brilliant. That, plus our connections with Disney-Anaheim, they’ll be a breeze to make, right, my friend?’

To Lewis’s credit he merely nods and looks away bored, as if I just asked him to open a ketchup bottle.

‘Sorry, boys.’ Geena says. ‘Not enough bang. No matter how hard you try to topspin your story.’

‘What, then?’

‘This.’

She finishes fussing with her hair and stares at me. I wait for the axe to fall. Instead, still fully-clothed, she slips into the water and glides like a seal to the other side, hops out and grabs the white dome-shaped mosquito tent we use for the twins when they play outside.

A flustered Marianna says, ‘Here let me do that, honey. Getting buggy isn’t it?’

‘Not yet, mamma, I need it for something else.’

She slips back in the pool, tent in arms, and wades back to the ship, where she says to Fiona, ‘You and Adam hold this right. . . about. . . here.’

She turns to me. ‘You absolutely must have people on board for this ride long before they get inside that ship.’

‘If you’re talking pre-load, I. . .’

‘I’m talking total immersion. And paying to do it.’ She points to the mosquito tent. ‘See that iceberg over there?’

‘Are you saying we need some kind of prop iceberg that. . .’

‘It’s not a prop, it’s a four thousand room, combination hotel, casino and convention center SHAPED like an iceberg.’

I see it all in a flash. ‘Like the
Luxor
, you mean?’

‘Better. Theirs is standard casino glitz inside a fake pyramid. But walk inside our iceberg and suddenly you’re a First Class passenger already INSIDE the
Titanic
. Everything looks like the ship. Your room is done up like the Guggenheims’, the restaurants perfect replicas of the First Class Dining Room, the staff wear
White Star
uniforms, and you’ve got ringers in period costume working the promenades, bowing to you like you’re a millionaire living in the Gilded Age, and they’re there to serve your every wish.’

‘Casinos too,’ Joe says. ‘Love the tables.’

‘Of course casinos.’ Geena thumps the mosquito tent iceberg for emphasis. ‘At least three, and conference centers, secondary restaurants, game arcades, underground parking, and everything else that goes along with a destination vacation. That’s what you need to make this thing work in Vegas. You need to immerse your guests so deeply into your world that they forget who they used to be, and become what you want them to be. If it works at NASA – and it damn well does – it can work here.’

She crouches down so that her head is just above the water.

‘If you do the job right, create sightlines so perfect that there’s no way for them to see around the psychic scenery, then no matter what day or year it is, when they walk into that lobby to check in for their First Class stateroom, by the time they hand over their credit card, it’s going to feel like April 10th, 1912, all is well with the world, life is good and everyone is going to live happily ever after.’

‘Until April 15th,’ I add.

A long pause, hot sunlight, a mosquito net tent, a cobbled-up ship model, people standing in chest-deep water in a swimming pool, but also a chill in the air from what we’re seeing in our minds instead.

Fiona whines, ‘Mom, can we go swimming now?’

‘In a minute. First, tell me what you and Adam think.’

‘I was only sort of listening.’

Adam stares at her, his jaw slightly open. This mini-airline captain is on a collision course with his hormones. To break the spell I shout in my summer camp lifeguard voice, ‘Buddy check!’

‘Romeo and Juliet instinctively grab each other’s hands and lift them high, performing the timeless, safety-first gesture that shows the lifeguard that you and your buddy are watching out for each other and all is well.

Then, to my surprise, Geena takes my hand and lifts it up too.

‘I love your hotel idea,’ I blurt out. ‘I really do.’

‘That’s all it is. An idea.’

‘For now, maybe, but when I. . .’

‘C’mere.’ She pulls me over to the side of the pool, out of earshot of the others.

‘Look. . .at. . . me.’

I stare into her dark brown eyes, and tumble headfirst into the rabbit hole of love again.

‘Ninety days,’ she whispers. ‘That’s all you’ve got before you put away your childish things and grow up once and for all.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Driving home today, I decided no matter what happens, I’m not going to be the villain in this story – at least not for ninety days. And was right. Look at Pop’s face. He’s in seventh heaven about this
Titanic
thing and so are you.’

‘But you would make such a good bad guy.’

‘In three months’ time I will, if this doesn’t work out. But right now I want to be the love interest, the gorgeous woman who also happens to know how to kick-box.’

‘Which you do, but what about your job? Neither one of us will have one.’

‘Fear is a powerful motivator. Much better than sex, although not as fun.’

‘You’re serious about trying to make this work?’

Her eyes answer my question; the set of her jaw underlines it.

‘So what about my job interview? Designing air conditioning systems for an industrial park could be such a wonderful way to spend the rest of my life.’

She chews the inside of her cheek, lost in thought, then kisses me. ‘How about we sleep in late tomorrow instead?’

‘Good idea.’ I kiss her back. ‘I’ve got some great behavioral modification planned.’

She draws back. ‘Isn’t this how the twins happened?’

‘Naw, that’s some girl book you read. Mine’s going to be a thriller.’

One of my heroes is Ray Cummings, a famous science fiction writer back in the 1920s. I’ve kept two of his quotes in my wallet ever since my Disney days:

‘We divide our lives into hours, minutes and seconds to create the illusion of order and calm.’

‘Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.’

But fear changes all that.

A truck swerves into your lane, a guy pulls a knife, a grease fire goes WHOOSH on your stove, and time as you know it stands still – or seems to – as adrenaline gushes into your bloodstream, vessels constrict, pupils dilate, and glucose surges into your trembling muscles to save your sorry ass.

The ‘fear’ you as a rider will experience in
Ride the Titanic
comes from the sensation of ice-cold water rushing into an ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner, hissing steam, people shouting and the world changing in an instant from calm to chaos. Not enough fear to create real panic, but enough to yank you out of your complacent world long enough to feel what it’s like to be sailing along in big, fat, safe ship in the middle of a cold ocean when suddenly an iceberg SMASHES into you, the lights go out, and your world starts goes down, taking you along with it.

Eight minutes later, the opposite rush of salvation comes when the
S.S. Carpathia
arrives to rescue you from a nightmare that – if we design it right – you’ll pay to experience again and again, until you climb back into that aluminum tube with wings and fly home to brag to your friends that you ‘rode’ the
Titanic
and lived to tell the tale.

Easy enough to write about this, but the challenge facing me now is how to create, build, and operate a multi-level, 4-D, immersive entertainment experience that does this for real. If it were happening at Disney it would be a piece of cake.

Here’s how: