KK03 - Disney in Shadow

by Ridley Pearson

  He turned the doorknob and opened the door.

  Inside, he found everyone waiting.

  14

  PHILBY RAN THE CONTROLS. Jess and Amanda changed into skintight green leotards and tights that included booties, gloves, and full hoods that covered their heads and faces like ski masks. Patches of green plastic mesh had been sewn into the hoods to provide a way to see out, and to breathe.

  Charlene attached the thirty-five wired sensors to each of the girls. The sensors would measure every kind of joint and muscle movement. Then the girls took turns on the green stage in front of the green background as Philby directed them to squat, stand, walk, lie down, run, crawl, dance, and jump. He thought up dozens of combinations of movements as Finn and Willa ran video cameras that captured and recorded, from multiple angles, every move the girls made. The girls made some mistakes and had to repeat their movements, many of them several times.

  Philby worked a pair of computers, one recording the video, the other recording the digital output from each of the thirty-five sensors. The computers measured and recorded the similarities and differences between the way each of the girls moved compared to a database of how dozens of other people moved, including all the Kingdom Keepers, each of whom had been part of the database nearly from its inception.

  Philby completed the recording with just fifteen minutes to go until Jess and Amanda absolutely had to be headed back to the Nash House. He had a good deal of work yet to accomplish, work that had to be done in Soundstage B, with its phenomenally powerful computers.

  “No way I can get this done in time. And we still have all the voice work to do,” he said from his seat in the control room.

  “Red alert!” came the voice of Wanda Alcott, issuing a warning that meant someone—Security?—was heading toward the soundstage.

  The kids had practiced their roles for such an event: Willa stood poised, ready to kill the overhead lights; Philby put both computers into sleep mode; Finn and Charlene shut down the stand-alone lights and all the cameras; Jess and Amanda disconnected the main cables from their suits, the umbilical cords that fed the computers. Everyone was intent on hiding.

  All the kids scattered, having elected hiding places earlier.

  Jess—in the green suits it was hard to tell the girls apart—had difficulty unclipping the large plug at the end of the master cable. Amanda made it off the all-green stage, but Jess was still struggling with the oversize connector. There was no way she could leave the stage so long as that huge cable was attached to her suit.

  Finn, who’d hidden behind a wall of plywood panels on casters, watched helplessly, desperately wanting to run out and help her.

  Jess lay flat down onto the stage. The green of her suit and the cable blended perfectly with the green of the backdrop and flooring—she all but disappeared.

  The lights went dark, and Finn heard Willa scamper to find a place to hide.

  Only seconds passed before the door swung open and the lights came on again.

  “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” one of the two night watchmen said. “Do you see anything?”

  “The report was someone hearing something,” the other man said. “We might as well look around.”

  Leaving the door open behind them, the two walked to the center of the soundstage. Only then did Finn, peering out, see that a light on one of the cameras was still glowing. His eyes darted between the camera and Jess, who remained flattened on the green deck, only a matter of yards from where the two men stood.

  One of the guards lit up a cigarette.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” his partner said.

  “Correction: I can’t smoke out there. No one’s going to see me smoking in here, unless, I suppose, you’re going to turn me in?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “No problem.”

  “Okay, then.”

  The smoker remained where he was. The other guard grew restless and headed for the control room. Philby was somewhere in there.

  “You know what they use this place for?” the smoker called out. “Those hologram kids.”

  “DHIs,” the other called back.

  “The kids, yeah. You gotta admit, they look freaking real.”

  “I know.”

  “They give me the weebies, to tell the truth. I mean, if you want guides, why not just hire real kids?”

  “It’s Disney World, you moron. Don’t knock it: it’s a paycheck.” He entered the control room. Finn lost sight of him, concentrating instead on the smoker, who stood less than twenty feet from Jess, his back to her.

  She seized the opportunity, crawling on her stomach across the green stage, the cable dragging behind her like a green snake.

  The man took another drag off the cigarette and slowly turned in Jess’s direction as he exhaled. If he looked down, he’d be looking right at her.

  Finn willed her not to move, not to so much as breathe.

  The ash from the man’s cigarette broke loose and fell slowly to the floor. His head dropped, his eyes following it.

  Finn couldn’t take it. He spotted a group of push pins stuck into the plywood. He withdrew one and threw it across the room. It clattered and rolled.

  The smoker turned away from Jess with a start. Finn backed up, deeper into shadow.

  “Hey!” the smoker called out.

  The other man reappeared from within the control room. “What?”

  “Something…I don’t know…over there.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying I heard something.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So check it out, you doofus. And put out that cigarette before you burn the place down.”

  Finn stepped forward and sneaked another look.

  The smoker smudged out the burning cigarette against the sole of his shoe. As he did, Jess once again crawled toward the edge of the green stage behind him. She reached the length of her cable and stopped, face down.

  The smoker headed in the direction of the sound of Finn’s pin. He searched the area near the door they all had come through. His partner joined him.

  “Well,” said the smoker, “I heard something too, but it wasn’t much. How do you want to deal with it?”

  “It’s a nonevent. I’ll call it in.” He snagged a radio from his belt as the two men made for the door. His voice could be heard faintly reporting in as they shut the door.

  Five minutes passed. “All-clear,” Finn announced in a forced whisper.

  “We were probably talking too loudly,” Philby said, once they’d gathered in the control room. “We can do this. We just can’t be so loud about it.”

  “We can’t do it tonight,” Finn corrected. “Look at the time.”

  To everyone’s surprise, they’d lost nearly a half hour.

  “We’re going to be late,” said Amanda. “That won’t be pretty.”

  “We can’t be late,” Jess said. “There’s no telling what Mrs. Nash might do. That woman is…well, let’s just say she’s not normal.”

  “We made a lot of progress on the imaging,” Philby said. “But there’s more to do, and don’t forget the voice recording. We’ve got to have Sunday if we’re going to pull this off.”

  “Then we can’t be late,” said Jess.

  “But we already are,” said Amanda. “Unless anyone happens to have a helicopter handy?”

  “Maybeck,” Finn said.

  They all looked at him.

  “We’ve got to get Maybeck to delay the other girls. If they’re late, and if Jess and Amanda arrive at the same time—”

  “Then Mrs. Nash won’t know,” said Willa excitedly.

  “But the girls will,” Charlene said. “What about the other girls?”

  “Jeannie’s the only one who might put up a stink,” said Jess. “The others couldn’t care less.”

  “But Jeannie,” Amanda said, “will definitely tell on us.�
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  “Then you’ll have to bribe her,” said Charlene, as if she knew all about such things.

  “How?” said Jess.

  “There must be something. Money?”

  “No, not Jeannie. All she does is read books from the library. She couldn’t care less about money.”

  “Music?” Philby asked. “Movies?”

  Amanda said, “I know!” She looked over at Jess.

  “Her poster.”

  Jess looked at Finn, then at Amanda. “That could work,” Jess said.

  “What?” Finn asked. “Whatever it is, we’ve got to do it. We can’t have her wrecking this.”

  The two girls giggled. Amanda said, “Are you sure?”

  “What?” Finn asked, feeling he was being left out of some joke.

  “Jeannie’s poster is of you, Finn. Your Magic Kingdom DHI poster.”

  “Me?”

  “What if we could promise her she could meet you?” Amanda asked.

  “That hardly qualifies as a bribe,” Philby said. “More like a penalty.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Finn said.

  “Well?” Jess asked.

  “If it means your getting back safely tonight, then absolutely,” said Finn.

  He glanced over at Amanda. Something felt wrong about agreeing to do this. But he just had.

  15

  JEANNIE PUCKET REFUSED TO LIE about Jess and Amanda’s whereabouts, but her compromise position was to agree not to tell on them. If Mrs. Nash didn’t ask, she agreed to keep her mouth shut, so long as she got to meet the boy who her favorite DHI had been modeled after.

  Mrs. Nash didn’t ask. Having returned home to an empty house, she had been on the phone trying to find all her girls as they climbed the front steps. Amanda and Jess were among the group, having timed their arrival perfectly. Not so much as an eyebrow was raised.

  Sunday’s foray into Hollywood Studios went much the same as the first session: the Kingdom Keepers met Jess and Amanda backstage, courtesy of Wanda Alcott; everyone donned costumes and, using employee ID cards, gained access.

  Philby completed the task of translating as many of the girls’ movements and spoken phrases as possible into computer code. He assembled the code and then dumped it onto a hundred-gigabyte portable hard drive, about the size of a paperback book. The creation of the DHIs was hindered by the pressure of time—while each of the kids had spent over a month in the soundstage modeling for their DHIs, Jess and Amanda had spent a grand total of four hours. It meant that, without a doubt, there would be gaps in their motion and speech, like a DVD or CD skipping. They were certain to “go digital” at times. What that would mean for the two human girls asleep in Mrs. Nash’s house, or the appearance and performance of their DHIs inside the parks, no one knew.

  Philby had a number of new concerns and he shared them with Finn as the two, in the guise of their DHIs, sneaked from in front of Cinderella’s Castle toward a Cast Member Only entrance to the Utilidor, the underground tunnel system that connected attractions below the Magic Kingdom.

  There was no way, yet, for Philby to select who crossed over and who didn’t. The only control they had over their transitioning was the black fob that also returned them. Finn had discovered that pulling out the fob’s small battery prevented their crossing over. Without the small watch battery in place, the kids got a good night’s sleep; with the battery installed, they crossed over—all of them. There was no way yet to send just one or two of them. It was something Philby hoped to remedy, perhaps even that same night, but as it was, they’d left the DHIs of Willa, Maybeck, and Charlene in Walt’s apartment at the top of Cinderella’s Castle, awaiting their return. Maybeck had the all-important fob. They would hide it in the apartment as they crossed back.

  If the two boys weren’t back by midnight, Maybeck was to use the fob to cross all three back over, stranding Philby and Finn and delivering their human selves into the Syndrome. The DHI servers shut down at midnight—that was part of the fix that Imagineers had believed would solve the Kingdom Keepers “problem” once and for all. This midnight curfew was another of Philby’s intended targets when he and Finn reached the computer server farm thirty feet beneath the surface. If he could defeat the curfew installed in the software, they could stay in the parks longer as DHIs.

  “It’s complicated,” Philby said.

  “That’s an understatement,” said Finn.

  The two boys moved quickly between bushes, keeping low and working their way toward the ice cream shop on Main Street. The park came alive at night with all the Disney characters. It was difficult if not impossible to identify Overtakers, unless a particular character was seen doing something suspicious. He and Philby stuck out. They needed to make it underground as quickly as possible.

  They paused, well hidden, allowing a golf cart to make it down Main Street and turn into Tomorrowland.

  “At this point, servers project DHIs into the four different parks,” Philby explained. “Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios. Our crossed-over DHIs always land in the Magic Kingdom. That’s okay, but time consuming if we want to be in Epcot looking for Wayne. What I have to do is figure out why the Magic Kingdom is the default landing and change it, at least for the time being, to Epcot. That’s something Wayne set up, so hopefully I can distinguish the instruction within the existing code, the problem being that if it was easy to find, then the guys who scrubbed the code to ‘fix’ the KK problem should have found it in the first place.”

  “Unless they did find it and Wayne reentered it recently,” Finn suggested.

  “That would explain why we suddenly started crossing over again. Good point.”

  “And no one’s been told to clean the code since, because we haven’t been spotted.”

  “Another reason not to be spotted now,” Philby said.

  “How long to install the girls?” Finn said.

  “Around twenty minutes. Once they’re installed here, they should self-propagate and install onto the other servers. They’re all linked by fiber optics. They share resources, which makes the refresh faster, and keeps the feed hot if one of the servers fails. I’ll use those twenty minutes to try to change the landing default to Epcot.”

  “And you’re going to show me how to read the Epcot maintenance stuff?” Finn reminded.

  “Piece of cake. I can get that started the minute the download begins.”

  Philby hoped that Epcot maintenance reports might reveal something of the Epcot infrastructure, might show or suggest to the boys where to find the various utility rooms, places where Wayne could be locked up. Philby had once been led by Wayne into a powerful graphic representation of the Magic Kingdom’s schematics. If such a thing still existed—and there was no reason to think it didn’t—it would likely be accessible from the Utilidor’s computer room.

  Finn didn’t trust Philby’s optimism. When it came to computers, Philby seemed to think all things were possible, whereas his own experience had often proved much different. Half the time Finn couldn’t get his printer’s scanner to work, much less crack the code of Disney’s maintenance server.

  “Let’s go!” he said, the golf cart having passed and disappeared.

  They ran for the boardwalk that fronted the ice cream shop, turned left, and found the sign that read CAST MEMBERS ONLY. They hesitated, alert for the sound of anyone coming.

  Finn used hand signals to motion for Philby to follow him. They slipped through the short turn in the fence that led them backstage, where they saw permanent office trailers and employee parking, empty at this hour. To their right was a small set of stairs leading to an elevator. The door beside the elevator led to a set of descending stairs where a sign was posted high on the wall: WELCOME TO THE UTILIDOR—WATCH FOR VEHICLES, AND HAVE A MAGICAL DAY!

  Finn felt Philby place his hand on Finn’s right shoulder. If they failed at this, in the morning their parents would find their sons lying in their beds, impossible to awaken. It would scare their families to
death.

  No matter what, they could not allow that to happen.

  16

  FROM THE MOMENT FINN’S DHI entered the Utilidor tunnels he had a bad feeling. It didn’t come from anything obvious. There were still a few Cast Members milling around. Most of them were the women whose costumes required wigs, makeup, and extra attention. The wigs had to come off and be put away in the wig shop, the makeup removed, the costumes hung up and put away. But there were also other workers driving the golf carts laden with bottled water, soda, sweatshirts, boxes of 3D glasses, popcorn, costumes, books, pins, lanyards, cotton candy, DVDs, and all the hundreds of items for sale in the park’s various gift shops. It all moved through the Utilidor—some of it well past the hour of the gates’ closing.

  Finn and Philby, shimmering slightly under the fluorescent lights, were greeted with nods and smiles. The DHIs were genuinely well liked by Cast Members, and though it should have occurred to some of them that they never saw the DHIs in the Utilidor, instead the two were met with a joyful surprise and they actually felt compelled to wave to several of those who were most eager to greet them.

  Philby, who managed to keep far too many facts in his head, led Finn to the right at the first intersection, and to the left at the next. He then waved Finn across the hall and they busied themselves at a bulletin board, standing with their backs to an unmarked door. Finn recognized the door from an earlier visit to the computer room.

  “Our problem now,” Philby said, “is that the door will be locked.”

  “Which is why I came along,” Finn said. “You tell me when, and I’ll do it.”

  “And if there’re people inside? How are you going to explain that?”

  “If there are still people inside, which I doubt since there’s no light coming out from under the door, and they see me, it won’t be me doing the explaining. Right? They’re the ones controlling the computers, including the DHI server. It isn’t shut down, or we wouldn’t be here right now, but we don’t know what the software does, how it deals with us once the park is closed. We probably aren’t supposed to be here. Not at this hour. So I imagine my showing up will surprise them just a little bit,” he said sarcastically. “All we can do is try it, and see what they do. If they head for a keyboard, I’ll know we’re in trouble.”