Disney in Shadow (9 page)

J
EANNIE 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.

F
ROM 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.”

“If they shut down the server,” Philby said in a cautionary voice, “the Return button won’t work. It won’t just be you and me—all of us will be trapped in the Syndrome. All of us will be lying in our beds at home like we’re half dead.”

“We’re either doing this, or we’re not,” Finn said. “It’s a little late to be debating the merits of the plan. Forget us. Forget the Syndrome. Think of Wayne. Think of Jess’s dream, or premonition, or whatever it is that Jess has. Wayne’s in trouble and he needs us. End of story.”

Philby looked over at Finn and nodded. “You’re right.”

“I know I’m right.”

“Okay. So do it.”

“I’m going to do it now.”

“So why aren’t you moving?” Philby asked.

“Because now you’ve scared me. I mean, what happens if there are people in there?”

“I thought we just got past that.”

“I thought so too,” Finn said, turning around and crossing the wide tunnel to the door on the opposite side.

He paused there in front of the unmarked door. A pair of voices came and went at the far end of the tunnel they were in. He knew he mustn’t be seen going into this room, and so he waited to make sure the voices weren’t coming toward them. But there was more to it than that. He also stopped there to clear his head. He forced his fear into a tiny box at the back of his mind and he closed the top of that box and he locked it. He washed all concern and all sensations from his body, taking a deep cleansing breath and feeling his connection to his senses expelled with his exhalation. Even thought left him, so that he existed in an ether, a fragile place where he wasn’t even Finn any longer. He wasn’t even sure he
was
—that he existed at all. He was a bundle of jumping atoms, light generated by a series of computer-controlled projectors. If he could become pure light, without thought and without form or shape, no physical barrier could stop him.

He imagined the train coming down the tunnel and he stepped forward and passed right through the door into the humming room on the other side. The light from his own projection created a glow in the otherwise dim room. He looked left: no one at the desk there; right: row after row of shelving lined up in stacks like a library. The shelves were not filled with books but with computer servers, network hubs and switching, terabyte hard drives, routers, and thousands of flashing, colorful LEDs. It was all neat and organized with labels attached to each shelf below a device.

Old McDaniel’s Farm
read a computer printout, hanging like a sign on the endcap of the one of the stacks. A server farm. A computer nerd’s paradise.

Slowly, Finn allowed his thoughts to flow again. His senses came back online and he not only processed cognitively but he felt his fingers and toes tingle.

He turned and reached for the doorknob. His hand went right through the door. He withdrew it and closed his eyes, trying to speed himself back to a less pure condition, where his body would be more than light.

He hadn’t told any of the others, but this transition had become increasingly difficult for him. He could easily—perhaps too easily—transport himself into the state of pure DHI—
all-clear
he called it—a state in which he possessed no material quality, in which he was capable of walking through walls or on top of water. But the way back to his human self was sometimes harder. It occasionally took him more time to transition back to being part DHI–part human. He wasn’t sure when that scale had tipped, but it had; he didn’t know what it meant, but knew it meant something. He tried the handle again, and this time it turned. But he looked down at his own hand as if it belonged to somebody else.

And maybe it did.

Philby came through quickly.

“Jeesh! What took you so long?”

Finn shut and locked the door behind them.

“Heaven!” said Philby, spreading his arms as he faced the stacks of servers. Finn’s primary job was to get them in and out of the locked room, a job half accomplished. His other job—checking the maintenance records—would have to wait.

Philby searched the aisles, row after row of servers, inspecting the labels taped beneath each black brick. Unlike Finn, he didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by the maze of wires and display of blinking lights. He located a vertical column of six machines and a keyboard and screen that accessed them. Within minutes he’d removed the portable hard drive and was downloading the data from the Soundstage B shoot.

He typed frantically, at a speed Finn had trouble believing.

“Done a little bit of this, have you?”

“For me,” Philby said, never slowing, “this is like a violinist playing a Stratosphere—”

“Stradivarius,” Finn corrected him.

“Whatever. Just like that. I dream of messing with this stuff. For most companies, it would be a major deal to have one of these SGIs. I’m looking at six right here. Four more, a couple rows behind us. They’ve got everything in here: Solaris, Red Hat, Linux. All the top-of-the-line Macs. For all I care, you can just leave me here.”

“Don’t get too carried away, okay? You’re freakin’.”

“The girls are downloading,” he said. “It’s going to take me a while to try to find that Easter egg of Wayne’s—the remote.”

“And the curfew limits,” Finn reminded. “How about you lift those first?”

“I’ve got to do this in the order I’ve got to do it. But yes, I’ll lift the midnight curfew if possible.”

“I knew you’d say something like that.”

“Maintenance!” he said, as if remembering to keep Finn busy. A flurry of typing. “Hang on a minute.”

He led Finn to a computer terminal in the next row. On the screen was a familiar layout.

“Is that VMK?” Finn gasped. Disney’s online Virtual Magic Kingdom had been shut down over a year earlier. Finn had missed going on the site.

“VMN, actually—Virtual Maintenance Network—but it’s just like it,” Philby said. “That’s why it’ll be easy for you.”

He worked a boy avatar up a ladder, through a door, and into a tunnel. At the other end, a door came closed behind the avatar.

“Okay, you’re in,” Philby said.

Finn’s avatar faced a large screen listing all kinds of locations within Epcot: attractions, foreign countries, buildings, restaurants, even a graphic labeled
PYROTECHNICS
.

“Start with the obvious things like electrical and phone,” Philby said. “You’re looking for junction boxes, places all the wires or pipes come together. Those might be actual rooms in the real Epcot—utility rooms where they might have put Wayne. There will be a code at the bottom of each of those kinds of places. Write down the code. I can probably figure out pretty closely where it is inside the park.”

He took off, back to his own aisle. They talked through the gaps in the stack that separated them.

“How are you doing?” Philby asked.

“Getting the hang of it.” Finn moved his avatar through the puzzle of colorful tubes, ladders, and pipes. “What
is this
exactly?”

“The maintenance guys created a virtual world that would let them fix a lot of stuff remotely. Wayne knew about it.”

“Wayne knows everything,” Finn said. Talking about Wayne made Finn miss him all the more. He found an intersection of purple and blue tubes. There was a pulsing code beneath the box where they met, just as Philby had said there might be. He wrote it down. He moved his avatar in front of the graphic—a door—and then forward. The door opened and the screen changed to put Finn inside a small room where the various colored tubes terminated in boxes on the walls.

The code below one of these boxes was flashing red and blue.

“Is it okay if I try to open a box?” he called out.

“Go for it,” Philby replied.

But Finn hesitated even so: Philby was not bashful when it came to computers.

Finn used the mouse to move over to the box, and then right-clicked, bringing up a menu.
OPEN, REMOVE, OFF
, and
REPORT
were the only highlighted menu choices; the rest were grayed out.
REPORT
was pulsing. Finn clicked on it.

A pop-up window zoomed open and lines of code scrolled, pausing briefly as they filled the window. Each paused but seconds before they began scrolling rapidly up. Finn clicked on one of the lines to stop the scrolling. Most of the words had been condensed, so that power was written as
PWR
, and temperature as
TMP
. He studied the strings of code and numbers, then tried to make sense of the time code that ran on the left.

“I’ve got something here,” he said.

“Write it down,” Philby said. “I’ve hit a line of code that could be Wayne’s Easter egg. It requires a password to edit the code, which could be why the guys repairing the code didn’t remove it.”

“No, I mean I’ve really got something here,” Finn said. He wrote down two of the lines verbatim. “I think…if I’m right…” He backed the avatar out of this wall box, then out of the room in order to take a wider view of the overall screen. Several of the codes beneath various boxes were pulsing. But not all, by any means.

“I’m busy here,” Philby said.

Finn drilled down into a similar box—entering a room that also showed a pulsing code and then a junction box with a flashing label. By the time he opened the pop-up window, he’d convinced himself.

“Temperature drops,” he said.

“What’s that?”

Finn took notes furiously. The pop-up window appeared to be an error log, the scrolling lines a nearly minute-by-minute cataloguing of significant variations in temperature swings, all recorded in centigrade.
Temperature drops
, he noted. In each case the temperature had fallen dramatically before it slowly climbed again.

He backed out of the error log and found his way to the wider view that showed the tubes and wires. There were six codes pulsing. He wrote them down and circled them repeatedly so he wouldn’t forget them.

At the bottom of the screen Finn saw an identifying marker change. Beside
CURRENTLY ONLINE
: 1 flashed and then changed to 2.

“Philby…I’ve got a visitor.”

Philby didn’t hesitate this time. He hurried to Finn’s side and ran a finger along beneath the Cast Member Monitor line.

“Dang,” he said. “We need to find an exit.”

“An exit? Can’t I just close the session?”

“It doesn’t exactly work like that. Once you’re in this world, you’re in it.”

“Sounds familiar,” Finn quipped.

“The main problem being,” Philby said, taking a look at the door leading to the Utilidor, “as long as your avatar’s online they may be able to determine which station you’re using.”

“What! So get me offline!”

“I just told you: it doesn’t work like that,” Philby replied anxiously. “It’s a virtual world. And…maybe…” He sprinted around the stack and into the next aisle and began tugging on cords and trying to sort through the massive bundles of multicolored wires. Finn was alongside him now. Philby grabbed and pulled Finn’s finger so that it pointed to a particular blue wire. Philby then followed that same wire as it twisted and traveled along the stack to another set of boxes. He pinched a plastic clip, and pulled the wire from a box.

Together, they raced around to the other side. Finn couldn’t remember seeing Philby so flustered. He’d been mumbling to himself for the past thirty seconds.

“Tracers…user logs…spiders…not good, not good…”

They reached the terminal Finn had been using. His avatar was gone.

“You did it!” he said, pounding Philby on the back.

“No…no…no….” Philby muttered. “Not really. Not so fast. Not quickly enough.”

He sprinted to the next aisle and typed even faster than before. But he kept looking at the room’s main door as if expecting someone.

“What the heck is going on?” Finn said.

“You know that wire I disconnected?”