Kingdom Keepers(14)
Wayne nodded and cocked his head curiously. “Yet something’s bothering you.”
“Charlene said it isn’t safe. You basically said the same thing.”
“And yet here you are. You came back,” Wayne said.
“You brought me back.”
“Did I? Not exactly. This is a two-way street, young man. You’re neither hologram nor human. You’re something in between, I think. The holograms don’t think for themselves, and they speak only what you recorded for them. How much you are…one or the other…may depend on your thinking;—what you’re thinking, how you’re thinking it. So I’d be careful of what I was thinking, if I were you.”
Finn spotted a large gold bear by the entrance to the Jungle Cruise. He shook his head to clear his eyes since the bear was walking on two feet and there was what looked like an oversized rat jogging to keep up with it. “Is that…?”
“What?” the old man said excitedly.
“Pooh and Piglet?”
“Is it?”
“There!” Finn said, pointing.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Wayne was quick to lose his patience. “I don’t see what you see.” He sounded frustrated.
“Pooh and Piglet.” Finn was certain now.
“What are they doing?”
“Walking away from us.”
“Anything else?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Finn felt like some kind of translator.
“I told you: things are happening in the park. We—you and your friends, actually—need to stop them.”
“The Overtakers.”
“Yes.”
“It isn’t safe,” Finn repeated.
“No, it’s not,” Wayne said, agreeing.
“What’s that mean, exactly?”
“What did you think of the park as a small child?”
“Magic,” Finn said without a second thought. He still thought of it as magic.
“Exactly,” Wayne agreed. “But there are two sides to magic, yes? Good magic is what you’re talking about. But there’s other magic besides good magic.”
“Black magic,” Finn stated.
“A layman’s term, but yes, a darker side to magic that few if any fully understand.”
“Do you?”
“Heavens no. But Walt did. He wrote about it. He made films. Invented characters. He understood its seriousness, its potential for…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
“Potential for what? Evil?”
“Let’s just put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.”
Finn climbed into the front seat of the golf cart. His feet disappeared. They weren’t simply in shadow; they were…gone. He felt a little faint. “My feet,” he gasped.
Wayne explained, “The hologram imaging system isn’t set up to project to all locations. There are places we call shadows. Like dead spots where cell phones don’t work. Inside some attractions they will be visible—you, the DHIs, will be visible. Other locations, maybe not. Your feet inside a cart, for instance,” he said, pointing, “not so good. You may be able to control this. We don’t know for sure. You’re the first of your kind.”
Finn glanced down at his missing feet. It wasn’t so bad.
“Okay?” Wayne asked.
“Okay, I guess.”
Wayne pressed the accelerator. The cart lurched forward.
“Where’d you get your license?” Finn asked, holding on for dear life.
“What license?” Wayne answered, his eyes sparkling.
Four or five dark, shadowy figures streaked across the intersection in front of the cart. Wayne didn’t see them. Finn reached over and jerked the cart’s steering wheel, narrowly averting an accident. Wayne braked to a stop.
“You nearly paved those guys,” Finn exclaimed.
“What guys?”
“The—” Finn couldn’t complete the sentence. Wayne hadn’t seen them. Then Finn said, “Pirates.” He pointed to their left. “But not exactly pirates. They look more like…”
“Like what?”
“More like robots…Like the lifelike pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean. And Finn realized that was it: they weren’t people, but Audio-Animatronics figures that had somehow come alive. “Never mind,” Finn said, not wanting to sound crazy. A group of the figures was pushing a line of small blue cars ahead of them. Finn thought he recognized the cars but couldn’t associate them with any particular attraction. He was stuck on the idea that some of the AAs—but they were only machines—had come alive. Was that possible?
Wayne asked, “How many?”
“Five…no, six, including the guy with the hat.”