Kingdom Keepers(5)

“All I have to do is audition?” he asked, testing her.

“That’s right! They might not even take you.”

“Mom,” Finn said, “this is me we’re talking about. Of course they’ll take me.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hotshot, but I do not want to hear you talking that way, and you know it. If this is going to go to your head, we are not doing this.”

Actually, Finn’s mom loved to hear him talk that way, though she pretended otherwise. She had schooled him in self-confidence. He’d auditioned for several things and never won a part yet, but not because he lacked confidence.

“Okay. I’ll do it,” he said.

She beamed. He loved to see her like that—bright-eyed and childlike.

A month after Finn had passed the final audition and won a place as a Disney Host Interactive, or DHI, he arrived at an enormous soundstage at Disney-MGM Studios.

The size of a jet aircraft hangar, the soundstage was rigged with hundreds of film lights, a green screen that filled one entire wall, trampolines, cameras, boom microphones, and dozens of scruffily dressed crew members. He’d never seen anything like it, except in movies, though he did his best to pretend otherwise. A college-age girl dressed in black and gray wore a headset with a microphone mouthpiece, a fuzzy black ball by her lips. She called herself a “PA.” It took Finn four days to realize that that stood for production assistant. Her boss was a guy named Brad, from Disney Imagineering.

Brad made Finn dress in green tights and a green stretchy top and walk around on a green stage. The costume had small metal sensors, like thin coins, stuck to the tights on every joint of his body—dozens of the things. Cameras hooked up to a computer recorded the movement of the small metal disks. In the cameras’ eyes, the green costume, moving against the green background, basically made Finn’s body disappear. The computer saw him instead as a floating cloud of shiny points. The engineers would later use the recordings of Finn’s movements to animate the holograms of Finn and the other kids. Brad explained that this process was called “motion capture.”

There were five kids in all. One very pretty girl, Charlene, had sandy blond hair and blue eyes, with pale skin. The other girl, Willa, struck him as a little geeky, but extremely smart. She was sweet, but not knockout gorgeous like Charlene. Not many girls looked like Charlene. Willa struck him as moody. With her hooded brown eyes and dark, braided hair, she might have been Asian or Native American. Maybeck, an African American kid, was taller than Finn by a full head and had the big-guy attitude to go along with it. For some reason he made a point of telling Finn that he was a Baptist. Finn, who wasn’t terribly religious, wasn’t sure what to do with that information, nor even what it meant.

On a break, Finn hung out with Maybeck and the last of the five, a boy who introduced himself as Philby. Like Maybeck, he obviously preferred to be called by his last name.

Philby looked older than all of them, but was in fact the same age. He had a British accent or something close to it—Australia or New Zealand, Finn guessed.

“Quite the motley group,” Philby said.

“We’re the Orlando assortment pack,” Maybeck quipped. “One of every flavor.”

Finn said, “We’re all from different schools, right? What’s with that? It’s like they wanted to make sure none of us knew each other. Why would they do that?”

“Control,” Maybeck answered. “These kinds of guys…with them it’s all about control. That guy, Brad? I don’t trust him. He’s keeping stuff from us. Count on it.”

Finn liked Brad, but he knew what Maybeck was talking about. It did feel like they weren’t being told everything.

“We’d better be able to trust him,” Finn suggested. “He’s the one turning us into holograms.”

“I don’t know about you,” Maybeck answered, “but I never trust anyone but myself.” He added a little late, “No offense.”

Finn wanted out of his tights.

Philby said, “Did you know that DHI—Disney Host Interactive—also stands for Daylight Hologram Imaging?”

“Seriously?” Finn asked.

“Totally.”

“See?” Maybeck said. “That’s what I’m talking about—right there. First I’ve heard of it.”

Philby continued, “This has never been done before. DHIs. Not like this. We’re going to be turned into absolutely perfect three-dimensional images. Duplicates of ourselves. We’ll look real, but we’ll be made of nothing but light. It’s pretty cool technology, actually.”