Kingdom Keepers III(33)

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.