Kingdom Keepers III(36)

“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.