Charlene raised hers and pulled it right back down.
“For today you’ll be in the back row. Clara will fill you in. You’ll watch her. We won’t ask anything too demanding of you just now. Tomorrow’s performance is different. We’ll integrate you more fully at this afternoon’s rehearsal.”
Charlene, like the rest of the Keepers, lived her life with one eye open. Between the OTKs and the OTs themselves, nowhere was safe. She and the others were under what felt like perpetual surveillance. So when the hair on her neck tingled, she peeked to her right and caught the tall, thin girl staring at her.
Green eyes.
The girl wormed a smile at her. Fake and insincere.
Charlene smiled back, equally void of emotion, but her gut twisted.
“We will switch out the DHI models who are on the cruise with us and replace them with their holograms. I’ll go over that choreography, and we’ll rehearse it with stand-ins in a minute because we want it executed flawlessly. One minute, Captain Jack and his pirates will be in a sword fight with the models. The next, Jack will gain the advantage and go for a killing blow to Finn, one of the DHIs. His sword will pass through the hologram, which should be quite the crowd-pleaser. The hologram is programmed to then battle Jack to stage left and off. It should be terrific fun. So, if there’re no questions right now, we’ll get started. Let’s take it from ‘living the adventure.’ On your marks, everyone!”
By five in the afternoon guests had already begun to gather on Deck 11, which had a view of the Funnel Vision screen and a stage where a Cast Member named Max was already warming up the crowd with trivia questions and T-shirt giveaways. For the arriving guests, the afternoon had been spent unpacking, eating, and then eating some more. With the Dream at capacity for the Panama Canal passage, more than three thousand passengers were wandering the ship. Many hundreds arrived to Donald’s Pool to participate in the Sail-Away Celebration, a triumph of song and dance to set the tone for two weeks of endless entertainment. There were dozens of programs of every kind for every age throughout the ship at any given hour. Several times a week Cast Members threw events like this: celebrations, feasts, and parties. It was impossible for even the most cynical and skeptical not to be impressed.
The Sail-Away Celebration was intended to set the bar high, to let guests know this was not going to be anything less than the most magical and memorable trip ever. The show was lively, colorful, and infectious. The Cast Members smiled and exuded energy. The giant outdoor movie screen above them set backdrops and delivered effects. Dozens of hidden speakers boomed with song. From the opening moment, the crowd was mesmerized, clapping and singing along with a dozen dancing performers and appearances by a wide variety of Disney characters, all of whom elicited cheers.
Backstage, hidden inside the housing for the ship’s forward smokestack, Maybeck, Willa, Finn, Charlene, and Philby stood ready for their signal. Though they had managed to gather for their required rehearsal following the ship’s drill, there had been little time to share their experiences of the previous hours. As a group they did not know of Wayne’s call nor of Philby’s successful installation of the GPS transmission unit; nor had they heard of Willa and Maybeck’s discovery of a possible piece of Maleficent’s cape. In fact, the only message that they had managed to communicate between them was Charlene’s warning that a part of the upcoming show pitted Jack Sparrow against Finn in a sword duel that called for Jack to stab Finn’s hologram—a piece of programming that, should it go wrong, might have obvious unwanted side effects for the real Finn.
With no time to do much of anything about that possibility, the five now stood, mentally reviewing the choreography they’d gone over only minutes before, a clever bit of distraction and substitution that had some small pyrotechnics grabbing the crowd’s attention while the DHIs took the place of the Keepers—holograms in place of kids. They planned to slip behind the back row of performers (a row that was supposed to include “Cecily Fontaine,” but did not) right at the moment of DHI projection. Only the real Finn was to remain onstage. He’d be engaged in a sword fight with Jack Sparrow. His switch to hologram was a bit more tricky: two Cast Members would grab swords and step up to take on Jack, defending and screening Finn. By the time they stepped away, the real Finn would be gone, replaced by his DHI. But timing was critical. Finn focused, reminding himself of his positions onstage and the timing they’d just rehearsed.
His heart beat quickly at the idea of Jack Sparrow swinging a sword at him. He couldn’t be sure Jack Sparrow would be played by a Cast Member. What if the DHIs were not the only ones being substituted?