KK01 - The Kingdom Keepers aka Disney After Dark

by Ridley Pearson

Finn raised his arm and caught sight of his watch. His arm appeared solid. It did not glow and shimmer the way it had while he was with Wayne. That came as a relief.

  Finn parted the curtains.

  There, out the window, hanging in the exact same place in the sky, where Wayne had pointed it out to him, Finn saw the curving smile of a half-moon. Could he have known that in his sleep? How? He looked again.

  The moon seemed to be laughing at him.

  2

  The halways of Finn’s middle school could sometimes feel as long as runways. Late for class, he found this to be one of those times. Steel lockers occupied most of the space between the doors to the classrooms. The lockers were covered with stickers and pictures of movie stars or pro athletes, which instantly distinguished a girl’s locker from a boy’s. Fluorescent-tube lighting cast a sickly glow over everything, and made human skin look vaguely greenish.

  “He said there was a fable. A story of some kind,” Finn said to the boy standing next to him.

  “That my friends and I are supposed to save the park, or something.” He realized how ridiculous this sounded. “Whatever that means.”

  “By ‘friends’ you mean like, me?” Dillard Cole asked. Dillard ate enough for two kids and had the body to show for it.

  “He didn’t mean you, Dillard,” Finn said gently, trying not to hurt the guy’s feelings. “Not exactly. He meant the other…the hosts. At Disney World. The DHIs.”

  “No way.”

  “Way,” Finn said, hurrying off to his fourth-period classroom.

  “It was only a dream!” Dillard shouted after him.

  Finn wasn’t so sure about that.

  “We’re honored you could join us, Mr. Whitman,” said Mr. Richardson as Finn rushed in to his world history class. Mr. Richardson was probably the most boring teacher in the entire school.

  He’d lived in the U.S. for twenty-some years, but still spoke with a thick British accent. He sounded like a pompous snob.

  Finn checked the wall clock; he was eight minutes late, just under the ten-minute deadline when Richardson would have given him a tardy. Three tardies meant after-school study hall. Finn already had collected two others, both from science class.

  “You’ll sit up front, please,” Mr. Richardson said, indicating an empty chair. Torture on top of humiliation. “For the record, your notoriety pulls no weight in my class. I beg you to remember that when grades are issued. I find the idea of child actors tedious at best.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Finn said, sliding down into the chair, resentful that he’d been made to apologize.

  He’d taken the job at Disney World somewhat against his will, mostly at his mother’s urging.

  At the time she’d had no idea she was making him into a middle-school rock star. He remembered it well.

  * * *

  “There will be money in it,” his mother had said. “Your father and I can put a little something away for your college.”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Finn had complained.

  “This is Walt Disney World, don’t forget. You would be a host, like a guide, in Walt Disney World.”

  “It’s not exactly me. ”

  “It’ll look like you. Sound like you. It’ll seem like you to everyone but you. You’d be there for years, Finn Whitman. Maybe forever. You can’t get any ‘cooler’ than Disney World.”

  His mother didn’t know everything, but when she was right she was right. Finn loved the Disney parks. So did his friends. Even though they lived in Orlando, they all went to the parks whenever they could afford it. “But the Magic Kingdom, Mom? It’s for little kids. At Disney-MGM, sure! Animal Kingdom would be awesome. But the Magic Kingdom?”

  “You love the Magic Kingdom, and you know it. Besides, the rest of your family would get complimentary passes—several a year, every year, for life. As in, forever. We could basically go whenever we want.”

  “Without me.”

  “I thought you just said you’re too old for the Magic Kingdom.” Finn’s mom could twist almost anything he said. He picked his arguments carefully with her. She had explained the terms of the contract to him, but Finn hadn’t really paid attention.

  “Tell me about the disguise stuff again,” he said.

  “You would only be allowed to visit the Magic Kingdom with prior approval. Once permission is granted, you’d still have to go in disguise. But a hat and sunglasses would be enough. You’d only have to wear them when you’re in the Magic Kingdom. They can’t have two of you running around, the real you and the hologram-host you. It makes sense if you think about it.”

  It did make sense, but he wasn’t about to admit that.

  She said, “It sounds so easy. All you do is let them film you walking and gesturing. You read the script a couple times into a microphone. They process the film, or whatever, and, presto!

  You’re a hologram-host at the Magic Kingdom. With a college nest egg and lifetime complimentary passes. Finn, you love special effects! What they’re offering is for you to be the special effect. How much cooler can that be?” She was right again, but he resisted an all-out agreement. His mother had once called a new toaster “high-tech.” What did she know?

  “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 him
self 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.”

  “But if it’s never been done before,” Finn said, “how do we know it’s safe?”

  The boys glanced back and forth between themselves. Philby said, “It’s like taking pictures, that’s all. How can it not be safe?”

  “It pays,” Maybeck said harshly. “That’s all I care about. My aunt could use the extra money.”

  “Your aunt?” Finn said, before he took the time to think that his question might sound rude.

  “Yeah,” Maybeck said. “I live with my aunt. My parents…They aren’t around.”

  Finn felt awful for having asked. Maybeck grew silent. He seemed less tough all of a sudden.

  “Sorry,” Finn said, “for asking.”

  “Not your problem,” Maybeck said in a softer voice. “My aunt’s cool. She tried to get me in a toothpaste ad, but I lost out. Then this thing came up. Brad told me that if I’d gotten that ad I’d never have been asked to be a host. They want nothing but fresh faces.”

  “So you got lucky,” Finn said.

  “We all got lucky,” Maybeck agreed. “A DHI in the Magic Kingdom? We’re going to be famous.”

  “We’re going to be ghosts,” Philby corrected. “Electronic ghosts, provided that this technology actually works.”

  “Don’t say stuff like that,” Maybeck pleaded. “Of course it works.”

  “Of course,” Philby said. “My bad.” But he sounded less than convinced.

  3

  “I don’t get it,” Dilard said as he gripped Finn’s ankles for sit-ups. There were about forty kids on the crabgrass doing various forms of exercise out behind the school, in a field enclosed by a corroded chain-link fence. The South Florida climate ate metal down to rust and turned wood to sponge. Only concrete had a fighting chance. The kids, spread around the field in clumps, tried to make it look like they were exercising. Dirt stuck to Finn’s arms and the back of his neck. He looked up at the ocean-blue sky full of billowing white clouds.

  “The other DHIs,” Finn explained. “The Disney Hosts…I’ve got to hook up with them before I go back.”

  “You know how stupid that sounds?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t care. No matter what, I’ve got to find out if they’ve had similar…dreams.”

  Dillard glanced up and immediately let go of Finn’s ankles. Finn went head over heels backward. He found himself looking at an upside-down version of a girl named Amanda Lockhart, who had transferred to the school in late September, a few weeks earlier. She had exotic-looking eyes, a deep, natural tan, and a few freckles on her cheeks. She was stretching along with a dozen other girls. Finn wasn’t big on girls, but something about Amanda grabbed and held his attention.

  Dillard clasped his ankles again. Finn struggled back up to sitting.

  He squeezed out a couple more sit-ups. “It’s experimental,” he explained. “The DHI technology. Not exactly photography, not exactly computer graphics.”

  “You’re going psycho on me,” Dillard complained.

  Finn said, “When I woke up, the moon was right where it belonged. You want to explain that?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Dillard said, “but I think they fried your brain.”

  “I don’t know any of their full names. Willa, Charlene, Maybeck, and Philby. Maybeck and Philby will be easier to find than the girls, because those are their last names, unusual names at that. There was this guy at MGM who ran things. He would know who everyone is, though I’m not sure he’d tell me.”

  Dillard gave Finn a puzzled look. “I feel sorry for you, man. You’ve lost it.”

  “The new girl: Amanda. Doesn’t her mother or father work over at MGM? Did you hear about that?” Many of the students’ parents had something to do with one of the parks.

  “Amanda is a girl,” Dillard reminded Finn. “Have you lost your mind?” Dillard thought of girls as a separate life-form.

  “Yeah,” Finn said. “Maybe I have.”

  4

  The monorail zoomed past a sea of green trees, heading for a stop at the Grand Floridian Hotel.

  “This is pretty cool of you, Amanda,” Finn said. He wore a Tampa Devil Rays basebal cap and a pair of his father’s old sunglasses, which looked too big for his face. Some disguise. Amanda wore hip huggers and a shirt that exposed her belly button.

  “We’re taking photographs?” she asked.

  “They’re friends of mine, you see?”

  “Sort of.” Then she confessed, “No, not really.”

  “I don’t know their full names, so I don’t know how to find them. If I can get photographs of their DHIs and show them around some of the other schools, then maybe someone will recognize them.

  I’m not sure what else to do.”

  “Word is, you’re going psycho,” Amanda said. “I wasn’t about to get you mad at me.”

  “I’m not stabbing girls in showers or anything.”

  “That’s a relief.” Amanda allowed a hint of a smile that Finn knew she would rather not have revealed. It wasn’t cool for a girl to show she liked a boy any more than the opposite. Boys and girls seemed to spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince one another that they didn’t exist.

  Finn explained, “The problem is, if I’m going to visit the Magic Kingdom, my admission has to be pre-approved. That means telling my parents, and I can’t exactly explain this to them.”

  “You haven’t exactly explained it to me. Listen, I don’t mind using a couple of my family’s comp tickets, Finn. If you’re worried you owe me, you don’t.”

  “Cool.”

  “Is everything cool to you?” she asked. “What’s with you and that word?”

  “You’re cool,” he said, looking right at her. Where did that come from?

  She blushed and bit her lower lip to keep from grinning. She looked out the monorail car’s window, as if she hadn’t seen the Grand Floridian a hundred times.

  “So why’d you agree to help me, anyway?” he asked, coaxing her. The doors hissed shut. A recorded voice announced that the next stop was the Magic Kingdom.

  She glanced out the window too. “Because…I have my reasons. I want to help.” She spoke to the glass. Then she looked directly at Finn and said, “Besides, I’ve never met a real psycho before.”

  “Very funny.”

&nb
sp; “I thought so.”

  When she laughed, it reminded him of bells. He made a mental note not to tell Dillard that.

  At the entrance to the Magic Kingdom, Amanda handled the complimentary tickets while Finn kept his head down so as not to be recognized. A minute later they were inside the main gate, passing the spot where parents picked up and returned the rented baby strollers.

  Still looking at the pavement, Finn asked her, “Do you see any obvious security types?”

  “No.”

  “They don’t all wear uniforms. They’re pretty hard to spot.”

  “Finn, you’re not exactly one of the ten most wanted, or something. We’re going to be fine.

  Hey! There’s a host over there,” Amanda said. “It’s not you,” she announced.

  Finn looked over. A crowd had gathered around the DHL “That’s Charlene,” he said.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. Here goes.”

  Amanda slinked over toward the crowd, then posed for a shot with Charlene as Finn raised his father’s digital camera. Charlene looked perfectly real—absolutely real—until a kid walked through her. The DHI never stopped talking, never noticed that a kid was playing with her.

  “You’ve gone awfully quiet,” Amanda said a moment later, as she rejoined Finn.

  “I’d never seen that before. A kid walking through a DHI like that.”

  “They shouldn’t be allowed to do that,” Amanda said. “It’s disrespectful.”

  It wasn’t the actual act that bothered Finn. It was the concept. A hologram was nothing but light—a three-dimensional image. How could he become one by falling asleep? What was he thinking?

  “Do you believe in weird stuff?” Finn asked her.

  “Depends how weird, I suppose.”

  “Real weird.”

  “Try me.”

  But at that moment Amanda spotted another DHI and started toward it.

  Maybeck.

  Finn’s legs didn’t move. He felt something odd. Like someone was watching him. He spun around.

  Main Street was crowded with people. Finn searched faces, his focus shifting.