“If they shut down the server,” Philby said in a cautionary voice, “the Return button won’t work. It won’t just be you and me—all of us will be trapped in the Syndrome. All of us will be lying in our beds at home like we’re half dead.”
“We’re either doing this, or we’re not,” Finn said. “It’s a little late to be debating the merits of the plan. Forget us. Forget the Syndrome. Think of Wayne. Think of Jess’s dream, or premonition, or whatever it is that Jess has. Wayne’s in trouble and he needs us. End of story.”
Philby looked over at Finn and nodded. “You’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
“Okay. So do it.”
“I’m going to do it now.”
“So why aren’t you moving?” Philby asked.
“Because now you’ve scared me. I mean, what happens if there are people in there?”
“I thought we just got past that.”
“I thought so too,” Finn said, turning around and crossing the wide tunnel to the door on the opposite side.
He paused there in front of the unmarked door. A pair of voices came and went at the far end of the tunnel they were in. He knew he mustn’t be seen going into this room, and so he waited to make sure the voices weren’t coming toward them. But there was more to it than that. He also stopped there to clear his head. He forced his fear into a tiny box at the back of his mind and he closed the top of that box and he locked it. He washed all concern and all sensations from his body, taking a deep cleansing breath and feeling his connection to his senses expelled with his exhalation. Even thought left him, so that he existed in an ether, a fragile place where he wasn’t even Finn any longer. He wasn’t even sure he was—that he existed at all. He was a bundle of jumping atoms, light generated by a series of computer-controlled projectors. If he could become pure light, without thought and without form or shape, no physical barrier could stop him.
He imagined the train coming down the tunnel and he stepped forward and passed right through the door into the humming room on the other side. The light from his own projection created a glow in the otherwise dim room. He looked left: no one at the desk there; right: row after row of shelving lined up in stacks like a library. The shelves were not filled with books but with computer servers, network hubs and switching, terabyte hard drives, routers, and thousands of flashing, colorful LEDs. It was all neat and organized with labels attached to each shelf below a device.
Old McDaniel’s Farm read a computer printout, hanging like a sign on the endcap of the one of the stacks. A server farm. A computer nerd’s paradise.
Slowly, Finn allowed his thoughts to flow again. His senses came back online and he not only processed cognitively but he felt his fingers and toes tingle.
He turned and reached for the doorknob. His hand went right through the door. He withdrew it and closed his eyes, trying to speed himself back to a less pure condition, where his body would be more than light.
He hadn’t told any of the others, but this transition had become increasingly difficult for him. He could easily—perhaps too easily—transport himself into the state of pure DHI—all-clear he called it—a state in which he possessed no material quality, in which he was capable of walking through walls or on top of water. But the way back to his human self was sometimes harder. It occasionally took him more time to transition back to being part DHI–part human. He wasn’t sure when that scale had tipped, but it had; he didn’t know what it meant, but knew it meant something. He tried the handle again, and this time it turned. But he looked down at his own hand as if it belonged to somebody else.
And maybe it did.
Philby came through quickly.
“Jeesh! What took you so long?”
Finn shut and locked the door behind them.
“Heaven!” said Philby, spreading his arms as he faced the stacks of servers. Finn’s primary job was to get them in and out of the locked room, a job half accomplished. His other job—checking the maintenance records—would have to wait.
Philby searched the aisles, row after row of servers, inspecting the labels taped beneath each black brick. Unlike Finn, he didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by the maze of wires and display of blinking lights. He located a vertical column of six machines and a keyboard and screen that accessed them. Within minutes he’d removed the portable hard drive and was downloading the data from the Soundstage B shoot.
He typed frantically, at a speed Finn had trouble believing.
“Done a little bit of this, have you?”
“For me,” Philby said, never slowing, “this is like a violinist playing a Stratosphere—”
“Stradivarius,” Finn corrected him.
“Whatever. Just like that. I dream of messing with this stuff. For most companies, it would be a major deal to have one of these SGIs. I’m looking at six right here. Four more, a couple rows behind us. They’ve got everything in here: Solaris, Red Hat, Linux. All the top-of-the-line Macs. For all I care, you can just leave me here.”
“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 highligh
ted 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.
He backed out of the error log and found his way to the wider view that showed the tubes and wires. There were six codes pulsing. He wrote them down and circled them repeatedly so he wouldn’t forget them.
At the bottom of the screen Finn saw an identifying marker change. Beside CURRENTLY ONLINE: 1 flashed and then changed to 2.
“Philby…I’ve got a visitor.”
Philby didn’t hesitate this time. He hurried to Finn’s side and ran a finger along beneath the Cast Member Monitor line.
“Dang,” he said. “We need to find an exit.”
“An exit? Can’t I just close the session?”
“It doesn’t exactly work like that. Once you’re in this world, you’re in it.”
“Sounds familiar,” Finn quipped.
“The main problem being,” Philby said, taking a look at the door leading to the Utilidor, “as long as your avatar’s online they may be able to determine which station you’re using.”
“What! So get me offline!”
“I just told you: it doesn’t work like that,” Philby replied anxiously. “It’s a virtual world. And…maybe…” He sprinted around the stack and into the next aisle and began tugging on cords and trying to sort through the massive bundles of multicolored wires. Finn was alongside him now. Philby grabbed and pulled Finn’s finger so that it pointed to a particular blue wire. Philby then followed that same wire as it twisted and traveled along the stack to another set of boxes. He pinched a plastic clip, and pulled the wire from a box.
Together, they raced around to the other side. Finn couldn’t remember seeing Philby so flustered. He’d been mumbling to himself for the past thirty seconds.
“Tracers…user logs…spiders…not good, not good…”
They reached the terminal Finn had been using. His avatar was gone.
“You did it!” he said, pounding Philby on the back.
“No…no…no….” Philby muttered. “Not really. Not so fast. Not quickly enough.”
He sprinted to the next aisle and typed even faster than before. But he kept looking at the room’s main door as if expecting someone.
“What the heck is going on?” Finn said.
“You know that wire I disconnected?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve got to reconnect it.”
“What?”
“We can’t leave that kind of thing behind. It’ll give us away. Don’t you get it?”
“Apparently not,” Finn said.
“These are computers.”
Finn waved for him to give him more, like they were playing a game of charades.
“They’re self-monitoring. They keep logs of everything they do. Every computer does, these especially so because they’re like ten times more serious than anything you’ve seen. Our being on here—it’s all there. That’s not a worry as long as no one goes looking for it.”
“But now…my avatar…someone’s going to come looking.”
“It’s possible. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Do they know I was in this room?”
“By now? It’s possible,” Philby repeated.
“So what are we doing here?”
“Plug that wire back in,” Phiby said. “I’m wrapping up.”
“But—”
“The wire!” Philby yelled.
Finn took off, slipped and fell, got to his feet and found the wire. Philby had reached the door by the time Finn caught up.
“Go!” Finn said. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll meet you in the apartment. We left the remote at the Studios, remember? We’ll have to go back there to return.”
“But—”
“Don’t wait for me!” It was Finn’s turn to yell.
Philby nodded.
They unlocked and cracked open the door. Philby peered out. “It’s clear,” he said.
Finn pushed his DHI out the door.
He locked the door from the inside, and attempted to calm himself, to clear his mind. His fingers tingled. He stepped forward.
He crashed into the door. He was not yet pure DHI, not yet able to pass through the door. The more he thought about someone coming for him, the more difficult it was to make himself clear enough. He debated just leaving the door unlocked, but it was sure to give them away, certain to make them audit the computers and discover the intrusions. He had to do this.
He closed his eyes and focused on a song, humming to himself. Out of nowhere Amanda’s face appeared in his imagination. That combination: Amanda in his eyes and the song “With You” in his ears and…
He walked through the door and into the hall.
Looked both ways.
No one coming.
He walked out, in no particular hurry, his feet and fingers beginning to tingle again. The song stayed in his head, the image of her in his mind.
He felt safe. He felt good.
He felt totally confused.
17
“HOW DID YOU SLEEP, sweetheart?” Finn’s mother asked him the next morning.
In the midst of cooking pancakes and bacon, she had her hair pinned up with what looked like a chopstick, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows, and her right hand on the wrong end of a spatula, scraping some burned stuff off the blade with a determined red fingernail.
“Okay, I guess,” Finn replied. His knees ached, his head felt fat, and he was beyond thirsty. He swilled down a glass of orange juice and went to the fridge to pour himself another.
“Anything fun going on at school today?”
“No.”
“There must be something.”
“No. It’s boring. Same as always.”
“But you like school.”
“Sometimes.”
“Then let’s make today one of those times!” she said brightly.
He could have bitten her. She came out with lines like this that didn’t even sound like her. She was probably reading another book like Parenting Your Teenage Monster or Be-Teen the Terror. She tended to quote whatever advice she was getting, whether from a friend, a book, or a podcast.
“You lose any more weight, Mom, and you’re going to disappear.”
“I’m just keeping fit. Fit is it!”
She flipped the pancake.
“Not too long on that side, okay?” The up-facing side was the color of coffee groun
ds. She was an okay cook most of the time, though she could trash the entire kitchen just making peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches. There was currently not an open square inch on the countertop, unless you counted the half acre of spilled pancake flour, or the used teabag with Lake Earl Grey surrounding it.
“Disney sent us a letter about the DHIs being installed on the cruise ships. They’re still working on that.”
“That would be pretty good,” Finn said.
“That would be very good,” she corrected. “For your college fund especially.”
“You know Wayne?” Finn said.
“Yes?”
“He’s missing.” The words came out of Finn’s mouth and he wondered exactly where he’d thought he was going with this.
“Missing?”
“Never mind.” He wished there were a rewind button for real life, like Adam Sandler’s in Click. He could have put it to good use.
“Missing, how?” she said.
“As in no one can find him.”
“There’s no reason to be fresh, young man.”
She delivered the pancakes. He considered asking her for a jackhammer but worried she might send him to school with no breakfast at all.
“That’s none of your concern,” she said quickly, her mind jumping to the obvious next step.
“I know.”
“Finn?”
“I know, Mother. I get it.”
“Tell me you won’t get involved in something like that.”
“Something like what?”
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said, trying to move her away from the promise. He wouldn’t lie to his parents. He would, and could, stretch the truth to the cosmic edge of reality, but not tell an outright lie.
“Should I call someone?” she asked. “About Wayne I mean?”
“I don’t know. Who would you call?”
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