Ridley Pearson - Power Play

Philby’s eyes ticked back and forth-the professor at work. He poked his head through a network of smaller pipes. “Got something,” he said, crawling through. He returned a moment later with a small, greasy hand towel. They took turns cleaning each other’s face.

“We’re still a mess,” Finn said, indicating his clothes. “I’m like a human booger.”

“This is a cardboard recycling station.”

“Yeah? So?”

“It’s closing time. Everyone wants to get home. You think anyone’s going to look twice at a couple of kids coming down the hall wearing cardboard boxes?”

“I like it!”

The boys snuck around to the side where dozens of collapsed cardboard boxes leaned against the wall. Philby sized up two of them, and the boys reassembled them, overlapping the flaps to make them square and sturdy again. Philby then tore sections out of the flaps: one for Finn’s neck, and one for each of his legs on the opposite end of the big box. It was marked doritos. Philby’s was sun chips. They got past the machinery, and Philby quickly helped Finn into his box so that it hung on his shoulders and ended just above his knees, making walking awkward. Philby climbed into his box, but had trouble getting the bottom flaps closed. Finn tried squatting but it did no good-he was just a big cardboard box. Finally, Philby gave up. His box hung from his shoulders with his head sticking out, but the bottom flaps hung down, moving with his every step.

With Finn walking awkwardly in the lead, the two boys moved out into the thirty-foot-wide Utilidor tunnel joining dozens of Cast Members. Philby had been right: no one gave a pair of moving boxes a second thought.

Twenty yards later, they reached a set of windows on their left. Venetian blinds drawn from the inside. They walked past.

“The server room,” Philby hissed from behind.

Finn didn’t need to be reminded. He’d been here more than once. The last time, a certain green-skinned fairy had been here as well.

Philby tried to get his eye to the window at the edge of the blind so he could see through, but the box was too big and it blocked him from leaning in close. He turned to the side, but again the box blocked him from seeing in.

Suddenly, the door swung open. Finn spun around and said to Philby, “Here, I’ll fix it for you.” He spun Philby and his box around, mainly to hide their faces.

Three Cast Members came out of the server room, saying good-night to each other. Two of them wished the other a good vacation, and the man thanked them. Finn turned back as the door was shutting. He got a look into the room, seeing no one. But then, reflected off the door’s safety glass, he caught sight of a man at a desk.

“There’s still at least one guy in there. At a desk over on the far side of the room.”

“Well, we can’t just stand around here. We’ve got to do something.”

Finn said, “The smells coming out of this box are going to make me puke. We’d better keep moving.”

The boys continued on toward an exit where people dressed in street clothes were leaving. Golf carts laden with everything from bottled water to Pirates of the Caribbean muskets streamed past. The Magic Kingdom was shifting into maintenance mode. Stores and restaurants would be restocked. There would be painting and carpentry, cleaning, and polishing carried out within the Park for the next several hours. The boys had to reach the server, gain access, determine which Park Willa was in, and launch a rescue attempt. Every second counted.

Behind them, the server room door opened and two men came out. The second one checked to make sure the door was locked, and the two said good-night.

“Can you manage all clear ?” Philby asked.

“Maybe for a few seconds.”

“Unlock the door and let me in.”

Finn nodded. They stood in front of the door. Willa needed him, Finn reminded himself. He closed his eyes and pictured the train coming. When he opened them again, the blue line shimmered around his filthy sleeve. He stepped through the box and the closed door into the server room. The lights were off. No one was there. Good.

Ten seconds later, he watched the blue line fade until it was gone. He reached out and unlocked the door for Philby.

A few minutes later, two cardboard boxes were discovered by a cleaning crew outside the server room. The cleaners picked up the boxes and carried them to recycling, while on the other side of the wall two nervous boys waited for them to pass.

“We’re in,” Philby said.

Jess sat upright in bed. While dozing over homework, she’d had the kissing dream again. The same steps in the background. She shuddered, feeling guilty and somewhat creepy. Finn was a good enough guy, but she didn’t think about him like that. She felt a little sick to her stomach. No matter how this went down, it couldn’t be good for anyone.

Her reaction was automatic and immediate. Once again she reached under her pillow and came out with her diary. She switched on her book light and flipped through the pages to the earlier sketch. There were details about the stairs to add: they stepped down left to right and-here was the weird part-weren’t equal in size. Bad perspective, she thought, or out of scale. She sketched in some planting that looked familiar to her, though she couldn’t place it. She added some texture to Finn’s face; he looked incredibly lifelike. Filled in his shirt with stripes. Modified the tailored shirt she was wearing in the sketch, only to realize it was a shirt she didn’t like very much. She lent it to Amanda more often than she wore it herself.

Well, there’s a solution, she thought. If she avoided wearing that particular shirt, then she wouldn’t be wearing it in the future. If she didn’t wear it in the future, then she wouldn’t kiss Finn.

Relief flooded through her. So simple. It all came down to avoiding that shirt.

“Here’s something to think about,” Philby said, standing alongside Finn, facing row after row of library-like shelving that held stacked computer servers, Ethernet routers, modems, power supplies, and wireless boxes, all blinking a constellation of colorful lights. “If the OTs are messing with this stuff, this is the time they mess with it: after the Park closes. We may not be alone here for long.”

“Way to cheer me up. Thanks,” said Finn.

Philby reached the DHI server, the electronic brains responsible for both generating their images and communicating those images to an array of Park projectors within the Magic Kingdom. It also tied to other DHI servers through fiber optic lines, in the Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Philby pulled out the tray holding the server’s keyboard and entered his back-door password. The system rejected the password.

“I thought it was a data transmission problem,” he said, half talking to himself. “There’s no attempt limit from the hardwired keyboard, only with remote access. I thought if tried my password from here I’d get in. But that’s not working. What I know for sure is that if I tried remotely and failed three times in a row, remote access would be denied for twenty-four hours. An alarm would be sent up-line. Engineering Base over in the Studios would see the hack attempt and probably notify Security. I’ve got one more remote try, but I know it’s not going to work. It’s the OTs. They were waiting for me.”

“You don’t actually know that.”

“You think it was the Imagineers? Wayne sends me a warning, then locks me out of the server? I don’t think so.”

“So what about Willa?”

Philby just stared at the screen, fuming. “The fob should still work for a Return-it’s sent wirelessly over the cell-phone frequency, a whole different subsystem than a manual Return. But it’s not going to be easy finding her.”