Disney in Shadow

1.

Finn Whitman ran hard, then all the harder still, Donnie Maybeck by his side and keeping up. By day, Tom Sawyer Island in the Magic Kingdom was an intriguing tangle of trees and bushes interrupted by meandering pathways. By night, it was something altogether different.

Especially with four insanely angry, sword-carrying pirates bearing down on you, followed closely by an alien with a genetic malfunction that posed like Elvis Presley and looked slightly like a cross between a koala bear and a cuddly dog. The guys in the torn T-shirts and calf-length pants had leaped from the shadows surrounding Pirates of the Caribbean - the park having been closed for nearly three hours - immediately in pursuit. Stitch, on the other hand, had appeared out of nowhere.

Finn made the mistake of glancing back at them.

“Don’t look back!” Maybeck called out sharply. “Your face, your skin is like a flashlight. You’ll give us away! Believe me, Whitman, this is when it pays to be yours truly.”

Maybeck thought of himself as God’s answer to everything, and wasn’t afraid to share that opinion. If given half a chance, he would make the point that his great-grandparents had been slaves, and his grandparents sharecroppers on Florida sugarcane plantations; he was fiercely proud of his African American heritage and of the fact that his family were some of the original Floridians, instead of being descendants of snowbird retirees, like Finn and so many of his friends - and their fellow DHIs.

DHI stood for Disney Host Interactive, or Daylight Holographic Image, depending on who you asked. There were five DHIs, including Finn and Maybeck - holographs of teenage hosts that, by day, acted as guides to guests at the Magic Kingdom. (The other three, Philby, Willa, and Charlene, were by now supposed to be awaiting the two boys in the Indian Village across the water from Tom Sawyer Island.)

There was a glitch in the software that projected the holographs in the park: when any of the five teens who’d originally modeled for the DHIs went to sleep at night, they would wake up, not as themselves, but as their holographs, inside the Magic Kingdom. As it turned out this was no glitch - an old guy, a Disney Imagineer named Wayne, had intentionally made this “crossover” possible by rewriting the projection computer code. He’d done this because he’d needed the help of the DHIs to solve a riddle left behind by Walt Disney years before.