"Disney-Double-Cross"

Chapter 5

Turbo had felt a strange tingling a fraction of a second before he and the Cy-Bug contacted the molten cola stream. "They lied to me", he thought, before his vision of the world dissolved into a blinding white...then, he saw his world coalesce into a strange room, with a man with a mustache seated behind a desk who said, with a Scottish accent, "Captain Kirk, we got him!"

"Who the heck is 'Captain Kirk'", Turbo thought as he slumped to the deck.

Another man, holding some sort of device, ran to him and scanned him and after a few seconds said "His code is complete and undamaged. He'll be fine."

Turbo had too much to think about..."What game are these guys from? Are they from a game at all? Is there a digital afterlife?"

The two men, Scotty and Bones, helped Turbo to his feet as Captain Kirk entered the transporter room.

"Turbo, I'm Captain Kirk of the Federation Starship Enterprise. Welcome aboard."

The two shook hands as Turbo, completely bewildered, said "So...I'm not dead?"

"No. You're in our game, safe now."

"How...how did you guys do that? How did you save me?"

"Turbo, we've been here since 1983, but you've never visited us."

"I'm not an astronaut, I'm a kart racer. Don't you guys ever visit Tapper's? That's where everyone gathers at the end of the day."

Kirk looked at Bones and Scotty, and asked "Why didn't we ever take shore leave at Tapper's?"

The two men looked at each other and shrugged in unison. Part of the game has the ship stopping at Star Bases, so there was really no need to go outside of their game.

Turbo was more composed now, and asked "How did you know what was going on, how did you know I was in trouble, and how did you rescue me?"

"Everyone in the arcade knew about the movie being filmed, so we were able to watch the filming from the viewscreen on the bridge. Spock didn't like the idea of merging your code with the Cy-Bug's code so he made a copy of your code and saved it to the transporter file."

"Transporter file?"

Kirk realized that he'd gone way over Turbo's head, and smiled as he explained that in the arcade, the transporter had the ability to beam characters from one game to another without passing through Game Central Station. They'd been monitoring the filming and when things went awry, had a transporter lock on Turbo and beamed him safely away from certain death.

Game Central Station was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop, save for the protests of the Disney people's avatars as Ralph dragged them out of Sugar Rush with the help of Duncan and Wynnchel. "Surge, make sure that their plug doesn't get unplugged. We want answers and they're not leaving until we get them!" Tamora said "Maybe we ought to drop them off with the Cy-Bugs and let them die like Turbo!"

The mood was ugly as everyone gathered in front of Tapper's. Shouts of "They murdered Turbo!" spread through the angry crowd of digital characters. The wranglers showed the equipment they'd used to control Turbo's transformations to everyone and pleaded that they couldn't explain why it didn't work when it absolutely needed to. "Dead batteries", someone shouted. "This has no 'batteries', it's all controlled from the computers in the trailer in Litwak's parking lot."

"It should have worked..." was all they could say.

Ralph had heard enough..."OK, Tamora, I like your idea. Everyone in favor of feeding these lying cretins to the Cy-Bugs raise their hands!"

A deafening cheer went up, but the Disney people said nothing because they knew that there was no way that their bodies in the human world could be harmed, the filming was complete, and they would merely be disconnected once the Cy-Bugs consumed their avatars.

The angry crowd began to head towards the entrance to "Hero's Duty".

(end of chapter)