Lost in Cyberspace Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - The Mesozoic Era

  Chapter 2 - The Ultimate Computer

  Chapter 3 - The Club Scene

  Chapter 4 - The Last of Fenella

  Chapter 5 - Muggers to the Fourth Power

  Chapter 6 - Aaron Up a Tree

  Chapter 7 - No Seat, No Hands

  Chapter 8 - Alone In the Black Hole

  Chapter 9 - Aaron Zimmer Is Missing

  Chapter 10 - To Horse and Away

  Chapter 11 - A Tasteful Private Residence

  Chapter 12 - Thousands of Afternoons Ago

  Chapter 13 - Possible Breakthrough

  Chapter 14 - The Past People

  Chapter 15 - Cabbages and Kings

  Chapter 16 - A Question of Time

  Chapter 17 - Phoebe’s Question

  Chapter 18 - Midnight on the Nose

  Chapter 19 - Phoebe

  Chapter 20 - Parents’ Night

  Blast from the past

  Aaron was over between two glowing screens. His hands were splaying out over the keyboards. He entered five or six digits. Then it happened. Both screens lit up like Las Vegas. Full-color supergraphics surged. I smelled everything—smoke, flowers, furniture polish. I blinked.

  When I looked again, Aaron was still there. But somebody else was in the room, standing between us. One second she wasn’t there. The next she was.

  “Amiable characters, fleet pacing and witty, in-the-know narration will keep even the non-bookish interested.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  BOOKS BY RICHARD PECK

  Are You in the House Alone?

  Father Figure

  The Ghost Belonged to Me

  Ghosts I Have Been

  The Great Interactive Dream Machine

  Lost in Cyberspace

  Representing Super Doll

  Through a Brief Darkness

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 STZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books for Young Readers,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1995

  Published in Puffin Books, 1997

  Copyright © Richard Peck, 1995

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Peck, Richard.

  Lost in cyberspace / by Richard Peck. p. cm.

  Summary: While dealing with changes at home, sixth-grader Josh and his friend

  Aaron use the computers at their New York City prep school to travel through time,

  learning some secrets from the school’s past and improving Josh’s home situation.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17434-0

  [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Schoots—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.P338Lo 1995 [Fic]—dc20 94-48330 CIP AC

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated with thanks to Jana Fine and Pat Scales

  1

  The Mesozoic Era

  After the separation, Dad moved to Chicago, and Mom decided to go back to work, so she was practicing getting up early. She’d bought some new outfits. Heather and I were dressed for school. I go to the Huckley School for Boys, so I was in dress code:black blazer

  blue-and-white Huckley tie

  big shirt

  gray flannel pants

  any shoes but sneakers

  Heather goes to the Pence School for Girls:white blouse, choice of style, with collar

  Pence plaid skirt

  any shoes but sneakers

  Heather’s shoe statement was lace-up black blobs with stainless steel eyelets and tire-tread soles. Each of her shoes weighed an easy six pounds.

  “There are children with tragic foot deformities who have to wear corrective shoes much better looking than those,” Mom often said to Heather. “And cheaper.”

  This morning Mom had some news for us. It was about somebody named Fenella, who was coming from England to live with us. Mom had found Fenella on an Internet link-up called “Au Pair Exchange.”

  “And what’s an O Pear supposed to be?” Heather was tearing open a Pop-Tart and examining its insides, which is a thing she does. “It sounds like a baby-sitter who never leaves. Who needs her? I’m virtually thirteen and emotionally fourteen. I missed the Gifted and Talented Program by this much. I can sit myself. I’ll O Pear Josh.”

  She jerked a thumb at me. And I’m only one grade behind her. “I’ll be the 0 Pear who never leaves,” Heather said.

  I slid out of my chair and checked out the window for the school bus. We live twelve floors above Fifth Avenue. The trees over in Central Park were bare branches with wrinkled balloons left over from summer. The Huckley bus was held up at the light on the corner. It’s a Chrysler minivan with a blue-and-white paint job. Heather’s Pence bus was in the distance behind a tie-up.

  “Buses,” I said.

  “Don’t think of Fenella as a baby-sitter,” Mom said.

  “I’m not thinking about her at all,” Heather said. “She’s the farthest thing from my mind. And where are we going to put her? We use the maid’s room for storage.”

  “And don’t think of her as a maid,” Mom said. “Au pairs are not baby-sitters. And they aren’t servants. They’re English girls from very nice backgrounds. They come over here to help out with families and to see American life. They’re here to expand their horizons, and ours.”

  Heather said, “My horizons are already—”

  But Mom said, “Whoa,” because I was heading for the door. She had new glasses with giant lenses for her upcoming career. She looked me over. Standing, I’m as tall as she is sitting. “How did you learn to tie a tie that well?” She peered at me. “It even has a little dimple under the knot. That’s professional work.”

  “Practice,” I said.

  “Is the day coming when you won’t need your old ma for anything?”

  “Not right away,” I said.

  “I have the final interview today,” Mom said, “at Barnes Ogleby.”

  “B.O.,” Heather said.

  “I’ll be home before you two are unless they let school out early again. Why can’t schools run the full day anymore?”

  “Because we’re pressured enough.” Heather clutched her forehead. “We need a lot more time off than we get.”

  “All the more reason for Fenella. I don’t want you turning into a couple of latchkey kids,” Mom said. “Wet or dry?” she said to me.

  “Dry as possible.”

  She planted a careful kiss on my cheek. It was hardly damp, and she didn’t have her lipgloss on yet.

  I didn’t give Fenella any more thought. I mainly think about what’s happening now. When I left the apartment for school, Heather was still popping her tart. We try not to take the same elevator.

  Aaron Zimmer was on it, coming down from the penthouse. He’s in my year at Huckley, but shorter. We call him the A-to-Z man because of his name and because he knows everything from A to Z. Some of what he knows is actual fact. Some of it is just stuff he says.

  “Yo,” we said. I stick my homework into whatever book. Everybody but Aaron carries g
ear to school in a backpack. He carries a briefcase-style laptop computer with a certain amount of software. Even without storing it electronically, he has a lot of signal compression in his biological memory bank. He’s what they used to call a smart kid.

  “Six hundred and sixty-five more class periods till summer,” he said. “I estimate that at seven classes a day, five days a week, allowing for holidays, spring break, and field trips.”

  “What about—”

  “I’ve factored in fire drills. The field trip today is dinosaurs.”

  The Huckley School catalogue tells parents that all its students are to be interactively computer literate for the challenges of twenty-first century corporate competition.

  This means they’ve walled off one end of the media center and have a couple of terminals in there. I’m not that much into it. Also, I spell better in real life than on the keyboard. Aaron has named the computer room the Black Hole. That’s his personal name for it, possibly because it doesn’t have natural light. He’s in there most of the day. You can sign out of classes and go there if you can get a teacher to cover for you.

  They tell us that in the future we won’t have to leave our screens for global video-conferencing across the information superhighway. All we’ll need is a mouse and a modem and we’ll never need to go outdoors.

  But we get out quite a bit for field trips. So we were looking at another day at the Natural History Museum. You can get all this edutainment on CD-ROM. But in the winter we have two field trips a week to keep the restlessness down.

  At the museum, they threw our class in with the fourth and fifth grades. The fourth graders aren’t even in middle school yet, but we integrate with them for field trips to get them ready for us. Even the fourth graders have been coming to see the dinosaurs for years.

  “All they do is stand around like dorks,” said a fifth grader, meaning the dinosaurs. “What this place needs is some electronic manipulation. They could use some digital film techniques.”

  “Kids,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

  We passed up the headphones. Aaron had the whole dinosaur evolution stored and was happy to display his own personal version of it.

  “The jury is still hung about whether dinosaurs were hot-blooded or cold like your contemporary reptiles,” he remarked. “The speed of their movements argues for hot blood.”

  We moved into the Hall of Mongolian Vertebrates.

  “In Asian deserts fossilized nestlings have been uncovered along with clutches of eggs. This means dinosaurs conducted family life. To defend against the meat-eaters, the larger herbivores developed a herd mentality.”

  A herd of fourth graders were hanging around us by now. Aaron talked them right through to the extinction of dinosaurs, touching lightly on the giant asteroid theory.

  They listened, but some of them were still confused by “fossilized nestlings.”

  “Say hello to the baluchitheres,” he said in passing, “ancient cousins of your modern rhino.”

  Then he summed up by saying, “The only certain fact about dinosaurs is that no species was ever purple and named Barney.”

  The fourth graders stared.

  Now the museum cafeteria was in sight. A huge, long-necked, small-headed shadow fell over us.

  It was Mr. Headbloom, the teacher in charge. He has us for homeroom, and he’s our reading teacher. He calls the reading class Linear Decoding. You’d think teachers would be impressed by Aaron. He has all this knowledge he doesn’t even have to call up on a screen. But with teachers he’s not that popular. Mr. Headbloom is glad to sign him out of class to go to the Black Hole anytime Aaron wants.

  “Zimmer,” Mr. Headbloom said, “knock off the voice-over and let the fourth graders interface with the exhibits as units.”

  As the old Huckley teachers like Mr. L. T. Thaw die off, they’re replaced by mouse potatoes like Mr. Headbloom who talk like this. We went in and did lunch.

  2

  The Ultimate Computer

  Aaron had goat cheese on seven-grain bread, being a vegetarian—herbivore. I had the beef burrito.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Dinosaurs just don’t do it for me anymore. I mean, they’re all dead and gone, right? Who’d want them around anyway? Hitting a deer on the highway is bad enough.”

  Aaron had his laptop on the lunch table. He was idly punching up something on it with his left hand, then squinting at his screen.

  “Look, the past is over,” I said. “It’s okay for museums, but we’ve got enough problems without digging up the old days. Am I right or what?”

  Aaron dug a grain out from between his teeth. “I have a theory.” He has a lot of them. “And I think modern cybernetics will bear me out sooner or later. As we know, science is slow.”

  His left hand was still playing his laptop like a piano. He can think out of at least two compartments of his brain at the same time.

  “As I see it, there are a couple of ways to approach the past. You can dig it up, like dinosaurs, which is basically pre-electronic.”

  “There’s cloning too,” I said. “DNA and like that.”

  “Forget cloning. That’s not experiencing the past. That’s reproducing it.”

  “There’s virtual reality,” I said.

  “That’s show business,” Aaron said.

  “Or you can get into your time machine,” which was my last idea.

  Aaron sighed. “Josh, I can read your mind. Time machine to you means this thing made out of sheet metal with ten-speed gears, flashing lights, and little puffs of smoke coming out of a tailpipe. A contraption.”

  “With seat belts,” I said.

  “Forget it,” he said. “Grow up.” Sometimes he can look at you just like a teacher.

  “You can dig up the past. Or you can really test the electronic limits and actually be there. It’s a question of dialing into the cosmic internet. The past isn’t necessarily over. It’s just piping in on a parallel plane.” Aaron ran a finger around his collar, which is a thing he does. I think his mom still ties his tie. “Do you follow me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. You’re like this in class. You’re breathing steady. Your eyes are open. But nobody’s home. Your modem’s unplugged. Let me try it another way.” He tapped the table with a finger covered in goat-cheese crumbs.

  “We’re looking ahead to maybe five hundred TV channels available to the general viewing public.”

  “So?”

  “So how about five hundred and one?”

  “You mean the five hundred and first channel is the real past if you could just find a way of calling it up?”

  “You’re scanning in the right direction,” Aaron said, “but I know how you think. You picture yourself sitting in front of a screen viewing the past like an old movie, with a bottle of Snapple in your hand.”

  “But big screen,” I said, “and better than VHS quality.”

  Aaron rolled his eyes, so I said, “What you’re saying is that the past is still happening if you know where to look?”

  “Cyberspatially,” said the A-to-Z man. “Or in layman’s terms, yes.”

  “Just how many people are going to be able to channel-surf into another time?” I try not to swallow all Aaron’s theories. I try to be skeptical.

  He shrugged. “Who can say? Maybe we’re already doing it and don’t notice. We sleep a third of the time. Teenagers sleep more than that. Who knows where you are when you’re asleep? Not all your circuitry is shut down. Think about dreams.”

  “I dream a lot about falling.”

  “Who doesn’t? That’s the first fear babies have. We haven’t been babies for ten years. Dreams are strange, and the whole world’s strange to a baby, right? And scary. Maybe dreams aren’t memories. Maybe they’re happening.”

  “Then you wake up and you’re back to real time?” I said.

  “Both times are real,” Aaron said. “The forward-movement idea of time is a pretech human way of explaining the unk
nown. It’s a primitive invention, like the rotary-dial phone.”

  “And I have this dream where we’re taking a test at school, except it isn’t exactly Huckley. And if I fail this test, I’m in deep—”

  “Perfect example,” Aaron said. “That could be something from a hundred years ago when flunking a test was serious. You could be living the experience of a kid in a really strict school, in England or somewhere. I mean it’s not about now, right? Buster Brewster has flunked every test since preschool. And does Huckley throw him out or keep him back a year or beat him with paddles? No such luck. Not as long as his parents keep paying tuition.”

  Aaron shouldn’t even have mentioned Buster Brewster, because Buster himself appeared at our table. We don’t have bullies at Huckley. We call them hyperactive. Buster was the main one in our grade.

  He whacked the back of Aaron’s head and reached across him for our salt shaker. Buster was going from table to table, loosening the tops of the salt shakers like he does in the school cafeteria. There’s nothing too original about his thinking. He wrenched ours loose with his mighty fist. Salt rained all over the table.

  “Don’t even think about tightening that,” he said. Buster’s voice hasn’t changed yet, but it’s lower than ours. “Make my day, wusses.” Then he lumbered on to the next table.

  “Be nice if Buster Brewster entered another time frame and forgot to come back,” I said, but quietly. “Seriously, though, do you think it’s possible to make contact with other times, outside of dreams?”

  “Josh,” Aaron said, making shapes in the salt, “we’ve already got video beamed over phone wire. We’ve got phone calls digitized over TV cable. We’ve got data-based interactivity going in every direction. We’re talking information explosion. We’re talking new windows of opportunity. Or in layman’s terms, anything’s possible.”

  I’d polished off my burrito. Aaron was picking up scattered grains on his plastic plate with a wet, salty finger. Somehow this annoyed me.