The Great Interactive Dream Machine Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Power Outage

  Chapter 2 - Two Preppies and a Poodle

  Chapter 3 - How Fossils Are Made

  Chapter 4 - One of Those Days

  Chapter 5 - A Couple of Complete Strangers

  Chapter 6 - Better Than Grown

  Chapter 7 - What Hunks?

  Chapter 8 - How Bad Can It Be?

  Chapter 9 - The Threshold of a New Frontier

  Chapter 10 - The Watcher

  Chapter 11 - Now or Never

  Chapter 12 - Trouble in the Making

  Chapter 13 - Backward Is Forward

  Chapter 14 - Doodlebug Summer

  Chapter 15 - Three More Wishes

  Chapter 16 - Victory in Europe

  Chapter 17 - Just a Few Flowers, Just a Few Friends

  Lost in cyberspace?

  Aaron went back to the computer room to store his formula.

  Then it happened.

  And this time it hurt.

  The walls bulged. The floor buckled. The terminals blurred. I seemed to be seeing Aaron through one of those fun-house mirrors. He’d laid one finger on his keyboard, and it was all happening again: Cellular reorganization

  Personal disintegration

  Interactivity

  I went blind for a minute. Pains shot around me where I’d never had them before. Feet, spine, you name it.

  Then it all stopped.

  There was a little steel-gray haze drifting in the room. But why was I hurting so bad?

  And where was Aaron?

  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 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn 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., 1996

  Published by Puffin Books,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1998

  Copyright © Richard Peck, 1996

  All rights reserved

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

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17435-7

  [1. Computers—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P338Gr 1996 [Fic]—dc20 95-53263 CIP AC

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Madge and Bill Briggs,

  and

  Mei Li

  1

  Power Outage

  My best friend used to be Aaron Zimmer.

  Aaron’s always been the shortest kid in class at Huckley School and the smartest. I’ve always been his best friend. Practically his only friend. We even get in the same trouble together, and we live in the same apartment building. I live on the twelfth floor. He lives up in the penthouse. We’ve been tight since preschool. You can ask anybody. But now in the spring of sixth grade, I don’t see that much of him. When I do, his mind is somewhere else. He’s mentally missing.

  My mom says it’s puberty. She says that when people hit puberty, they begin to go in different directions. Some of them go into orbit. This may explain Aaron. Basically he only relates to his computers. He spends so much time at his motherboard that he’s forgetting how to interface with humans.

  You get this with people who were given too much software at an early age. Call them vidkids. Some of them have logged so many screen hours with Gauntlet, SolarStriker, and PlayStation that they can’t tell virtual reality from reality. Aaron may be an example of the worst-case scenario. If you X-rayed his skull, you’d probably see microchips and copper wiring. Just kidding, but I’m serious.

  We’re pretty different. Maybe too different. I like to read R. L. Stine. He likes to read The Internet Yellow Pages. In my dreams I’m falling from high places and seeing scary faces at windows. In Aaron’s dreams he’s probably surfing the Net and exploring Donkey Kong country. I like the weird and unexplained. Aaron is weird and unexplained.

  Not everything we used to do was that much fun, but at least we did it together. Now on this spring Saturday I had zilch to do and nobody to do it with. Central Park was in full bloom. It was the perfect weekend, and it might as well be a school day. Why even get up?

  I was up anyway, eating cold cereal. At the other end of the table was a letter in a Huckley School envelope. In my experience, any letter from a school to parents is bad news.

  We try to be quiet on Saturday mornings because Miss Mather, the old lady who lives right below us on eleven, complains even if we’re walking around in sock feet. She sends up little notes that say:Stop jumping on my head.

  Our apartment was beginning to stir. Mom was moving around in her room, and I heard whining. It was either Heather’s hair dryer or Heather herself. Heather’s my sister: seventh grade. I had a couple more minutes alone with my cereal, tops.

  I’d brought a book to the table we had to read for Mr. Headbloom’s class. It’s Time and Again by Jack Finney, not a bad book considering that it isn’t by R. L. Stine. Besides, there was going to be a quiz.

  Mom came in.

  On weekdays she dresses for success to go to her job at Barnes Ogleby. This morning she was in her Saturday gear: jeans, penny loafers, and her oldest college sweatshirt, the one with SAVE THE WHALES across the front. Mom’s pretty even without makeup.

  On her way to the coffee maker, she detoured to give me my morning hug. For a moment all I could see was SAVE THE WHALES. “Josh, summer’s coming, and we have to talk.”

  If you’re a kid anywhere else, summer’s great. If you’re a kid in New York, summer’s just another problem.

  “We really ought to call your dad.” Mom tapped the letter from Huckley School. “We should get his feedback.”

  Dad’s in public relations, working out in Chicago right now on the Lucky Mutt dog food account. My parents aren’t exactly separated, but Mom says they get along better when they’re in different time zones.

  Then it happened.

  The world went dim. The light over the table winked out. Every plug-in appliance went dead. The digital clock clicked once and went down. In the distance the whining stopped, so it was the hair dryer, not Heather.

  Mom and I waited until Heather stumbled into the room looking like a damp dog. She was only about half blow-dried. “Mo-om,” she said, “nothing works.” Being almost thirteen, Heather figured anything that went wrong was Mom’s fault.

  When the power goes, we look down from the front windows to see if the traffic lights are out. If they are, the whole city’s shut down. This happens, and it’s an excellent time not to be in the subway or trying to do ATM banking. Besides, it’s interesting to see what happens to traffic without stoplights. Everybody stops. Then everybody goes at once. But the light down on Fifth and Seventy-second was operational. So it was probably just our building. This also happens.

  Mom looked at me. �
�Aaron,” she said.

  I had to admit it was probably Aaron. His bedroom is so fully computerized that it could overload all the generators of a major nation.

  Heather was making a turban out of her towel. “Typical,” she sighed. “We ought to move to another building. I need more closets anyway.”

  While Mom went looking for a coffeepot that didn’t plug in, I slipped out to check on Aaron. The apartment was pretty shadowy, so I wouldn’t be missed for a minute.

  Out of habit, I left through the front door. But it was dark as a pocket out in the hall. Kicking sounds and swearing came from behind the elevator doors, so this was Vince the doorman. He’d probably been delivering the mail to our doors. From the sound of the swearing, Vince was trapped somewhere between our floor and eleven.

  The only other way out is through the kitchen door and up the back stairs. As I crept past Mom, she said, “Josh, we really do need to talk.”

  “What about?” came Heather’s voice behind me. “Is Josh in trouble at school again?”

  By then I was out of there. When I’d climbed all the way up to the Zimmers’ kitchen door, I was breathing hard. I pushed the bell. Habit again. I knocked, and the Zimmers’ housekeeper opened up, holding a lighted candle. She doesn’t speak much English, and she wasn’t in that great a mood either.

  “Aaron home?”

  “And how,” she said.

  Behind her the oven door was open. She’d been taking out a half-baked cake that was never going to rise. The Zimmers have an all-electric kitchen.

  Their place is a nice spread across the top of the building. About half the roof is their terrace, professionally planted, with top-of-the-line garden furniture. Their penthouse covers the other half. They have so many rooms that they don’t run into each other very often. From the windows of their all-white living room you can see most of Manhattan.

  I crept through it. Ophelia’s usually on her silk cushion on the windowsill. She’s a French poodle, white to color-coordinate with the room, and she’s mainly Mrs. Zimmer’s dog. When she sees me, she tends to bound over and try to take a chunk out of my ankle. Ophelia, I mean, not Mrs. Zimmer. So you always check to see where Ophelia is. She wasn’t on her cushion. Her nose was sticking out from under a sofa. Something had scared her under the furniture, and I thought I knew what.

  I followed the smell of a small electrical fire down a long hall to Aaron’s room.

  I pushed open his door. He’s got a bed in there and a stack of Byte magazines from the school media center, and a book called Navigating the Internet. But the rest of the room is an ultra-high-tech, state-of-the-art, stand-alone microsystem workstation.

  It’s built around a pair of Big Blue’s power PC’s with a couple of high-definition TV screens and more addons and video assets than you can believe. We’re talking mainframe here. It goes to the ceiling, with wires and cables snaking around the floor. Aaron calls it his personalized blendo-technopolis. He uses terms like this, and I don’t know what they mean.

  As late as last winter if Aaron wanted to mega-diddle his data on two keyboards at once, he had to use the computers in the school media center. We were both this close to getting in big trouble for being in there when we weren’t supposed to be. Now I noticed that his home workstation had doubled in size.

  Aaron’s parents pretty much give him anything he wants. But that’s usually the way. Your best friend’s parents give him more than your parents give you.

  I didn’t see Aaron. Needless to say, the lights were out. Steel-gray haze hung in the room. I looked all around. Then I checked behind the door, and there he was, crumpled in the corner. He’s a funny-looking kid anyway. Very pale face. Bright-red hair going in every direction. Small feet. Small hands. Small all over. Today he looked like they’d started to electrocute him, but the governor called.

  He has very baggy eyes for a kid, and they were really staring. He was holding a soldering iron in one hand. The fingers on the other hand were working away, punching up something in the air. He does that a lot, like he’s working on a keyboard even when no keyboard’s there.

  “Aaron,” I said, “if I touch you, will I fry?”

  “You kidding?” he said. “The electricity’s off.”

  I sighed. “And how did that happen? How did you manage to off the power in a sixteen-story building this time?”

  “I’m thinking power surge.” He began easing up the wall.

  “Power surge? Does that soldering iron in your hand have anything to do with it?”

  He looked surprised to find a soldering iron in his hand. But then he’d just been blasted out of his chair and across the room. Too bad it hadn’t knocked some sense into him. “Oh well,” he said, “back to the drawing board.” Another one of his sayings.

  “Tell me how it happened, Aaron. Talk me through it.”

  “You couldn’t follow it.”

  “Try me.”

  We were standing in front of his technopolis. It was quiet, cooling. It was like some dead civilization. Aaron stroked his chin. “I was trying to go next generation with my equipment. Do you realize that the sixteen-bit Sega and Nintendo technology is already obsolescent now that game systems like 3DO and Atari have started processing data thirty-two or sixty-four bits at a time?”

  “Hadn’t heard,” I said. “You about blacked out the Eastern Seaboard so you could play computer games?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand. Why try? That was just an example. You’ve got to keep upgrading. You’ve got to stay on the cutting edge.” He stared up at me, and his eyes were little pink pinwheels. “Nothing is future-proof, Josh.”

  “Let’s start farther back,” I said. “You got up this morning. You went straight to your keyboards without combing your hair or brushing your teeth. You booted up your computers or whatever.”

  “I logged in. I had e-mail,” Aaron said. “And that’s another example. World Wide Web is to e-mail what television is to radio. We keep moving on. Today’s technology is tomorrow’s archaeology. Today you’re happening. Tomorrow you’re history.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You had e-mail.”

  He nodded. “I join channels with a kid out in Hays, Kansas. Met him through a chat room.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His user I.D. is Hayseed. His real name’s Floyd.”

  Floyd?

  “He was pretty excited today,” Aaron said. “He’d just won his county’s Jersey Cattle Club essay contest: ‘Why I Would Like to Own a Jersey Calf.’ He’s heavy into 4-H.”

  I stared. “You’re talking halfway across the country to a kid named Floyd who calls himself Hayseed and wants a cow? Aaron, that hurts. I live in your building. I’m right here.”

  He blinked up at me. “You don’t have e-mail.”

  “Okay, forget Floyd. By the way, what’s your user I.D.?”

  “A2Z,” Aaron said. At school we call him the A-to-Z man because he’s named Aaron Zimmer and because he knows everything from A to Z. Thinks he does.

  “What did you do next?”

  His eyes got shifty. “I’m working on a new formula.” The haze was lifting, and he glanced around the room. “I don’t want to say too much about it. I don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Don’t worry about my hands,” I said. “Just talk.”

  The only time we can talk these days is when his computers are down.

  “Here’s just an example,” he mumbled. “In the next-generation stage we’re looking at a holographic projector instead of a printer. Right? Transmission of three-D imagery, okay?”

  “Hold it, Aaron. This is beginning to sound familiar.” Because I remembered how he once got carried away with something he called “cellular reorganization.” And I mean carried away. It meant being sent by your computer to other times. It meant that all the cells in your body reorganized and shipped out. I’m not saying it didn’t work, but he never got the bugs out of the formula. I was hoping he was over it by now.
/>   “It’s not about cellular reorg—”

  “That was an early stage.”

  “Where are we now?”

  “Is it going to do me any good to recap fiber-optic potential for you?”

  “Probably not.” I looked at him. And I happened to notice his eyes were practically shifting off his face.

  “F.L.I.R.,” he said, almost whispering.

  “F.L.I.R.?”

  He threw out a small hand. “Shut up about it. We’re talking a top-secret military device: forward-looking infrared system.”

  “I’ll hate myself for asking, but if it’s top-secret government stuff, how did you get it? E-mail?”

  “Keep your voice down. I was hacking around at random and found myself in the Big P.”

  “Big P?”

  “Pentagon,” he breathed.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Aaron, give me a break. You’re a troll, but you’re no mole.”

  But did he hear me? Forget about it. “What I needed was optimum programming for enough high-intensity three-dimensional image shifting that I could store here at home and digitize for any computer I happened to have access to. The Big P thinks F.L.I.R. is just a kind of post-radar for spotting triple A.”

  “Triple A?”

  He sighed. “Anti-aircraft artillery.”

  “One of these days you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot, Aaron. Just bottom-line me.”

  “I put together a formula, and the government helped. We’re taxpayers, am I right? So then I found I could download imagery from the server at the rate of sixty pictures a second, enhanced by F.L.I.R.” He patted a set-top box in his technopolis. “When I get this baby wired and running, I’ve got ten times the computing power of a top-of-the-line PC, with the added capacity for night fighting if we’re interested. When you’re downloading imagery from the server at the rate of sixty pictures a second, it can reorganize your total body and move it out. We could probably even bomb some other country if we had warheads. Theoretically.”