The Great Interactive Dream Machine Read online

“What’s Pencil-Neck doing this summer?” Heather asked. Pencil-Neck is her name for Aaron. Don’t ask.

  “He’s probably going to computer camp,” I mumbled.

  Heather heaved up a big sigh. “So that leaves you, Josh.”

  “Don’t start, Heather,” I said. “We got through the weekend without hearing Mom’s plans for me.”

  “What choice does she have?” Heather said. “It’s too obvious to mention. You’re going to soccer camp. You must look hilarious in soccer shorts. It’s hard to know what to do with you. You’re at the awkward age.”

  “Give me a break, Heather. I’m only fifteen months younger than you.”

  Heather sighed again. “It’s different for a woman, Josh.”

  Then she left.

  Aaron wasn’t on the bus Monday morning. He goes in early to work on the terminals in the media center. If he’s more than five minutes from the nearest computer, he starts keyboarding the air. Then he seemed to have signed himself out of his morning classes. At noon I checked the salad bar in the lunchroom, but he wasn’t there. The trouble with a best friend is that when he’s not around, you don’t have anybody. Later on in life I think you can have more than one friend, but not in sixth grade.

  As I reached for a tray, I got a sudden flash.

  What if Aaron had gone into the media center this morning and started fiddling this new formula of his ... and it had worked? What if he’d had a cellular meltdown or reorganization or whatever? What if he’d e-mailed himself back to the dinosaurs or someplace?

  I panicked.

  Frederick “Fishface” Pierrepont was behind me in line. I nearly trampled him as I headed for the door. I pounded down to the media center. The terminals are in a back room Aaron calls the Black Hole. There was a sign on the door:BOTH COMPUTERS DOWN

  But that didn’t mean anything. Aaron puts up that sign whenever he doesn’t want to be interrupted. Really scared now, I turned the knob.

  Aaron was in there, and so was Mrs. Newbery, the media specialist. She was hunched over one of the keyboards, and Aaron was standing beside her. They were eye to eye, and he was giving her a lesson.

  “It’s a piece of cake, Mrs. Newbery,” he was saying. “The instructions for loading the disk are inside the front cover holder. You’ve inserted the CD-ROM in the drive, right?”

  “Did I?” Mrs. Newbery said faintly.

  “Okay, now choose from your File menu and type ’d colon backslash setup’ in the Command line box. No, wait. Don’t press Enter till you’ve clicked OK.”

  “Okay,” Mrs. Newbery murmured.

  “So now the rest of the instructions are right there on the screen. All you have to do is double-click the icon, and you’re in business.”

  Mrs. Newbery’s hands hung in the air. Aaron patted her shoulder. “Let’s go over it one more time. A bit is a piece of information, remember? And a byte is the basic collection of eight bits that makes computing possible. Are you with me on this?”

  The back of Mrs. Newbery’s head quivered. She turned around and saw me at the door. She seemed relieved. “That’s about all I can absorb today, Aaron. You two better cut along and get some lunch.”

  We left.

  “Adults,” Aaron said out in the hall. “You just can’t make it simple enough for them. Mrs. Newbery doesn’t know a bit from a byte. She doesn’t know a binary code from Bart Simpson. She doesn’t—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Aaron, you scared me bad. I thought you’d ... like, vanished.”

  His pink eyes peered up. “Cut school?”

  “Not exactly. I thought you’d been fooling with your computer-camp formula, and it might have ... I don’t know.”

  “Dialed me into the cosmic Internet and faxed me back to the Tertiary period?” Aaron blinked. “Josh, I’m only in sixth grade. That’s post-graduate-level work. All I’m aiming at is a spreadsheet.”

  The lunchroom lines were short when we got there. I went for a taco, and Aaron made himself a salad that was mainly bean sprouts. No wonder he’s beginning to look like a rabbit.

  This being a boys’ school, there was food on the ceiling, and you couldn’t have heard your own Walkman. Let me explain about Huckley. You’ve got the lower school, which is up through fourth grade. You’ve got the middle school, which is fifth through eighth, and the eighth graders run it. After that it’s the upper school unless you go away to boarding school. Except for Aaron, who’ll probably go straight on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Where they can study him. We settled at the end of a table.

  “The trouble with you, Josh, is that you think computers can do anything.” A bean sprout hung down from Aaron’s mouth and moved when he talked. “You have a very simple view of the whole process.”

  “My trouble is,” I said, “I’m looking at a solid summer of soccer.”

  I shouldn’t have mentioned it.

  A bunch of people loomed over us. A fist hit the table. Our trays jumped. We looked up, and it was Daryl Dimbleby—Terrible Daryl. We don’t have a gang at Huckley. We call it student government. Daryl’s the middle-school president. He won in a landslide because he shaves.

  Nobody around here is named Daryl, but I think he’s a foreign-exchange student from someplace like Oregon. He’s built along lumberjack lines, and he’s a very clean-cut, good-looking guy until you come to his eyes. Then you see he’s mean as a snake.

  He wasn’t alone. He never is. He had his eighth-grade peer group with him and two or three of the larger seventh graders, and Buster Brewster. Buster is the biggest kid in sixth grade, and bad to the bone.

  “Sixth graders, right?” Daryl snapped at us.

  He knew.

  “Why are you two still in the lunchroom?” he said. “Spell it out for me. If there’s anything I hate to see, it’s sixth graders lolling around in the lunchroom like they own the place.” Daryl’s snake eyes bored down into us. “What’s our motto for sixth graders? Remind me.”

  “Eat it and beat it,” Aaron mumbled.

  “You got it,” Daryl said. “So get out of here and stop cluttering up the landscape with your miserable small bodies.”

  He stroked his stubbly chin. “Wait till we get you two into soccer camp. We’ll either make men or mincemeat out of you. Take this as my personal pledge.”

  “Actually,” Aaron said in his changeable voice, “I’ll probably be going to computer c ...” But his words trailed away. His bean sprout hung limp.

  Daryl planted a pair of massive fists on his hips, so his whole peer group did too. “What’s the school rule? Let’s hear it.”

  So his whole bunch chanted: “Eighth grade leads,

  Seventh grade follows,

  Sixth grade crawls,

  Fifth grade wallows.”

  Even Buster Brewster got the words right.

  Aaron and I were more than ready to take our miserable small bodies out of there. But we probably weren’t moving fast enough. Anything could have happened to us. Then Coach Trip Renwick entered the lunchroom.

  This is his first year on the Huckley faculty. He still wears his Dartmouth sweatshirt. The whistle around his neck hangs from a lanyard he probably made as an Eagle Scout.

  “Code alert,” Daryl muttered. “It’s Coach Renwick.” His peer group unclenched their fists. Buster straightened his tie.

  “Hey, fellows, how’s it going?” Coach Renwick boomed, and they all beamed innocently at him. The sparkle off Daryl’s white teeth was blinding.

  Aaron and I escaped.

  On the way to History it hit me like a ton of bricks. In regular P.E. class we play soccer by grade. The worst that can happen is that Buster Brewster will kill you. Buster likes to inflict as much pain as possible, even on his own team. But at soccer camp ...

  “Aaron, Terrible Daryl Dimbleby is going to soccer camp. Why didn’t I think of this? We’ll be living under his rule.”

  “What we?” Aaron said.

  School went on forever that day. Then when Aaron and I got
home, Miss Mather was in the lobby, talking to Vince. Nanky-Poo too. She was hanging from Miss Mather’s shoulder in a carrier bag. Nanky-Poo’s face was sticking up from the bag. When she saw Aaron and me, she remembered Ophelia and screamed.

  “There they are now,” Miss Mather said to Vince. She pointed an old finger at me. “That is the boy who jumps on my head.” She pointed at Aaron. “That is the boy with the attack dog.”

  An attack poodle?

  “Young man,” she said to Aaron, “I have lived all my long life in this very building, and I have never known such an outrage. I have alerted my lawyers. That animal you harbor is a public nuisance. It is clearly out of control.”

  Which is true. Ophelia flunked out of obedience school.

  “And it will simply have to be put to sleep.”

  I thought about Ophelia asleep on her silk cushion up in the penthouse with her muzzle between her paws. Then I realized that Miss Mather meant something else. Aaron and I edged around her to the elevator.

  I was going to push twelve when he said, “You can come on up to the penthouse if you want to.” This was more like the old Aaron, and I didn’t have any plans. I’d finished Time and Again and was as ready for the quiz as I’d ever be.

  As soon as we were in Aaron’s room, he booted up his computers. Lights flashed. Menus came up. Various voices spoke. Monitors glowed. Aaron limbered up his hands by playing over the keyboards. Then he was pointing and clicking and doing all the stuff he does. He was calling up his computer-camp-project formula. It began to flash on both screens and the added-on videos. Letters of light, figures of fire, visuals—clustered. Even Aaron couldn’t hold all this in his head. He peered. He squinted. He double-checked.

  When he seemed satisfied, he turned around to say, “We never finished lunch, did we? I’ll see what’s out in the kitchen.” Aaron’s idea of junk food is tofu and carrot curls.

  Then it came to me. It was a really bad idea, but it filled up my brain. Here right in front of me in an empty room was the formula that could send Aaron to computer camp.

  What if his formula got changed a little bit? What if just one of his digits was off? What if he showed the computer-camp people a bunch of no-brainer nonsense for his project?

  They wouldn’t take him.

  I’d have a friend to go to soccer camp with. We could get stomped together.

  I know, I know. But I was desperate. Terrible Daryl Dimbleby had pushed me over the edge.

  Then I noticed that my hands were reaching for the keyboard. They didn’t know where to begin. Even computer-literate people wouldn’t know their way around Aaron’s totally personalized and encrypted blendo-technopolis. It was like his brain—totally unexplored.

  I pointed and waited. I clicked. A finger of mine touched a key. One of the digits in Aaron’s formula winked out. I clicked OK. I entered a different digit, I forget what, and pressed Enter.

  I stepped back to watch screens all over the wall blink and make the change. Aaron came in the door behind me. I jumped a foot. He brought in two lo-cal power drinks and a plate of raw turnip sticks.

  I looked at this snack. “Is that it?” I said. “What are we, gerbils?”

  I watched him chew for a while. I didn’t feel good about what I’d done to his formula. You don’t have a lot of guilt in sixth grade, but you have some.

  Aaron didn’t look too innocent himself. He was up to something. He hadn’t invited me up here to watch him eat turnip sticks. He chugalugged his power drink and stood up.

  “I’ll need you to stand right there in the middle of the room,” he said, not looking at me.

  “Wait a minute, Aaron.”

  “I’m going to try a dry run on this formula. Remember it’s just theoretical. It’s only happening on the screens.”

  “Then why do I have to be here?”

  “You’re just backup,” he said. “In case something happens to me, which it won’t.”

  “What am I supposed to do if it does?”

  “Use your initiative.”

  But I remembered that thanks to me, nothing would happen, probably.

  He was staring at one of the screens. I could tell from the back of his head that all the compartments in his brain were fully engaged. Now he was working up his Emotional Component. All his thoughts were going in one direction, which mine never do. He was lining up his numbers with his need. He was being very creepy.

  He pressed Enter. Deep in its heart, a microprocessor clicked. A robot voice said,PROCEED RETROACTIVELY

  With a few moves Aaron scrolled his formula to the tops of the screens and entered another set of digits. The whole wall seemed to think about this. The voice said,QUADRATIC QUOTIENT SEARCH NOW SCANNING EXPONENTIALLY

  “What’s that in English?” I asked.

  “Mathematically, I’m halfway back to the K-T boundary,” he said. “I told you it wasn’t interactive. I told you I had the bugs out of my formula. With any luck, I’ll be able to display a computerized schematic of the prehistoric world that’ll knock the socks off of—”

  I saw it on the screens first. But they were only reflecting the room. The walls wobbled. The floor warped. We staggered. Even Aaron’s wall-sized technopolis was changing its shape, softening. Digits ran together.

  Winking lights merged. Schematics got all tangled up with each other. The whole room was coming apart around us like wet Kleenex.

  I’d made the formula misfire. Were Aaron and I going back to the Tertiary period? We were in the penthouse of a building that wouldn’t be built for millions of years. We’d fall sixteen floors to dash out our brains on the K-T boundary.

  I made a grab for him. “Aaron,” I screamed, “I have a confession to make.”

  But who heard? The walls were like screenwire now, and the wind howled in. We were turning and turning through time and space.

  I had one final thought. This is how fossils are made.

  4

  One of Those Days

  I was flat on my back, and all the vertebrae in my spine seemed to be separate. I need to watch this. There’s a history of back trouble in my family. My hands felt around. I was stretched out on sand.

  I didn’t want to move. I wanted to spend history here. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Aaron’s miserable small body lying on the next sand dune. I saw his shape in the dark. I didn’t see breathing.

  Then he sat up and looked around. He saw me. “We’ve gone to the beach. Why?”

  “Do I know?”

  “Why are you even here?” he said. “I bet you were standing too close to me. I told you to stay in the middle of the floor.”

  “Aaron, the whole room fell apart. Maybe the whole world.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  I could if I took it easy. Sand was drifting into my pants.

  “Aaron, where are we?”

  He was pulling on his chin. “Sand, sea, sky. It could be the Tertiary period. It could be later than that. Hey, it could be the future if my formula really went cuckoo.”

  It was a warm evening, too quiet except for the lapping of the waves. It wasn’t a bad place to be, exactly, if we only knew where.

  “I think we’re being watched,” Aaron said in a spooky whisper. “In fact, I’d put money on it.”

  “Knock it off,” I said. “I’m already scared.”

  But I knew it was true. My flesh crawled. We made ourselves look around. From over a high dune two glittering black eyes in a ghostly white face were looking down at us. Nothing human. It would have scared the pants off R. L. Stine.

  Aaron whimpered. Or maybe it was me.

  The lips on the face curled back. Light shone on fangs. Then the thing bounded up and started skittering down the dune on all fours. Her rhinestone collar winked. She had her imported Italian-leather leash in her mouth.

  Ophelia.

  Aaron’s head dropped into his hands. Ophelia bounded up to nip at his knees.

  “I don’t believe this.” Aaron spoke through his fingers. “Get
down, Ophelia. Heel.”

  But was she ever glad to be out. She was dancing around, kicking sand in our faces, having a great time. Aaron reached in his pocket to see if he’d brought a Baggie. “How could my formula go this wrong?” he moaned. “How could it interactivate Ophelia?”

  “Aaron, I have a confession to—”

  “You know what happened, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yes, Aaron, I do. When you were out of the room, I—”

  “We’re here because of Ophelia’s Emotional Component,” he said. “Something went haywire in the microprocessor, and it lined up my numbers with Ophelia’s need. All she ever wants to do is go out for a walk.”

  “Aaron, she wasn’t even in the same room with us.”

  He nodded. “She’s either on her cushion in the living room or at the front door with the leash in her mouth, waiting to go out. See how far wrong my formula has gone? Boy, do I have some numbers to recrunch. If my formula’s picking up on Ophelia’s need, it could pick up on anybody’s.”

  “Aaron, you may have crunched your last number. You may have diddled your last data. We don’t know where we are. We could be in some other time zone. We could be in some other time. We could end up with our faces on milk cartons. Aaron, we’re missing.”

  He climbed to his feet like an old man, which he sort of is. “Come on, give me that leash, Ophelia,” he said. She can nip you and keep the leash in her mouth at the same time. But he got it on her collar. It was a strange scene. Aaron in Huckley dress code with Ophelia on her leash, and we could be in Saudi Arabia or somewhere.

  I got up and we started trudging. First one dune and then another. We came to some tall grass bending in the breeze. Aaron examined it, and Ophelia did her business. We moved on. Ophelia pranced ahead, showing off as usual.

  Aaron’s foot hit something in the sand. He reached down and dug around. Then he held it up: an empty Diet Pepsi can.

  “Well, that narrows down the time frame,” he said.

  Pretty soon we came to a lifeguard’s tower. Then we began to see roofs and finally a sandy sidewalk. We started walking along a street. There were some big shingled houses in long yards under trees. At one place they were having a party. Porsches were lined up outside. Then we came to a public phone under one of those round plastic domes.