by Betsy Uhrig
“It gets worse,” I said.
“How?”
“Ms. Grossman decided that the only people in town smart enough to fix them were—”
“Don’t say it,” Luke broke in. “Woozle.”
“Yup. They brought them over there today.”
“Crap,” he said again. “If those nerds open those things up, they’re going to see some stuff they shouldn’t.”
“I know. I have a plan. It involves Shannon.”
“Of course! I’ll tell her to get them out and bring them home.”
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because they don’t belong to her. She’d be, like, stealing from her own company. Or the school. Or both.”
Luke sighed and maybe started doing the hand-hair thing again. “So what do you suggest we do?”
“How many people can you fit in your car?”
Chapter 42
BY THE TIME LUKE AND I were finished with this chat, it was past five. Shannon didn’t keep regular hours at work, but tonight, Luke had said, she planned to leave right at five—they were going out. Which meant he couldn’t overload his compact car with H.A.I.R. Clubbers and head on over to Woozle so his wife could look the other way while we took the laptops back.
I e-mailed the club list with a short message: Tomorrow afternoon, it read.
Then I thought about my options. Which included reading about federalism for history, solving for x twenty times in a row for algebra, reading yet another book where someone’s beloved pet dies for English, or obsessing about Prescient.
No contest. Then it occurred to me that if I couldn’t question the help screen about whether it was Alice, I could question Alice about whether she was the help screen.
You’re either laughing at me or weeping quietly, I’m sure, but bear with me a moment before you judge. Obviously, Alice didn’t know now whether she was going to grow up to invent a bunch of security equipment, get the cafeteria footage from my senior year, and figure out how to send the footage and the plans to build the equipment to watch it back in time to our uncle. But surely if she was going to grow up to do something as weird as that, there would be some seeds of it in her six-year-old personality. Some hint of what she was capable of.
That’s what I was counting on as I made my approach.
I will present what followed as a simple Q and A (Q being “Question” and A being “Alice”).
Q: Hey, Alice.
A: What, dork?
Q: You’re smart, right?
A: What do you want?
Q: Just chatting here…
A: [no response, turns back to the television]
Q: Do you think you’d ever want to grow up to work with computers? You know, like Shannon does?
A: [obvious confusion on face because computers = dorky, and Shannon = cool] I’m going to grow up to be a famous star who makes up shows and sings and dances in them. You know that. Go away.
Q: Well, if you change your mind and you do grow up to invent some cool computers, will you do me a favor?
A: No. What?
Q: Will you make your help screens helpful?
A: No. [cranks up volume on TV and turns away again, this time for good]
It was clear that Alice had no intention, today, of growing up to be a computer inventor. But did that mean it wasn’t ever going to happen? Most adults probably aren’t doing the jobs they meant to do when they were six.
The single crumb of information this interview left me with was that final “No.” Did it mean that Alice would grow up to invent an unhelpful help screen? And if she did, would it be because she was always going to, or because I had just suggested she do the opposite?
It was possible, it seemed to me in a mind-blowing way, that I had just created Prescient by implying to Alice that growing up to invent it would annoy me.
That’s the problem with the future. Everything you do has an effect on it, but you never know what kind. It makes you terrified to do anything. Unless it was you doing nothing that caused your problems… See what I mean?
Chapter 43
AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, as the H.A.I.R. Club waited for Luke to pick us up and take us to Woozle, I found out that cramming everyone into the car wasn’t going to be a problem. Half the club wasn’t willing to go.
Excuses varied, but they mostly boiled down to, as Nikhil the Blunt put it:
“This is your problem, Jason, so you can fix it.”
The real issue, I thought then and still believe now, is that no one whose parents worked at Woozle wanted to show up there and have to explain. Which left Hoppy, Vincent, and me. Also, oddly, Lara.
“It’s my problem too,” she said when the others had flaked off, leaving the four of us standing on the curb. “Plus my mother works flex-time; she’s already home by now.”
“So your uncle is picking us up and your aunt is going to get us into Woozle,” Hoppy said as we waited for Luke.
“Yup,” I said.
“And they are doing this no questions asked? They’re not going to wonder what we’re doing there, and why a couple of our backpacks seem heavier on the way out?”
“Ah, not exactly.”
“So what, exactly, did you tell them?”
Why hadn’t I planned for this line of questioning? I gulped, and I felt my Adam’s apple travel up and down in my bird neck.
“As much as they need to know,” I hedged. “Nothing more.”
“And how did you decide what they—”
Here, fortunately, Luke pulled up to the curb.
“It’s not going to take four of you, is it?” said Luke when he’d parked the car and I’d made the introductions.
“Hoppy and I are only here to create a diversion,” said Vincent.
Which wasn’t true. There were zero plans for diversions. There were no real plans of any kind.
“No, we aren’t,” said Hoppy.
“Sure we are,” said Vincent. “Jason and Lara are going to—you know—do the thing we need done. And you and I will make sure no one notices them doing it.”
“I am not calling attention to myself in any way,” said Hoppy.
Luke just looked straight ahead and drove as they continued to argue about this until we got to the Woozle turnoff.
“Here we go!” said Vincent as Luke left the main road and headed up Woozle Way.
“Geez, landscape much?” Hoppy said as the car moved slowly around the gentle curves and over the many speed bumps.
Lara didn’t comment—maybe because not commenting was what Lara tended to do, or maybe because she’d been to Woozle before.
I’d never been up Woozle Way, and neither had Vincent or Hoppy. We goggled out the windows like we were arriving at Disney for the first time.
The road wound through bright-green hills and the occasional tuft of ornamental grass or lily-pad-spangled pond. We could see biking/jogging paths meandering across the landscape on either side of the road, but we didn’t see any bikers/joggers.
The speed bumps only increased as we drove through the golf course. Luke was going about one mile an hour.
“We could walk faster,” I said.
“I think we might actually be going backward,” said Vincent.
“My car has low clearance,” Luke said huffily.
Then we hit a patch of woods. They were fake woods, though. Well, not fake. The trees were real. But it was more like a garden of trees than actual woods. There was even a raised boardwalk that circled carefully around the individual tree trunks.
“Does anyone else just want to live here?” said Hoppy.
“You can’t say that!” said Vincent.
“Why not? Look at this place. It’s like Pixar made it. I swear the sky is bluer here.”
“But it’s treason,” said Vincent. “You’re a Hopkins.”
“It’s not like we’re rivals,” said Hoppy. “We make hairnets. Woozle makes…”
“Hypochondriacs,
” Luke supplied, gunning it to maybe three miles an hour after we cleared another speed bump.
At last we pulled into a parking lot.
“Where’s the building?” said Vincent when we’d extracted ourselves from the car and gotten the circulation in our limbs going again.
“Still a ways away,” said Luke. “We take a shuttle from here.”
“A shuttle?” I said.
“That’s not going to make for a quick getaway,” said Vincent.
Which is exactly what I’d been thinking, but I said: “We don’t need to make a quick getaway. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Technically,” said Hoppy.
And now an oversize golf cart was pulling up beside us.
“All aboard!” the guy at the wheel shouted cheerfully.
Chapter 44
FEELING MORE LIKE THEME-PARK-GOERS THAN ever, we rode up a slight slope, keeping an eye out for the Woozle building. The golf cart cruised to a halt at a little sign that said SHUTTLE STOP 1. Where the driver seemed to expect us to get off. Except we still didn’t see a building.
“Is it an underground lair?” Vincent asked.
“They like employees to get off here and walk the rest of the way,” said the driver. “But I can keep going if you want.”
“We’re in kind of a hurry,” said Luke.
“Sure thing!” said the driver.
And away we went, the wind not exactly whipping through our hair, until finally we saw it, like the Emerald City shining in the distance.…
Not really. Nothing in real life could be that awesome, especially a place where people go to work every day. But it was modern and cool looking, with lots of glass panels instead of walls, and small trees growing on the roof.
Again, the guy stopped a ways away from the building (at shuttle stop two), and again Luke negotiated to get us closer. Finally, the guy gave up and drove us right to the front door. “Last stop!” he said.
“Why do they have a shuttle if everyone’s supposed to walk?” Vincent asked as we entered the building through tall glass doors and found ourselves in an enormous room that I later learned was called the atrium.
“This place is all about not riding if you can walk,” said Luke. “And not walking if you can run.” And as he went over to the security desk to get our visitor passes, the rest of us saw what he meant.
There were long people-movers in the atrium—like they have in airports, where people get on a conveyor belt and ride instead of walking with their luggage. But no one was riding on these—they were jogging. Why were they jogging instead of riding? We figured that out when we saw a couple of employees hop on where it said ENTER HERE. They were jogging because they were forced to: The people-mover was moving toward them, rather than away. They had to run in order to keep from being people-moved back where they’d started from.
Luke came over to us. He did not look happy.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“Already?” said Vincent. “Should I pretend to get my foot caught in the people-mover?”
Luke shook his head. “You have to leave your backpacks here. You can’t take them with you.”
“But where are we going to put the… items?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Luke. “Let’s see what Shannon has to say.”
Hoppy grabbed my upper arm and yanked me away from the group. “How much does your uncle know about what we’re doing here?” she whispered.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s cool.”
She let go of my arm, but she did not look satisfied.
We clipped on our visitor passes and managed to board the people-mover after a few false starts. Vincent almost really got his foot caught in it, no diversion intended.
We all started jogging immediately, and then had to flat-out run to move forward. Nobody wanted to be the one to fall and ride in a humiliating heap away from the others. And none of us did, though Hoppy and I came close a couple of times.
“Shannon’s going to meet us in the cafeteria,” said Luke when we’d managed to get off the people-mover and catch our breath. “Wait till you see that.”
“Yikes!” Vincent summed up our first impression of the cafeteria.
It was large, brightly lit, and cheerful. There were nice smells coming from warming trays and counters and stands. There were sculptural chairs and tables with lots of people sitting around chatting. But all of that was dominated by the “art” on the walls. Which consisted of huge detailed photographs of icky medical conditions.
“Why on earth would they put these pictures up where people eat?” said Hoppy.
“To kill their appetites,” said Luke. “They don’t want their workers to eat a lot, so…”
“Can’t they make healthy food instead?” said Vincent.
“Oh, they do,” said Luke. “That stuff only looks like normal food. It isn’t.”
At that moment, Shannon hurried up to us. She kissed Luke. “Hey, kids. How are you? Anyone want a brownie?”
She held out a napkin-wrapped bundle.
Vincent and I both reached out eagerly, but Luke shooed our hands away. “Those things are not brownies,” he said.
“They look like brownies,” said Vincent, his hand moving again in Shannon’s direction.
“Brownies require chocolate,” said Luke. “And sugar. And butter. None of which are in whatever you want to call those things.”
“They’re brown, anyway,” said Shannon. She studied them. “Brown-ish.”
“Brown-ick,” said Luke.
“You’re such a baby!” said Shannon. She turned her attention to me. “Heard about your little adventure with the fire department,” she said. “You’re getting quite a reputation. Are you going to make the Flounder Bay Times again? ‘Local Boy in Yet Another Bizarre Encounter with Authorities’?”
“No,” I said. “They agreed to keep our names out of the paper.”
“I was there too,” Lara added quickly.
“You were?” said Shannon, right on top of Luke’s “You were?”
“She was,” I said when Lara didn’t answer immediately. “Though it was completely my fault.” I added this automatically whenever the Incident came up. “Right, Lara?”
Lara remained silent. She was staring out past her hair with an expression I hadn’t seen on her before. It wasn’t shyness. Or annoyance. It was more like awe. Which was weird. I mean, she’d been to Woozle before. Could it be she was amazed by my blame-taking? It was pretty awe-inspiring.
Finally, she spoke. “Are those the dwarf runes?” she asked Shannon.
Chapter 45
SHANNON INSPECTED HER ARMS LIKE she hadn’t noticed any tattoos there before and where did those things come from?
“They are,” she said. “Except that—that’s a freckle.”
Lara was staring like she’d met an actual Middle-earth dwarf instead of a classmate’s aunt.
Shannon studied Lara for a moment and then said, “Are you Astrid Andersen’s daughter, by any chance?”
Lara nodded.
“Thought so,” said Shannon. “Astrid is great. So, so smart.”
She gestured toward a table near a hideous blowup of what could easily have been some alien disease that made the victim sprout sentient tentacles. “That table looks private,” Shannon said.
We sat down, and Luke started absentmindedly picking apart one of Shannon’s “brownies” and then eating the parts.
“There’s been a bit of a wrinkle,” he said with his mouth full. “No backpacks allowed past reception for visitors.”
“Huh,” said Shannon. “That is quite a wrinkle. Assuming you guys are planning to leave with more than you came in with.”
Hoppy was eyeing Shannon and Luke in turn, clearly still wondering how much they knew about our purpose here. Lara was eyeing Shannon, still awestruck by the tattoos. Vincent was eyeing the remaining “brownie.”
“Okay,” said Shannon, “here’s where we stand. Jorge and
Natasha, who are supposed to look at the objects in question, have been tied up since the school brought them in. They haven’t had a spare moment to glance at them.”
“That’s convenient,” said Luke.
“Isn’t it?” said Shannon. “They’d complain to their boss, but she’s the one who scheduled all the extra work for them.”
“She’s a real hard-hat,” said Luke.
“She is,” said Shannon.
“Is she you?” Vincent asked Shannon.
“She is indeed. So I think someone could pick the objects in question up without anyone much noticing, but there’s really no way you can take them out of the building.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” I said. “Flush them down the toilet?”
“Ha!” said Luke. “Not down the low-flow toilets they have here.”
“So what can we do?” said Hoppy.
“We’re going to have to repair them here,” said Shannon. “Then we can send them back to the school good as new.”
“We have no idea how to repair them,” said Vincent. “That’s what you people are supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”
“Jorge and Natasha can’t do it,” said Shannon. “They can’t even try without seeing way more than they should. Isn’t that right?”
The four of us nodded.
“Even the guy who built them doesn’t really know what they do, does he?”
Luke shook his head, and Hoppy, Lara, and Vincent noticed.
“But he might be able to fix them, right? If he had a little time and the proper tools?” Shannon went on.
“Oh, he always has the proper tools,” said Luke, polishing off his “brownie.”
“Wait a minute,” said Hoppy. She turned to me. “Your uncle built the laptops? And you somehow failed to tell us that?”
For the historical record, Lara’s expression had morphed right from meeting-Shannon awe to dealing-with-Jason irritated suspicion.
Even Vincent raised his eyebrows and said, “Dude…”
“I just found out!” I said. “Like, a few days ago. I was going to tell you at the next meeting. Seriously—”
