The Forgetting Machine
Page 5
“We’d better tell him what’s happened.”
We ran up the stairs and found Gilly sitting on the floor in the front hall reattaching Alfred’s head to his torso.
“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to leave disassembled robots lying where someone could trip over them?” he said.
“Sorry. I was reprogramming him when I got interrupted,” Billy said.
“Why were you reprogramming Alfred?”
“He’s got this little glitch.” Billy pointed at the damaged wall. “He punches holes in things.”
“Oh. Yes. That.” Gilly stood and lifted Alfred back onto his motilators.
Alfred and Gilly made an odd-looking couple. Gilly was tall and gangly with big features—like a beardless Abraham Lincoln, if you can imagine Lincoln in baggy shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt. Being the founder and chief executive officer of an international high-tech company such as ACPOD comes with certain benefits like a private jet and oodles of money. But to Gilbert Bates, the most important benefit was that he could wear shorts and flip-flops to work.
Alfred, of course, was a robot.
“Are you online, Alfred?” Gilly asked.
Alfred rotated his sensor array 360 degrees. I took a step back, just in case.
“Thank you, sir. I am fully functional.”
“Excellent. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”
“Very good, sir.” Alfred motilated off toward the kitchen to make tea.
“Dad, we have a problem,” Billy said.
“I’m sure Alfred will be fine,” Gilly said.
“Alfred’s not the problem. It’s that tutor you hired for me.”
“You mean Ernie Rausch?”
“Yeah,” I jumped in. “He filled up Billy’s head with history, and now Billy doesn’t even remember me.”
Gilly looked from Billy to me with a puzzled expression. “Billy doesn’t remember you?”
“No!”
“Oh . . . umm . . . and who are you exactly?”
• • •
That was when things went from irritating and weird to flat-out scary. Because it’s bad enough to be forgotten by your boyfriend. Boys, after all, are notorious for that sort of thing. But to be forgotten by everybody . . . TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!
And, frankly, terrifying.
“I’m GINGER!” I shrieked.
Seriously, it was a shriek. Both Gilly and Billy jumped back in alarm.
“Of course you are,” said Gilly in the sort of voice you might use to calm a suicide bomber.
“I’m Ginger Crump,” I said in a slightly more reasonable tone, “and you’ve known me for months.”
“Crump,” Gilly said. “Do you belong to Royce and Amanda Crump?”
“I don’t belong to anyone. They’re my parents.”
“It’s true,” Billy said. “She showed me selfies of us and everything, but my memory of her is gone, same as yours.”
Alfred rolled up, carrying a tray with a porcelain cup balanced upon it. “Your tea, sir.”
Gilly took the cup. I noticed his hand was shaking.
Alfred pointed his sensor array at me. “Ms. Crump, would you care for a beverage?”
At least the robot hadn’t forgotten me.
“No thank you, Alfred.”
Gilly said, “Alfred, has Ms. Crump visited us before?”
“On eight occasions since I came online, sir.”
“Was I present?”
“Yes, sir, on three of those occasions.”
“So it’s true,” Gilly touched the side of his chin with a long forefinger. “I am experiencing some form of selective amnesia. I wonder what else is missing.”
“Do you remember when you were the Sasquatch of Flinkwater Park?”
“Certainly . . . although I wasn’t a real Sasquatch.”
“Did Mr. Rausch do some sort of memory thing to you?” I asked.
“He helped me remember the entire code sequence on the antigravity dro—” Gilly stopped talking abruptly and shot me a look.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know all about the secret antigravity drone you’re working on.”
“You do?” he said.
“Billy told me.”
“I did?” Billy said.
“Don’t worry, you can trust me. I’ve known you since you were a Sasquatch.”
Gilly nodded thoughtfully. “Alfred!” he said.
“Sir?”
“Get Ernest Rausch on the phone, please.”
Alfred buzzed and blinked. A few seconds later, Mr. Rausch’s voice issued from Alfred’s speaker.
“Hello?”
“Rausch, this is Gilbert Bates.”
“Oh! Hello, Mr. Bates,” said Mr. Rausch.
“I’m having a little problem. I seem to have forgotten something.”
“I can help! What is it you want to remember?”
“If I could remember what I don’t remember, I wouldn’t have a problem now, would I?”
“Of course! I’m sure it’s a minor adjustment to your dynamic engram interface. Can you meet me at the neuroprosthetics lab? I can be there in half an hour.”
“The sooner the better,” Gilly said. “I’m on my way.”
14
Webhound
Billy wanted to go, but Gilly told him to stay home.
“Let me find out exactly what happened. If Rausch can restore my memories successfully, then we’ll see what he can do for you. In any case, just to be safe, I’m shutting down the REMEMBER program. We can’t have people losing memories willy-nilly. If I’ve forgotten Jennifer here—”
“Ginger!” I said.
“Yes, Ginger. Sorry. If I’ve forgotten you, then who knows what else I’ve forgotten?”
“My dad forgot we have a cat,” I said.
“And your father is . . . ?”
“Royce Crump!”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“I think you should go see Mr. Rausch,” I said.
• • •
After Gilly left, I asked Billy to help me with Charlotte’s Web. He might not remember that he was in love with me, but he was still a boy genius. I explained what had happened, and how I suspected the Tisks were behind it.
It took him only a few minutes to find the problem. Sort of.
“All the digital files have been corrupted,” he reported.
“Way to go, Sherlock,” I said sarcastically. “Like I didn’t figure that out on my own!”
“No,” he said. “I mean, all the files. Not just your tablet, and not just the Flinkwater County Library system. Every library in the country got hit. Even the source files at the publisher have been replaced with this edited version. In other words, the original Charlotte’s Web no longer exists. Somebody wrote a really nasty little worm, like a computer version of the Ebola virus, only worse. The Net is saturated with it. Anybody who has an unaltered copy of Charlotte’s Web on their device loses it the instant they access the Net. It’s quite brilliant, actually. You say Mr. Tisk is behind it? I thought he was a preacher.”
“He threatened to get rid of every last copy of Charlotte’s Web, so yeah, I’d say he’s our number one suspect.”
“I don’t see an IP address at his house . . . or at his church, either. I don’t see how he could create a virus like this without being plugged into the Web.”
“Maybe he hired some hacker to do it for him.”
Billy nodded. “Let me see what I can find.”
Watching Billy on his computer was like seeing a movie in fast motion. Screen after screen flickered by; I really couldn’t follow what he was doing. After a few minutes he slumped back in his chair.
“I tracked the virus back to an ACPOD server here in Flinkwater, but from there it leads to a cascading series of proxies—basically, just about every IP address within five hundred miles of here, with Flinkwater as the geographical center. Whoever did this is local, and they’re good. It’s like looking for a needle the size of an eyelash in a haystack the siz
e of Iowa.”
“So there’s no way to prove who did it?”
“Eventually. I sent a webhound after it.”
“Webhound?”
“A tracking program I wrote. But it might take a few hours. Or maybe longer, like a few days, if it has to chew through a lot of firewalls.
“How do we fix Charlotte’s Web in the meantime?” I asked.
“We can’t. It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone.”
“What about paper books? If we had a paper copy of Charlotte’s Web we could scan it and create a new digital file, right?”
Billy touched the side of his chin with his forefinger. I loved when he did that, even though I knew he’d stolen the gesture from his dad.
“I suppose we could do a reverse hack. Hack the hacker. But where would we get a paper copy? A museum?”
“Flinkwater Memorial Library,” I said.
“Seriously? I thought that got turned into an old-folks home.”
“Well, a lot of old folks do hang out there,” I said. “But it’s closed today, so we can’t get in.”
Billy grinned. I’d seen that expression before.
• • •
Billy used to have a collection of magnetic key cards that gave him access to just about every building in Flinkwater. But back when we got arrested for treason by the Department of Homeland Security, they had confiscated his collection.
“I thought the DHS took your key cards,” I said.
“They did, so I made something better. Check it out.” He sorted through the junk on his desk and came up with what looked like an old-fashioned oversize wristwatch. “I took the guts out and put in an RFID transmitter, smart-mag technology, and a titanium lock pick. I call it the Open Anything Watch. You ready?”
“I don’t know. . . . ” I’d been to jail once. I didn’t like it.
“You want to read Charlotte’s Web or not? It’s not like we’d be doing anything wrong.”
“Breaking and entering? Stealing a book? Ms. Pfleuger will kill us if we get caught.”
“We won’t break anything, and you’d just be borrowing the book. That’s what libraries are for, right?”
I thought it over for about three seconds. I really did want to read the rest of Charlotte’s Web.
15
Breaking and Entering
Billy was disappointed by the lock on the front door of the library.
“It’s just a lock,” he said.
It was the old-fashioned type that required a metal key. He’d been hoping for something high-tech so he could show off his Open Anything Watch.
“Does this mean you have to give your watch a new name?” I asked.
“No, it just means it’s going to be harder than I thought.” He took off the watch and extracted a long, flexible metal strip from the band. “Lock pick. This might take a few minutes.”
On an impulse, I reached past him and twisted the doorknob. The latch clicked and the door swung open. Billy looked at me, astonished.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Or maybe Ms. Pfleuger forgot to lock it,” I said as we slipped through the door into the empty library. The air was dead still; motes of dust hovered nearly motionless in the air, lit up by the sun coming through the windows. Billy looked around at the shelves of books.
“Wow, that’s a lot of paper.”
“You’ve never been here before?”
“Not since I was a little kid. Where are the computers? How are we going to find the book you want?”
I pointed out the COMPUTER-FREE ZONE sign on the back wall. “I think the book will be in the children’s section.” I started toward the corner where they kept the kids’ books, but was stopped by the most chilling sound imaginable—that of my name being spoken by a large, largely insane librarian.
“Ginger Crump!”
I froze. Ms. Pfleuger, wearing a dark green muumuu decorated with red and gold snakes, rose up from behind her desk like Godzilla rising from the ocean.
“The library is closed,” she said, coming toward us. As she got closer, I could see that what I’d thought were red and gold snakes were actually strings of flowers printed on her dress. Which did not make her any less scary—snakes, flowers . . . she still looked like Godzilla.
“The door was open!” I squeaked. At least it sounded squeaky to me.
“We didn’t do anything!” Billy was sounding a little squeaky too.
The Pformidable Pfleuger fixed her flamethrower eyes on us.
“Why. Are. You. Here?” she inquired terrifyingly.
“I want to check out a book!” I shrieked. Okay, it wasn’t really a shriek, but it was close.
Ms. Pfleuger halted her advance. The fire in her eyes abated.
“I thought you didn’t like books,” she said.
“I do! I do like books! I love books!”
Ms. Pfleuger crossed her arms and regarded us suspiciously.
“Seriously,” I said. “I was hoping I could check out Charlotte’s Web.”
“I thought you intended to read that . . . electronically.” She practically spat out that last word.
“I was, but there’s sort of a problem.”
“Oh?” She cocked her head and waited for more.
“The e-book got hacked.” I showed her some of the altered text on my tab. “It’s not just my tab; it’s everywhere.” As Ms. Pfleuger listened, I saw a grim smile spread slowly across her face. She liked that the e-books had been corrupted.
“We think the Tisks did it,” I said.
“The Tisks?” That seemed to make her even happier.
“We haven’t proved it was the Tisks,” Billy said. “But we’re pretty sure it was somebody in Flinkwater.”
“But we can fix it,” I said. “We just need a hard copy of Charlotte so we can scan it and unhack the hack.”
“I see. So it seems real books are important after all?” She loomed over us triumphantly.
“Yes! I was wrong!”
“Important enough for you to break into my library? We’re closed on Sunday, you know.”
“We didn’t actually break anything,” I said. “The door was open. Er . . . how come you’re here, anyway?”
“That is not your concern. In any case, your felonious efforts have gone for naught. Our only copy of Charlotte’s Web is checked out.”
“No!” I couldn’t believe it. “By who?”
“Whom,” said Ms. Pfleuger.
“Whom checked it out?”
“Who,” said Ms. Pfleuger.
I will never understand that who/whom business!
Ms. Pfleuger said, “I’m afraid I can’t share information about our patrons’ library records.”
“But what about all those kids all across the country who are right this minute reading Charlotte’s Web on their tabs, and instead of a spider and a pig talking, it’s a couple of humans? We need to fix this!”
That made an impression. Ms. Pfleuger thought for a moment, then said, “Mycroft Duchakis was here yesterday afternoon.”
“Myke? Myke has Charlotte?”
“I really can’t say,” she said, looking away.
I turned to Billy, but he had wandered off and was standing over by Ms. Pfleuger’s desk.
“I thought this was supposed to be a computer-free zone,” he said.
“Get away from there!” Ms. Pfleuger snapped.
Billy backed away from her desk.
“I think it’s time for you two to leave,” Ms. Pfleuger said in a firm voice.
That sounded like a good idea to me. I grabbed Billy and pulled him toward the exit, but not before I got a glimpse of the D-Monix 15395 computer on Ms. Pfleuger’s desk.
“Out!” she commanded, thrusting a forefinger at the door.
We got out.
“Now what?” Billy asked.
“Myke Duchakis has Charlotte! At least I think that’s wha
t she was telling us. I’m going over there.”
“I should probably check on my webhound program and see if it’s chewed through all those proxies yet.”
“Okay, you do that, and I’ll go get the book from Myke.”
We took off in opposite directions.
16
Myke Duchakis
Dark-skinned, rotund Myke Duchakis came from his room, bearing a basket of sleeping multicolored kittens.
“Oh,” he said, “I thought you were Mrs. Gumm.”
“Do I look like Mrs. Gumm?” Addy Gumm was the town’s cat lady, and she was a thousand years old at least.
“Not really,” Myke said. “Umm . . . do you want a kitten?”
“No thanks. How many do you have there?”
“I’m not actually sure. At least six. Possibly eight. They’re exhausted from terrorizing my chinchilla. He’s in his exercise ball, quivering with fear.”
One of the kittens—a black one—raised its head and said “Eep?”
“Are you sure you don’t want one?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. They were awfully cute.
“Did you know that cats were considered sacred by the ancient Egyptians?”
“I did not know that,” I said.
Myke is crazy for all kinds of animals. He is the founder and president of AAPT, which stands for Animals Are People Too. He volunteers at Clawz-n-Pawz, our local animal adoption agency.
Myke’s adoptive parents have lived in Flinkwater forever—his dad used to play for the Flinkwater Brazen Bulls, our high school football team, and he now coaches them. Myke’s mom grew up on a farm near Halibut, but Myke’s biological parents were from northern Africa. He likes to think of himself as a royal descendent of the Egyptian pharaohs. Whatever you do, don’t get him started on the Sphinx—he’ll talk your ears off.
“They used to mummify the pharaoh’s pet cats,” he said. “That way when the pharaoh died, he would have a friend waiting for him in the afterlife.” One of the kittens had crawled out of the basket and was climbing up Myke’s shirt. “Mrs. Gumm promised to take one of the kittens. And Ernie Rausch might take one, but I still need homes for the rest of them.”
“Ernie Rausch? Are you talking about Ernest Rausch, the memory expert?”