by K. A. Holt
Mrs. H was still towering over me. Her crooked finger arched in front of my nose and pointed into my bag. “What’s that, then?”
I looked to see what she was pointing at. “Oh. That’s just a book my dad told me to have my teacher look at—not you—the one who was supposed to be here.” My voice sounded very bitter—even to me.
“I’ll take that book as collateral, then. You can have it back when I get my book back.”
I wasn’t sure about giving Dad’s book to Mrs. H. He was going to want it back now that the original teacher wasn’t here for me to give it to. Unless … No! I tried to banish the thought from my mind, but it wouldn’t budge. Did Dad know that Mrs. H was replacing the teacher? Why wouldn’t he have told me? And why would he want her to have a book? It didn’t make any sense. I took a deep breath and pushed the thought of Dad and Mrs. H as Weird Secret Book Collaborators out of my mind.
“Here,” I said, handing over the book. “Can Larc and I go now?”
Larc started gathering up her stuff and Mrs. Halebopp said something to her quietly. She patted Larc on the shoulder and then stalked over to another table to yell at some boys for burning each other’s hair with modified laser pens.
“Ready?” Larc’s blue braces glowed as she grinned at me. “My project is on terraforming, too. We can help each other out!”
“Great,” I mumbled, and trudged out of the classroom. I could feel Larc behind me. She was so close on my heels that when I stopped, she crashed into me.
She giggled and smoothed her jumpsuit as I turned to face her. “You know, I really don’t feel like going to my apartment right now,” I said glumly
“But we have to study,” Larc said. “That’s the only reason Aunt Beebo let us out of class. So that we could study together and I could help you.”
“Yeah?” I said kind of roughly. “Help me? Well, your aunt Beebo is a psycho nutjob who is usually out to get me, so excuse me if I’m just glad to be out of her sight.”
Larc put her hand on my shoulder. “Mike, she told me about your sister. She thinks you and I should study together because it will help take your mind off what’s going on.”
“Whatever,” I said, and started walking again.
“Let’s just go to my apartment, then,” Larc called after me. “We can study just as well over there.”
I ran through the options in my head.
Go back to class and tell Mrs. H thanks for being nice, but no thanks.
Go to my apartment and be accosted by Sugar Bear’s “helpful” recordings.
Go to Larc’s and study.
For the first time ever, studying seemed like the best option.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “Let’s go study at your place.” “Great!” she said, matching my stride. “We’re almost there.”
She was right. In about two minutes we were outside her apartment door and she swiped her flash key to unlock it.
“Why don’t you use the eyeball scanner?” I asked. “I thought the flash keys were only for power emergencies. I didn’t even get one.”
“The scanner is broken,” Larc said over her shoulder. “Come on in.”
I followed her into the apartment. It was a lot like mine, but it was in shades of blue. There was an extra door on the far wall, but really, it was practically a replica of my place.
“The computer is over here,” Larc said as she crossed the room. She hit a button on the wall and a desk slid up from the floor. It was in the place that the viserator was in my apartment. “I can enlarge the monitor if you’d like to sit on the sofa and study.”
“Sure,” I said, not really caring. My mind was going in about a hundred directions. Whether to sit on the sofa was not one of them.
I plopped down and Larc sat next to me. She had a remote mouse to navigate the screen.
“Hey, a remote,” I said. “What, your executive assistant doesn’t change all your channels and run your computer programs for you?”
Larc stared at me like my hair was on fire. “What are you talking about?”
“Just joking.” I gave a halfhearted chuckle. “That stupid Sugar Bear is always around. I’m surprised he’s not here right now, begging to write down notes we dictate.”
“Mike Stellar, sometimes I think you’re speaking a foreign language. Except that I can speak all of the other languages and I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You speak all of the other languages….” I took my handheld out of my bag.
“Good idea. Let’s get down to business.” Larc started clicking the remote and a zillion pages popped up on the monitor. I turned on my handheld and got ready to sync it up. Something, though, grabbed my attention.
The remote reminded me of something. Remote. Remote. Was it the word that reminded me? The thing? What was it? I racked my brain to figure it out, but I got nothing.
“Do you already have a lot of this information?” Larc asked. “I know you’ve been working on your paper for a while now.”
“Weeeeell,” I said, scanning the zillion pages on the monitor, “I have pretty much all of this stuff. But I could add something on the long-term effects of terra-forming. My stupid report needs to be a lot longer or your darling aunt Beebo is totally gonna flunk me.”
“I researched the long-term effects of terraforming for fun a while back. Would you like to see my old notes?”
“You research for fun?”
“Sure,” she said with a devious smirk. “Don’t you?”
I sighed and shook my head. Obviously, this girl was nuts.
It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t figure out what the remote was tickling in my memory. A person? A place? A thing? Argh.
“Anyway,” she continued, oblivious to the fact that I wasn’t really listening, “we’re going to need more stuff than that to satisfy Aunt Beebo…. She’s going to want a thorough blah blah blah …”
I could see Larc’s mouth moving, but I’d stopped paying attention eight words before.
Finally I interrupted. “I guess we could talk about the Factory Approach. It’s supposed to work pretty well. At least theoretically.”
Larc raised her eyebrows. “‘Theoretically.’ Woohoo. You are smart! So the Factory Approach sets up carbon dioxide–producing facilities on the planet’s surface,” she said. “The carbon dioxide warms up the atmosphere, melts any water that’s there, and, voilà, you have an atmosphere that can support life.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t the theory posit that the factories might work too well and overpollute the environment? Won’t superfast terraforming methods be more likely to kill a planet?”
‘Posit’?” Larc grinned. “That’s an old-man word.” She clicked the remote a couple of times and the screen filled with pictures of old dudes.
I readied myself to ignore her silly remote clicking and launch into a speech about rapid overpollution as the major reason why the Factory Approach was a terrible idea when I paused. The clicking of the remote …
Nita!
That was it!
That was what the remote reminded me of!
Nita’s com-bracelet. It was this stupid, cheap thing that Hubble had bought her years before. It was remotely linked to the matching com-bracelet that he wore. She still wore hers, even though it didn’t work. Well, it probably would have still worked with Hubble’s matching com-bracelet, but … Anyway, that was it!
I jumped up from the sofa. Larc looked at me, startled.
“What?” she asked. “Are there bugs in your pants?”
“No,” I said, feeling silly for jumping up like that. “No. I’m cool.” I sat back down, my mind racing.
Larc started talking and every now and then I nodded or grunted so that she would think I was paying attention. As she babbled I began scrolling crazily through my handheld. Stored somewhere on one of the hard drives was a hack I’d written ages ago when Stinky and I were trying to listen in on all the smoochy love talk between
Nita and Hubble. It was a freakin’ crazy awesome hack, because it had actually worked. Stinky and I just about died from alternately laughing and puking when we heard some of those love chats. If I could find the hack, I might be able to bust into Nita’s com-bracelet again and hear what was going on around her.
My heart was beating at a totally unhealthy pace as I tapped the handheld screen furiously. The hack wasn’t going to take very long, if I could just …
“Then all the planets will be dead,” Larc was saying. “Right, Mike?”
“Wha? Dead planets? Uh, right,” I answered, snapping to attention.
“Yes…. Well, that’s the theory, anyway,” Larc said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Dead planets. Floating out in space.”
“Hmmm?” I said.
“Are you paying attention to me, Michael Stellar? Your grade depends on this,” Larc said, waving her hand in front of my eyes. I noticed a scary ugly scar on the palm of her hand. It was in a kind of star shape and had a big throbbing vein down the middle of it. It was the nastiest thing I’d seen in my entire life. But it was sort of cool, too.
“Ew, what’s that?” I asked, grabbing for her hand.
“Mi-ike.” Larc yanked her hand away and snapped at me. “Focus. Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
“Right,” I said. “Dead planets. Because the terra-forming can mess with the magnetism of the poles or something like that. I have it here.” I motioned to my handheld.
“Cool. Can you shoot it to the monitor?”
“Oh, well, I’m kinda …”
Larc pounced at me, her icy eyes blazing, and tried to swipe my handheld. “I knew it, Michael Stellar! You’re not studying at all, are you? You’re playing some flight sim or something!”
“Whoa!” I hollered, hopping off the couch just in time to avoid her quick grab. Man, she was lightning fast. “I’m not playing games!” I shouted, dodging furniture as Larc chased me around the apartment. “I’m just … I’m working on a little side project right now….”
“Side project?” Larc shrieked. “You’re supposed to be studying. We’re supposed to be studying. If my aunt Beebo knew that you were just fooling around—”
“I am most certainly not fooling around!” I shot back, jumping over the arm of the couch to get away from her. “I just remembered something about Nita, and I was trying to see if I could …” I realized I was shouting. And sweating. And standing on the couch. I took a deep breath and slid down, sinking into the cushion.
I quieted my voice. “I was trying to see if I could contact her.” I shook my head. “Well, not contact her, really, but listen in on her, wherever she is. I thought maybe I could—”
“Oh, Mike,” Larc said, sitting next to me, her expression softening like someone had flipped a switch. “I know this has to be agonizing for you. I’m sorry I went crazy. Studying must be the last thing on your mind right now.”
I scanned Larc’s face with uncertainty. She was always so hard to read.
She leaned back into the sofa. “I don’t know what I would do if my dad or my aunt Beebo ever went missing.”
“You’d feel like a big pile of poo.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s how you’d feel. Like a big pile of poo.”
Larc laughed and punched my shoulder. I pretended I was going to go schizoid and attack her, and she flinched.
“So are you writing a program or something? To find Nita?”
I told Larc what I was trying to do and she actually had a couple of helpful suggestions for things I could add to the hack—like a voice activator and a program that would allow me to sync my handheld’s microphone up with Nita’s com-bracelet.
For the rest of the afternoon, we worked on the hack together and forgot about terraforming. It was kind of fun.
After a while I said, “Okay, let’s test it out. I haven’t calculated the distance from the ship to Nita yet, so we’re gonna need to test on something within the ship, but at least that’ll let us know if the core hack is working.”
“Of course,” Larc said. “What do you want to try it on?”
I looked around the room. “Let’s see if we can use it to project our voices through the computer monitor. That’ll be a good start.”
I tapped a few commands into the handheld and we waited while everything calibrated. I held the microphone end up to Larc’s face and said, “Say something.”
“Something,” she said, then smiled and stuck her tongue out at me. A few seconds later we heard her voice come through the TV loud and clear. We jumped up and I gave a happy hoot.
Then … something very weird happened.
The monitor talked back.
It said, “Did someone just … hoot?”
We glanced around the apartment, but no one was with us. The talking had definitely come from the monitor.
Larc pointed at it slowly.
The pages Larc had called up on the monitor were gone. In their place, the screen was divided into six sections. Each one looked like the living room of an apartment on the ship. In the bottom right-hand corner we could see two people sitting on a sofa. Larc and I got up off our sofa and peered more closely at the monitor. We were astonished to see ourselves staring at … ourselves.
“What the …,” I said, walking closer to the monitor. I saw my image in the bottom square walk toward the screen, too. My eyes widened and I carefully covered the microphone on my handheld with my palm. “It’s like we’re watching video surveillance,” I whispered. “Our hack could never have done this. It wasn’t sophisticated enough to—” I kept my hand over the microphone and with the other hand I tapped on my handheld’s screen. Suddenly the images disappeared from the monitor and a map of the ship appeared. There were a handful of blinking dots moving down hallways and in and out of rooms.
“What is that?” Larc asked. I had no idea. I tapped my handheld screen and the surveillance-type video showed up again on the big monitor. I grabbed Larc’s hand and dragged her behind the sofa. We crouched down, hiding, and peeked over the back of the sofa at the monitor.
“Is that your dad?” Larc asked.
Sure enough, in the top right square I saw Dad walk into a room and sit in a chair.
“Hey!” I said. “That’s my apartment!”
Then Larc’s dad walked into the room and sat down across from my dad on the sofa. Then I saw Mom appear, standing in the corner. There were figures appearing in all the boxes now.
“What are they doing?” Larc asked, her voice filled with wonder.
“I have no idea.” My voice was not filled with wonder. It was starting to go hoarse with dread.
“Can they see us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And then I added hopefully, “I don’t think so.”
Suddenly we could hear a lot of commotion. Someone said, “Hey There it was again. Did you just hear a kid talk?” Larc and I looked at each other in horror and simultaneously looked at my handheld. My palm had slipped off the microphone and was now not-so-helpfully covering the On/Off button. Someone else said, “How could that be? This is a secure transmission.” Then my mom said, “What the—Jim? Jim? Are you looking at the monitor? Why is the interface to your system turned on?”
“Uh, Larc,” I said, turning to look at her.
“Yeah?”
“Looks like the hack works.”
As Larc and I grabbed our stuff, we heard her dad say, “That’s really strange. I thought I disabled my interface this morning when I knew I wouldn’t be home for the meeting.”
As we ran out of the apartment, I said, “Should we hide somewhere? Are they going to come after us?”
“You think they’ll come looking for us?” Larc asked, not even out of breath.
I shrugged. “Why not? Two kids suddenly appear on some kind of weird closed-circuit camera thing? Not in school? Alone in an apartment in the middle of the day?” I flushed and dropped my eyes. “If you were a parent, what would you do?”<
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Larc ran her tongue over her glowing braces. “Were you going to try to kiss me in there, Mike Stellar?” She didn’t act scared or worried about being caught. She seemed to be enjoying herself immensely.
I abruptly stopped running. “What? Kiss you? No! Of course not! Why would I want to do tha—”
Suddenly we heard footsteps rounding the corner.
“In here!” Larc said, swiping her flash key and opening a door right next to us. She dragged me into the dark apartment. We both stood there for a minute, breathing hard and listening even harder. We didn’t hear anything. My heartbeat began to calm down and I looked around. The apartment was dark but I could still see that it was pretty much the same as my apartment.
“Whose apartment is this?” I asked, picking up a small globe that was sitting on a shelf near the door.
“Aunt Beebo’s.”
I almost dropped the globe. “Your aunt Beebo’s?” I felt my skin crawl as I realized I was standing in the lair of the devil. “Do you know what she would do if she knew I was in here?”
Larc offered, “She’d probably be relieved that you weren’t getting pummeled by some insane person who was chasing you in the hallway.”
“Relieved?” I laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your aunt Beebo was the crazy person chasing us in the hall.”
“Don’t be silly. She’s teaching class, remember?” Larc wandered over to the kitchen and pushed a couple of buttons. “Do you want a drink or something?”
I wanted to say no, but then I thought a drink would actually be nice. “Okay,” I grumbled, and Larc handed me a pouch of water.
She said, “Anything to eat? A snack or something? You didn’t eat much for lunch.”
I chuckled. “You’re acting like my mother.” Then I said quietly, “No, I don’t want anything. Thanks, though.”
It always seems dorky to say things that are polite to your friends. Why is that? I drank my water…. Hmm. Friends. Did I think of Larc as my friend? It still seemed like we hardly even knew each other.
Larc walked out of the kitchen and into the little living room. She sat on the sofa.
“We can still study, if you want.”
I made a pssssh noise and waved my hand like I was backhanding a bug.
