Mac Slater Coolhunter 2

by Tristan Bancks

  'You do yoga?' he asked.

  My mum taught a bit of yoga as well as fire-twirling. Baddha Konasana was one of the basic seated poses. I noticed that he wasn't really doing it right. Should I tell him? Before I thought about it the words started pouring out.

  'I think you've, um, got to tuck your heels into your groin a little more,' I said, regretting it immediately. Gatt stared at me like he might show me those knuckle tats in close-up. But then he tried pulling his heels back.

  'That workin' out OK for you?' he asked.

  'Yeah,' I said. 'That's ... better.'

  'Tell me what you want,' he demanded.

  I looked at Paul. I whispered to him and he whispered back.

  'We want to create flying transport for kids,' I said. 'With clean fuel or none at all.'

  'No fuel?' he said.

  Had I blown it that I knew about Perpetual?

  'Yeah,' I said. 'A safe, solo flying machine for kids. We've almost done it, but it needs a little refinement. Well, a lot of refinement, but in a place like this I think we could do it, y'know. We're only in New York for a few days but with help from people who think like us, maybe we can fast-track it. That's kind of our dream.'

  He stared at us. 'Kind of?' he asked.

  'Well, it is our dream,' I said, trying to sound certain.

  'Why flying?' he asked.

  'Um, fun,' I said. 'Fast. Flying lets you understand stuff you don't learn on the ground. And there's all that space up there not being used. It just makes sense.'

  Gatt closed his eyes, breathed deeply.

  'There's something I don't like about you,' he said.

  My heart sank.

  'I don't know what it is ... But I like your idea. It's big. I like big ideas.'

  My heart rose again.

  'I don't want you here. Not now,' he said. 'But if Melody's gonna vouch for you ...'

  'Yeah,' she said, then she had a long look at us and said, 'Yeah, I'll vouch for them.'

  I'm glad she wasn't hooked up to a lie detector because she was pretty unconvincing. Did we look that guilty?

  'Look around,' Gatt said. 'See if anybody wants to talk to you. But, remember, the second rule of The Hive is –'

  'You don't talk about The Hive,' I finished.

  He opened his eyes again, irritated by me butting in. It was a bad habit of mine.

  'Speak to anybody outside these walls about what's going on here and your life won't be worth living, si?'

  His biceps tensed when he said this.

  I nodded. 'Si.'

  'They screw up, it's on your head,' he said to Melody.

  She nodded. My eyes flicked to 'Create or Die'.

  Melody smiled. Joe closed his eyes. The meeting was over. As Melody led us to the stairs Paul and I were staring at the covered-up Perpetual, tools lying on the ground all around it.

  'Go near that and you're dead,' Gatt said without opening his eyes.

  20

  Blast-off

  The pilot squeezed the trigger and two intense bursts of smoke shot from his jet-pack. I hit record on my phone and looked around to make sure no one was watching me. I was trying to act casual, like I wasn't filming anything.

  The pilot was Heath – medium height, stocky build, sandy hair. We'd just been introduced, and he was standing on the dock outside The Hive, two cylinders attached to his back via an aluminium rig with grip handles out front. He had a blue helmet with white clouds hand-painted on either side.

  'We tested thrust on some model rockets,' Dan said in a slow Southern accent, checking Heath's pack. Dan was Heath's inventing partner – tall, skinny, lots of acne. 'And we've had two test flights which have gone pretty well.'

  'They've been developing it for nearly three years,' Melody said.

  'My father's in fuel and he helped us work out how to run it using cellulosic ethanol plants rather than fossil fuels,' Heath said, pulling goggles down over his eyes.

  'Aren't those plants, like, causing a food crisis?' I asked.

  'Yeah, but this fuel uses the stuff that others throw away. It's a waste product. Anyway, we're still in test mode.'

  'Thanks for letting us watch,' I said. Paul and I had been so delirious when we heard these guys had a jet-pack that they offered to show it to us.

  'We were gonna have another test soon anyways. You're good to go,' Dan said, giving Heath a slap on the helmet. We all shuffled back along the jetty towards The Hive. Heath, the pilot, moved to the end of the dock, near where the planks were falling away into the river. He gave the unit another quick blast of throttle. Seconds later, he gunned it and rose up off the jetty.

  He shot directly out over the river, his feet hanging a metre or two over the surface as he flew. Then he rocketed upwards, his movements jagged. He looked like he could fall out of the sky any minute. But he didn't. He flew around in staggered circles like a mosquito hunting for blood. You'd think everyone would go wild, cheering, once he had lift-off but the audience on the dock was silent, waiting for him to lose control and plummet into the Hudson. After about thirty seconds he turned and started shooting back towards us. He was coming in fast and looked like he was either going to pull up short of the platform or tear down the rest of the jetty.

  I glanced at my phone screen, checking if I had Heath in shot. I did. I had my arms folded and nobody even knew I was filming.

  I looked up again as Heath dropped a couple of metres really quickly – I thought it was all over but then he landed a foot on the dock. He slammed another foot down and it plunged right through the timber, showering splinters of rotten wood as he came running along the pier towards us.

  I couldn't believe he'd landed the thing. Everybody lost it, cheering and clapping and rushing in to see if he was OK. Heath ripped up his jeans leg and it looked like he had a pretty good cut on his ankle and calf from the wooden deck but, apart from that, he seemed OK.

  I stopped recording and Paul came over to me.

  'You get that?' he asked.

  'Think so,' I said, pocketing the phone. 'Next.'

  21

  Rollerballs

  Trees whipped past in a blur. My helmet strap flapped furiously under my chin. I howled like I do whenever I'm on something moving ridiculously fast. My eyes watered as wind ripped into my face. I wished I had a wing attached. I'd easily have taken off. For a second I thought about the hard, rough tar beneath me and how it might feel on my face if I death-wobbled and stacked, but even that thought couldn't slow me.

  I was testing Melody's skates on a path through the park. The 'wheels' were like bowling balls set into boots. 'Just lean forward,' Melody had said when I first stood up. So I did and then I quickly leaned back and fell on my bum. This happened about eight times before I finally got a feel for them.

  She said the skates worked like a Segway. All you had to do was lean forward and they'd start rolling. If you straightened up, the balancing technology inside the skate would slow you down. Unlike a Segway, though, these babies had no handle bars and no governor – the thing that slowed you down when you went too fast. 'So just take it easy,' she'd said.

  Yeah, right. I had my arms straight at my sides, leaning forward like an Olympic ski-jumper. I was holding my phone, filming on the run. I hit the bottom of the hill. Now it was dead-straight ground and I could feel the tiny electric motors inside the skate shoes driving me forward.

  Melody was back at the starting point, up in the treeline. Paul was in front of me, filming on his phone. He was standing at the edge of the park, near a road, about sixty or seventy metres away. I had to think about braking. Just straighten up. That's what she'd said. Straighten up and stop. But I'd been leaning forward for so long now that it felt weird to tip back, as though the skates might just shoot out from beneath me again. I gave myself a count.

  'Three, two, one ...'

  Then I started to lean back. Just easing it.

  I was leaning, straightening up. But the skates weren't slowing. They went right on careering tow
ards the edge of the park. I tried turning one skate behind and dragging a foot like you do to slow down on regular blades. But, because the wheels were big balls, I just kept rolling forward.

  I was maybe twenty-five metres from the road now. I'd been in situations like this dozens of times. Flying bikes, kitesk8s and plenty of useless Mac– Paul inventions. I started to look for soft places to land but if I veered off the path and onto the grass now I'd break my neck. I'd jumped off enough skateboards at high speed to know that inertia's a killer. So what was I s'posed to do? Skate onto the road? Hope there were no cars? Maybe.

  Just then a bus pulled up on the road at the end of the path. At least there'd be something to stop me, I thought. I had a snap-vision of those crash-test-dummy trials on badly made cars. The thing hits a wall and the dummies go flying through the front windscreen and shatter into a thousand pieces.

  Paul was still filming as I came speeding towards him.

  'Help!' I called to him.

  'Brake!' he said.

  'Keep shooting!' I screamed and I stopped those skates the only way I knew how.

  22

  Maybe There Is

  I veered off the path and hit the grass at what must have been forty k's an hour. I prepared for the roll. When the skates bit into the grass they tried to throw me through the air but I ducked my head, covered my face, rolled into the foetal position and cannonballed along the ground, top speed. The trees were upside down, the sky was my floor, the grass was on the ceiling and, when I stopped, body sprawled, every bit of me grazed and hurting, the skates were still spinning.

  I moved my fingers gently, feeling the pain, then I lifted my head. My neck killed. I sat up slowly and rolled my shoulders around. Then I opened my eyes. Paul was above me, still filming.

  'You OK?' he said casually.

  'Yeah,' I groaned. 'How'd it look?'

  'Venezuela, man,' he said.

  Paul had this thing about Venezuela recently. If something was cool it was Venezuela. Go figure.

  'She's coming,' he said, cutting the camera on his phone and sticking it in his pocket.

  Over the hill, at The Hive, Melody and Paul cracked open the skates and tried to work out what went wrong. I zoned out when they started talking propulsion, stabilisation and gyroscopic sensors. Science was strictly Paul's area. I'd heard him say, more than once, 'Physics is fun.' He'd been known to download past exam papers for year ten and twelve physics off the web and do them at home, for kicks. And I hung out with this guy.

  I took a look upstairs where Gatt was working on Perpetual with a girl and another dude. Gatt was smiling. The girl with him, who was maybe part Japanese, slammed the cover on the engine at the back of the machine. Gatt went back to his desk, the other two covered Perpetual and I headed back to where Paul and Melody were working. While they talked tech jive I sat there trying to work out how we could get a closer look at Perpetual, see if it really was a perpetual motion machine before the trial went down. I wanted to shoot the test but there was no point if it was a fake.

  After a while Paul and Melody nutted the skate problem. Paul was pretty proud of his input. The two of us went for a walk around The Hive. They were a weird bunch. Good-weird. Not bad-weird like some of the Coolhunters kids. We found this tall guy with super-white skin. Albino, maybe. He looked about twelve or thirteen. He was attaching little electrodes to the head of another guy, a redhead, who was lying on a torn single mattress on the floor. The electrodes were connected to a laptop through a series of red and green wires. The computer had USB solar, powered by light from the clear roof panels above.

  'Hey,' I said.

  'Fiddle-dee-dee, neighbour,' he replied.

  'I'm Mac. This is Paul.'

  'I know,' he said. 'Mel told me. They mostly call me Dink.' He went over to the computer and typed for a second.

  'You mind telling me what you're working on?' I asked him.

  'This here's a mind-mapper.'

  'What's that?' Paul asked.

  'Also called a dream machine,' he said. 'It's a way of recording people's dreams on video.'

  'No way,' I said.

  'Yes way,' Dink said. 'It turns an EEG, which records electrical activity in the brain, into images.'

  'That's incredible,' I said.

  'It would be,' he said. 'If it worked. EEG machines cost a bomb and my homemade app doesn't quite cut it. I'm starting to think of it more as an art installation than a scientific breakthrough.' He let out a big guffaw, baring big teeth and bright pink gums.

  'OK, just listen to the music, relax. Let yourself sleep,' he said to the guy on the mattress.

  Dink leaned over to me and whispered, 'My last invention was a Materialiser that let you download solid objects from the web. Like books and skateboards and stuff.'

  'No way!' I said.

  'Didn't work either,' he whispered. 'I'm having a bad run.'

  Paul and I laughed and hung there for a while. There was a bit of static on the computer screen at one stage but that was about as exciting as it got.

  'See you 'round,' I whispered.

  Paul picked his phone up off the desk and clicked 'stop' as we moved on. 'I hate doing this,' he said, keeping his voice low. 'I feel like a thief.'

  So did I, but I didn't see that we had a choice. We needed something to feed Speed. Our other option was to forget about coolhunting altogether and go back to our regular lives, but I just wasn't ready to do that yet.

  We found a chick called Hannah who was writing a novel on her mobile and giving away chapters for free every day on the web. It was written in short, sharp bursts of a hundred words. Joe Gatt was cool with it, apparently, because they were giving it away and weren't mass-producing anything. She was writing it with Oscar, a guy who was sitting across the desk from her. They'd write a chapter each and send it to the other writer who'd react with the next chapter. Sometimes the chapters had video embedded, other times just still pics.

  'I'm getting ready to go,' Melody said, coming up behind us. She and Hannah hugged.

  My eyes went to Melody's feet. 'What are they?' I asked her. At first it looked like she had bare feet but then I realised she was wearing some kind of clear shoe.

  'Oh, they're my UnSneaks,' she said. 'They're so old.'

  I knelt down on the ground and looked at them, close up. I didn't even care that much about clothes and shoes but these things were cool. Clear sneakers. Invisible sneakers almost. Kind of homemade-looking when you got close, which made them seem even cooler.

  'I like having bare feet,' she said, 'but you can't exactly wear no shoes in New York so I made UnSneaks. They feel like bare feet, too. Everybody helped me make them but these are the only pair. They're so comfortable but they stink. We forgot about ventilation. Don't get too close.'

  I looked up at Paul and noticed he was holding his phone on a weird angle. It was trained on the UnSneaks. I felt a pang of guilt that he was filming them but I knew these things were hot.

  'Guys, I'm gonna go soon,' Melody said.

  I looked at my phone. It was after two. No wonder I was hungry. The Hivers were starting to drift out the door.

  'Sure,' I said, standing and looking upstairs. 'Hey, is Joe still here?'

  'Don't,' she said and pushed me towards the door.

  'But how would he ever know?' I complained.

  'Believe me, he'll know. He knows everything.'

  'Just a peek at the engine,' I said.

  'He would, seriously, kill me,' she said. 'I got school tomorrow so I won't be around. Not till late. Trial's tomorrow night.'

  'Really?' I said. 'Could we come 'cos –'

  'I'll ask him,' Melody said as she shoved open the door and we stepped outside. 'But don't hold your breath.'

  'Where's it happening?'

  'Wouldn't you love to know,' she said.

  'Do you really believe it's a perpetual motion machine?' Paul asked her, skeptical.

  'I know it is. I saw it working this morning before you guys invited yo
urselves in. That's why Joe was in such a good mood.'

  'That was a good mood?' I said.

  'Was for Joe.'

  'Who is this guy?' I asked. 'I want to know more about him. Why's he so hardcore on the anti-consumer thing? Why so paranoid?'

  She started climbing down off the dock into a canoe. There was only one tied up.

  'He knows who he is. He's not trying to impress anybody else. And he's not prepared to sell out,' Melody said.

  I wondered if this was directed at me. Was she saying I was a sell-out?

  'Joe's dad used to tell him how lots of the world's great inventions have been turned to military use. Humans can't help themselves. He's not prepared to let that happen with perpetual motion,' Melody said. 'I'll bring back the other canoes.'

  'But what if the trial works?' Paul asked. 'What's he gonna do? Keep it to himself? Just in case someone chooses to do something bad with it?'

  Melody shrugged her shoulders, standing in the canoe, looking back up at him. 'I guess. Hey, I thought Mac didn't tell you about it.'

  'Sorry,' I said.

  'That's insane!' Paul went on. 'If it's a perpetual motion machine – which it isn't – but, say it actually is, then a bunch of kids have achieved what some of the world's greatest scientists never could. It'd shut down the oil industry. And coal. And nuclear. And he's going to give up the chance to eliminate the need for fuel, maybe save the planet, just because he doesn't want to sell the idea and because of some random possibility? Why doesn't he just give it away?'

  Melody untied the rope and sat down in the canoe, grabbing an oar.

  'Once he's conquered an idea, he's not interested in exploiting it.'

  'Well, he needs to be interested this time,' Paul said.

  'I know, but he's Joe. He doesn't change his mind. Forget about it. There's nothing we can do.'

  She started paddling towards shore.

  'You know what?' I called.

  She turned.

  'Maybe there is.'

  23

  Undercover

  'Here's how it goes down,' I said to Melody as she bumped into the dock, dragging the other two canoes behind. 'Paul and I shoot the trial undercover, we show Joe the footage afterwards and we let him decide if he wants to tell the world.'