by Barry Lyga
“Oh, great. One more thing to deal with. Like I don’t have enough on my plate. You guys are gonna give me a headache,” Kyle complained. He thought for a moment, then darted down at superspeed, snatching up a length of strong cable that had been pulled from Ultitron and spooled loosely on the ground. He tied it tightly around the scientists so that they couldn’t escape.
“If you behave and don’t yell your heads off, I’ll untie you before I go,” he promised, then made for his original goal: the wreckage of Ultitron and the wealth of free electronic gizmos and gadgets within.
Mairi barely had time to shout in surprise as Mighty Mike snatched her up in his arms and sped away with her. The next thing she knew, she was standing on a small bluff overlooking the time capsule burial plots. Her hair stirred in the telltale wind that always meant Mighty Mike had just flown away.
What had happened? Mike had opened the time capsule and then there’d been that light and then —
Suddenly, there were more people next to her on the bluff. More wind. Mike was flying people here, then darting back to the crowd to grab more people. Because …
Because …
Mairi finally looked at the time capsule burial area.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
The flash of white light had gone away, but in its aftermath was chaos. It took a moment for Mairi to realize exactly what was going on down there, but once she realized, it made her shiver as though this fine weather had gone incredibly, massively bad.
Some people were standing still. So still that Mairi thought — against her will, but she thought it anyway — that they might actually be dead. Other people were writhing on the ground as though in pain. Others were … They were …
She couldn’t quite believe her eyes, but other people were moving at incredible speed, running here and there, as if panicked by something …
And they were hitting one another …
Mike swooped and dodged in and around the crowd, grabbing people, separating the fighters. But it was a losing battle. There were too many of them, moving too fast, and the ones who were paralyzed, the ones in pain … they were sitting ducks for the fast movers.
Some of the police seemed unaffected and they were wrestling with the other police, who had gone crazy like the other townspeople. Mighty Mike moved swiftly, disarming the ones who’d been affected. Sheriff Monroe was shouting orders into the microphone, and as Mairi watched, the mayor took a swing at him, almost smacking him in the back of the head as her mouth hung open, slack.
What was happening?
And her parents. Where were —
Just then a fist came out of nowhere. It would have connected with frightening strength if Mairi hadn’t dodged at the last minute.
It was Mr. Rogers. The school gym teacher. His teeth were gritted, his lips pulled back in a horrible grin so taut that it must have been painful. But his eyes … his eyes were somehow blank and full of hate at the same time.
And he moved so fast … swinging at her again now.
Mairi backed up and nearly bumped into Miss Schwartz, her science teacher. For an instant, she relaxed, relieved. Miss Schwartz was her favorite teacher and Mairi was one of Miss Schwartz’s favorite students, practically a teacher’s pet. But then Mairi saw the look of madness in Miss Schwartz’s eyes and she knew that no one would be playing favorites. Not today. Not now.
Mairi ducked as Miss Schwartz swung at her, then rolled to one side, sprang up to her feet, and sprinted off, running down the side of the hill that led away from the burial area.
Mairi ran as fast and as far as she could. At first, she checked over her shoulder to see if she was being followed, but then she tripped and almost went face-down on the sidewalk. She decided that getting far away was more important than checking to see if someone was chasing her.
Besides … no one was following. It slowly dawned on her that she was running away from nothing. And had no idea where she was running to.
She slowed as she neared the northernmost tip of Major Street, suddenly aware of the burning in her lungs and the sore pain lancing through her legs. She leaned against a mailbox and tried to catch her breath.
What was happening? Why had people gone crazy all of a sudden? Why had —
No. Wait. It wasn’t that “people” had gone crazy. It’s that some people had gone crazy. Maybe the people closest to the time capsule …
No. No, that wasn’t it. Because Sheriff Monroe had been right next to it and he seemed all right. And the mayor, standing next to the sheriff, had gone crazy.
And other people had just stopped moving completely.
Mairi thought again of her parents. What had happened to them? In the chaos and confusion, she hadn’t been able to find them before running. She felt ashamed all of a sudden. What if her parents hadn’t been affected by the, by the whatever-it-was? What if they were scared and under attack like Mairi had been? She had run away. Abandoned them …
She spun around, clenching her fists, determined to return to the scene and find them, but before she could take a single step in that direction, she felt a familiar breeze press against her and then Mighty Mike soared into view, hauling Sheriff Monroe with him. The sheriff’s hat was missing, his shirt was torn, and a trickle of blood ran from one corner of his mouth, but he didn’t seem badly hurt. Just angry.
“Mairi! Don’t travel!”
“Don’t go back there,” the sheriff clarified as he got his feet under him. He gazed at her grimly. “It’s not pretty.”
“My parents —”
“— are all right. Well, as all right as anyone. I saw them both. They’re unconscious and no one is bothering them.”
“But —”
“Look, it’s under control. For now.”
“I made a wind tunnel and sucked all the air away,” Mike said. “Everyone went to sleep.”
“That … that’s a great idea,” Mairi said, impressed.
“It was the sheriff’s idea,” Mike said modestly. “I only utensiled it.”
Implemented? Sure, maybe. Mairi shook her head, furious with herself for trying to correct Mike’s vocabulary at a time like this.
“That won’t last forever,” she said. “They’ll wake up and start hurting one another again. What do we do?”
“‘We’ aren’t doing anything, young lady,” Monroe said, hitching up his gun belt. His handcuffs jangled. “I’m finding a safe place for you to hide out until this is over. Then I’m calling in the National Guard, and Mike and I will get started isolating the dangerous ones from the rest.”
“I want to help.”
Monroe shook his head. “No way. No civilians. Especially no kids.” He sniffed. “Although it’s pretty darn suspicious that your little friend isn’t around when this happened.”
Kyle? Did Sheriff Monroe really think that Kyle was responsible for this? For a moment, Mairi’s loyalty to her friend swelled to the surface and overwhelmed her fear. Kyle played pranks, yes, but this was far beyond anything he could do. How would he have access to the 1987 time capsule, for one thing? It had vanished long before Kyle was even born!
But then she thought of her dreams. Of the Mad Mask. The mystery face behind the mask.
And Kyle’s behavior lately. So quiet. Sullen. Not himself at all. Was he up to something? Had Kyle finally crossed the line and done something dangerous?
Monroe was staring at her as if he expected her to argue with him and defend Kyle. But Mairi just said, “I don’t know where he is.”
The sheriff nodded. “Let’s find a safe place for Mairi here, Mike. And then let’s get to work.”
Mighty Mike swept Mairi into his arms.
“Wait,” Mairi said. “Wait. Before you take me away, tell me, please: What’s going on? What’s happening to everyone?”
And Sheriff Monroe said the scariest thing Mairi had ever heard from an adult:
“I don’t know.”
Kyle knew that the soldiers would eventually wake up, so the f
irst thing he did was tie all of them up at superspeed. But even that was only a temporary solution. He was pretty sure that if one of them didn’t check in at some sort of base on a regular schedule, the Army would send more soldiers. So he had to move quickly.
Fortunately, moving quickly was something he was really, really good at these days.
He sped around Ultitron’s deactivated body, ripping open hatches, tearing through wiring and cabling, smashing his way into the innards of the thing. Unlike the Army and the government scientists, Kyle knew that Ultitron wasn’t actually a robot — it was just a mass of electronics and components jumbled together at random — so he didn’t feel bad about breaking Widget A in order to get to Widget B.
Erasmus walked him through the process, consulting the schematics for Ultitron that still resided on his hard drive. Kyle gathered everything on his “shopping list” and soon had a respectable pile of stuff he would have to haul back home. He pried a sheet of metal from Ultitron’s left leg, and twisted and mangled it until it formed a rough sort of bucket. Then he dumped his newfound treasures into it and lifted it over his head. It weighed close to a ton, he estimated.
“Kyle, now that you’re done with this, you really should —”
“Not. Now.” Kyle heaved out a breath and focused. He’d never tried flying with such a burden before. He would have to move very fast, lest someone see him near the Camden house with the “bucket.” And he would have to do it without dropping anything.
He sucked in another breath, then exhaled as he launched himself skyward. For a second, he tilted to the right, unbalanced by his burden, but he quickly righted himself and sped home.
Luckily, no one saw him. Of course — the time capsule burial. Everyone would be there, on the other side of town. He couldn’t have planned his heist for a better time!
He realized, with a small shock, that he’d completely forgotten to release the scientists as he’d promised. Oops. He would have to go back later. No biggie.
“There’s a serious problem,” Erasmus said. “Something happened at the burial ceremony. Details are sketchy, but it seems that the town is out of control.”
“I’ll fix it,” Kyle said, landing in his backyard.
“You don’t even know what ‘it’ is!”
“Trust me. I’ll take care of it. Now just let me get this stuff inside and get to work.”
Once inside, Kyle took off his stolen mask and got to work. He had Erasmus play something fast, with a strong beat, and then he worked at his top speed, blurring the air in the basement as he zipped from workbench to shelf to the time machine and back again.
He’d never been able to work so quickly before; he usually had to watch his noise level because his parents were always right upstairs and, while they weren’t all that bright, the incredible racket of superspeed gadgetry in the basement would surely have caught their attention. (Even then, they would wait for a commercial before budging from the TV — they always forgot they could pause with the DVR, further proof of their idiocy.)
But now he could cut loose. And he did.
Soon, he was sweating, the beads of sweat wicking away from him as he dashed from spot to spot. Flecks of his perspiration, hurled from his brow and sent splattering by his great speed, dotted the basement walls.
“It was when they opened the time capsule, it seems,” Erasmus said. “Reports are incomplete. And someone keeps babbling gibberish into the police band, so it’s tough to figure out exactly what —”
“Get off the police band,” Kyle ordered, “and calculate the tolerances needed to recapture a neutrino flow in this capacitor I’m building. I don’t want it to explode when I turn on the time machine.”
He stripped wires and crimped them together, then soldered them into place. He scrounged around for an old DVD player, unscrewed its shell, and pried it apart to access the goodies within. He needed the small laser and lens assembly that read the DVD during playback. It wasn’t terribly powerful, but it was accurate enough for his purposes to act as a controlling mechanism.
Kyle had been designing and redesigning and re-redesigning his chronovessel (it sounded much more impressive than time machine even though it meant the same thing) for weeks and weeks now. He had mentally gone over each aspect of it, carefully and cautiously examining it from all angles in the vast intellectual reaches of his enhanced brain. At the same time, he’d fed his ideas and schematics and plans into Erasmus so that the AI could give them the once-over and offer any suggestions, too.
In short, Kyle had already built his time machine. Now it was just a matter of assembling the parts.
The DVD laser. Wiring and cables from Ultitron. A chunk of solar panel. He opened up the motorbike’s gas tank — which was now useless; chronovessels didn’t operate on gas — and reinforced it with steel, then began adding the computer components that would control the time travel technology. He had grabbed a fistful of processors from Ultitron and now was wiring them to run in parallel, creating in effect a supercomputer in the shell of the motorbike. In order to travel through time, the chronovessel had to calculate millions of variables all at once and make changes to its systems in less than microseconds. Kyle’s brain was fast enough and powerful enough to do the math, but even at superspeed, it would be impossible to keep up by typing into a computer. This is why he needed his new, special supercomputer — it was connected directly to the heart of the time travel circuitry and could make the changes instantaneously.
“This is going to work,” Kyle whispered. Sweat gathered on his forehead and he wiped it away, still huddled over the glowing soldering iron as he pieced together another component. “It’s really going to work.”
“Of course it’s going to work,” Erasmus said in a huff. “We designed it.”
Erasmus didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand. He was an artificial intelligence, not a person. Yes, he was based on Kyle’s personality and brain waves, but he couldn’t really feel the world, couldn’t experience it any other way than through Kyle’s voice in the microphone or through the information that streamed through his police band and his Wi-Fi connection. With each passing day, Erasmus became less and less like Kyle, and more and more like, well, Erasmus.
“I designed it,” Kyle retorted. “You double-checked it.”
“I found the flaw in the zero-point energy collector,” Erasmus reminded him, “and figured out new efficiencies in the trans-light —”
“Enough!” Kyle said. “I get it. I get it. You were very helpful. Are you happy now?”
There was a period of quiet, electronic sulking, during which Kyle finished assembling the guidance controls for the chronovessel. As he was busy installing them into the motorbike, Erasmus piped up again, his voice noticeably subdued.
“Kyle, the police band has gone dead.”
“Of course it has. I had you block it.”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m blocking it, but people should still be trying to use it. It’s just that none of their signals would go through because of me. But no one is trying to use it. At all.”
“Well, good. It won’t distract us anymore.”
Another moment of silence. And then:
“Kyle, the police band never goes dead.”
Kyle paused. “What are you saying?”
“You don’t live in the virtual world like I do. The police band is always active. There’s always something going on, even if it’s just two deputies complaining about the sheriff or someone calling in for a doughnut run. There’s always something.”
“And now there’s nothing.”
“Nothing at all. Silence. Dead silence.”
Kyle bolted an old Xbox controller onto the handlebars of the motorbike.
“Did you hear me? Dead silence. No one is —”
“I heard you,” Kyle said, adjusting the position of the controller. “I’ll fix it.”
“How?”
“I’ll fix all of it,” Kyle said. He stood and stretched. “Th
e chronovessel is finished. I’ll fix everything by going back in time.”
Mighty Mike flew off; Mairi watched him go, his green-and-gold costume melting into the darkening sky as he went. In an eye blink, he was gone, leaving her there on Major Street as the sun dipped into the western horizon.
“It’ll be all right,” Sheriff Monroe promised her in his most convincing adult voice. “Let me get you somewhere safe while he tries to get to the bottom of this.”
The sheriff’s voice was usually calming, but right now Mairi wasn’t buying it. Just moments ago, the sheriff had called out on his shoulder-mic for the dispatcher back at the sheriff’s office to alert the National Guard, but no one had answered. He’d then tried his deputies in the field, but again no one had answered.
Nothing could get through. It was like Sheriff Monroe was shouting for help from the bottom of a well and no one could hear.
Mairi wasn’t a cop, but she figured when a sheriff called for help and no one answered, that was pretty bad news.
“Come on,” Monroe said, taking her hand. “We’re going to the office. It’s the safest place in town. There’s a good sturdy door with a lock and there’s the arm —” He shook his head, stopped talking, and started walking.
A good door with a sturdy lock? What did he mean? Mairi had gone on a field trip to the sheriff’s office in elementary school, so she knew the place. (In fact, now that she thought about it, that was the day Kyle’s feud with Sheriff Monroe began — Kyle had somehow managed to glue the sheriff’s gun into its holster.) The only door with a sturdy lock she could think of was —
“Are you putting me in jail?” she asked.
“Hush,” the sheriff said, his mouth set in a grim line. “Not planning on it, but if worse comes to worst, it might be the safest place.”
Mairi’s mind raced. Jail. That was crazy. And what else had he been talking about? The arm? The arm? What kind of arm —