by Barry Lyga
“All right. Lead me to the computer.”
They found another door, this one unlocked, that led into a murky hallway lined with lockers. “This is the eighth-grade hall,” Danny whispered. “I don’t come here unless I have to.”
“Why are you whispering?”
Danny blinked. “I don’t know,” he whispered.
“Why don’t you stop, then?”
“I … I can’t.”
Kyle sighed. “Take me.”
As he’d anticipated, the inside of the school had changed a lot since Kyle’s days here in elementary school. Or, rather, the inside of the school would change a lot between now and Kyle’s time in elementary school. A couple of familiar rooms just didn’t exist — there were lockers or brick walls where the doors should have been. And one hallway that Kyle remembered leading to the cafeteria instead dead-ended.
Danny lead him out of the eighth-grade hallway, down a large corridor that led to a glass-enclosed office. When Kyle had been in elementary school, this space was for the guidance counselor, his hated Great Nemesis — Melissa Masterton. But in 1987, it was the school’s front office.
The door was locked.
“Darn it!” Danny smacked his palm with his fist. “So close! The computer is right through there.” He pointed through the glass at a wooden door with a sign that read ATTENDANCE.
Kyle nodded. “Okay. Thanks for your help. It’s time for you to go.”
“What do you mean?” Danny’s eyes grew wide. “Dore! You’re not going to break the glass, are you? I didn’t help you so that you could break things.”
“So breaking in is okay, but just plain old breaking isn’t?”
Danny fidgeted. “I said I would get you in here and show you the computer. I didn’t say anything about causing damage.”
Kyle had had no idea that his father was so conscientious. Maybe that’s where I get my good behavior from, he thought, followed immediately by a weird feeling he couldn’t identify. The idea that he’d inherited anything other than eye color from his father was … He didn’t have a name for it. He didn’t know how it made him feel.
“Just go,” Kyle said. “I can pick the lock. But you shouldn’t stick around, just in case someone shows up. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Danny thought about it, then nodded. “All right. I’ll go. But will I see you later?”
Probably not, unless I can’t get the chronovessel working. “Of course.”
They shook hands and Danny scampered off the way they’d come. Kyle waited until he figured Danny had gotten out through the maintenance room.
And then — without hesitation — he punched through the glass door, shattering it into a million pieces.
“It was after I started touching the bom …” Mike hesitated, then continued, sounding out the word as Mairi nodded along with him, “… the zombies that I noticed my powers were becoming … becoming …”
“Weaker?” Mairi supplied.
“I was going to say ‘unstronger,’ but I think your word is better.”
My word is a word, Mairi thought.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Mike admitted. “I couldn’t save anyone. I don’t know if I can save you.”
“That’s all right,” Mairi said. “We’ll save each other, okay?” She smiled reassuringly at Mike, even though the last thing she felt like doing right now was smiling.
He smiled back. “Yes. Very excellent. We’ll save each other. That will be very nice.”
“Unless we can figure out what’s going on,” Mairi said, “we might be here awhile. Until the Army comes. Or until your powers come back.”
Mike brightened. “Do you think that will happen?”
“It could. Who knows?”
Mike paced the lighthouse. “We need to know.”
“Know what?”
“How strong I still am.”
“Well, sure, that would be helpful, but —”
CLANG!
Mairi jumped; Mike had delivered a karate blow to the post bolted into the floor that held the massive lighthouse lantern. The entire lamp structure vibrated.
“Mike!”
He did it again, and this time the post bent just a bit. Mairi scrambled out of the way as the lamp structure tilted crazily toward her.
“Stop it, Mike!”
Mike pulled away from the lamp. “I needed to know.”
“I didn’t know you were still strong enough for that!” Mairi limped over to where Mike stood. The post was crimped and dented. It would have been hugely impressive if Mairi didn’t know for a fact that Mike should have been able to punch through it with one shot. “I didn’t think you could still do that.”
And then she noticed that his knuckles were bleeding.
Mike stared at it as though he’d never seen his own blood before. And Mairi thought that maybe he hadn’t. Unwrapping her scarf, she offered it to him.
He flexed his fingers, testing his hand. “It’s not broken. I will be KO’d.”
“It’s actually ‘okay,’” Mairi finally told him.
Mike nodded grimly. “Yes. Of course. I knew that one already. Stupid of me to forget it.”
“Don’t worry about it. Here” — still holding out the scarf — “For the bleeding.”
He took the scarf and wound it around his hand carefully. “This is strange,” he said.
“You’ve never been really hurt before,” Mairi said. “At least not since you got your powers and your amnesia. You should —”
“That’s not what I mean.” He pointed to the lamp, which still flashed despite the abuse he’d dished out to it. “It keeps doing the same thing, over and over.”
“Right. It’s flashing.”
“But I mean …” Mike sounded puzzled. Well, more puzzled than usual. “It’s not always flashing the same way.”
She realized Mike was right — the light would stop for a moment, then start up again. She watched it, almost hypnotized by it, and realized that what had appeared to be random was actually a pattern. There were two kinds of bursts — long ones and short ones — and they were repeating….
“It’s Morse code,” she whispered. Kyle had taught her Morse code years ago, and they used to use it at school to tap out messages to each other during class.
“Who is Moore and why should we care about his code?” Mike asked.
“Not Moore’s code,” Mairi said. “Morse code. It’s the way people used to communicate, before phones and e-mail and stuff. It’s like a system of dots and dashes, and depending on how you combine them, you get letters and words.”
“I see no dots.” Mike peered around. “No dashes, either.”
“You don’t have to literally have dots and dashes. Just something shorter and something longer. A dot and a dash. Or a short sound and a long one. Or …” She gestured to the lantern, which pulsed out a long burst of light, followed by a quick blip.
“Oh,” Mike said. “I get it.”
A moment later, he actually did get it, and his face lit up without any help from the lantern. “What does it say?” he asked.
Mairi squinted at the light as it dotted and dashed away. “I don’t know. I don’t remember it well enough. But I know someone who will know.” She turned to Mike, her eyes fierce. “Do you think you can fly just a little more?”
“Where are we going?”
“We have to find Kyle Camden.”
“We’re about to make a move,” Kyle said, switching on Erasmus.
“It’s about time,” Erasmus said through the earpiece. “We can’t keep delaying. We need to get back to our time.”
“We can just set the machine to bring us back a few seconds after we left,” Kyle reminded him. “It’ll be like we never left.”
“You’d like to think so,” Erasmus said, “but there’s no guarantee we can fine-tune it that well. Not with the technology in this era.”
“You’re such a bummer.” Kyle stepped through the frame of the door. The
room marked ATTENDANCE was unlocked, so he went in.
It was a small room, lit by sunlight streaming through slatted blinds over a single window. If Danny had just pointed out the window, Kyle could have saved a lot of time. And a glass door.
Oh, well.
The room was packed with shelves and filing cabinets. Against one wall was a smallish desk with a boxy computer on it. The computer looked like something out of the old movies Kyle’s parents watched — it was positively ancient.
“Whoa,” Kyle breathed. “Old school.” He chuckled, looking around Bouring Junior High. “Literally.”
“Where are we?” Erasmus demanded. “You know I can’t see and without Wi-Fi and cell signals and GPS to guide me, I can’t tell where we are or —”
“We’re at Bouring Junior High,” Kyle told him, slipping into the chair at the desk. “We’re going to get online, find a place where we can get the stuff we need to fix the chronovessel, and get out of this time period.”
“But I tried telling you before that —”
“Quiet. I need to think.”
“But —”
Kyle popped out his earpiece and put it on the desk. Let Erasmus chatter away if he wanted to. Kyle had things to do.
There was no mouse for the computer and the keys were stiff and clunky. Kyle found the power switch and the computer screen powered on with a dull beep. A glowing green rectangle blinked in one corner for a moment, then vanished, only to be replaced by blocky, green text:
Kyle stared at the screen. What the heck …?
Ah. Wait. A password. That’s what it wanted.
He pawed through some papers on the desk and found nothing. But when he opened one of the drawers, he found a slip of paper with several words crossed out … and one word that wasn’t: lunchroom.
You’re kidding me. Not only are they stupid enough to write down the password right next to the computer, but they also make it something easy like lunchroom? Really? Have these people never heard of phishing or malware?
Kyle typed lunchroom at the prompt and hit ENTER. The computer made another dull beep and then the screen flashed. Kyle grinned, ready to launch a web browser….
But all that showed up on the screen was more text:
Kyle stared at the screen, which glowed back at him with that weird greenish text.
No mouse. No trackpad. No windows or icons or anything. This was the most useless computer in history!
He tried entering one of the underlined letters, but that only took him to more useless submenus — a grade book, a roster, stuff like that. Each one had an option to back out to the Main Menu, so he always ended up back at the original screen.
“Erasmus,” he said, slipping the earbud back in, “I need your help.”
“Haven’t you been listening to me?” Erasmus fumed.
“Not really. This computer is all —”
“I tried to explain it to you before. There is no Internet in 1987!”
“What?” Kyle couldn’t believe it. How could that be possible? How could people live without the Internet? “You mean no Internet in Bouring, right? They haven’t been hooked up yet?”
“No, Kyle. No Internet. Period. The TCP/IP protocol that runs the Internet in our time is barely a decade old at this point in history. There are various government and military systems connected by some old-fashioned 56 Kbps backbones —”
“Fifty-six kilobytes per second!” Kyle gasped, horrified. That was so slow! How could anything get done at that speed?
“— but the term Internet is only being used in some very specific organizations. Here in 1987, we’re on the cusp of global hookup, but it hasn’t happened yet. There’s NSFNET, ARPANET, NSI … a bunch of strung-together networks out there, but nothing remotely like the Internet you’re used to. Heck, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau won’t even build the first prototype of the World Wide Web for two more years.”
Kyle sank low in the chair, deflated and defeated. “We’re out of luck, then,” he moaned. “How else am I supposed to find a place to get the components we need in order to repair the chronovessel?”
“Think it through,” Erasmus encouraged him. “We’ve managed to do so much together — we can get through this, too!”
“Yeah, we did all of that stuff when my brain wasn’t scrambled by time travel.” Kyle almost brought his fist down on the desk, but decided against smashing it to pieces. “Now I’m so messed up that I couldn’t even remember when the Internet was invented. Pathetic.”
“That is pathetic,” Erasmus agreed, “but you’ve always been more than just sheer brainpower, Kyle. As much as I hate to say it, even before you built me, even before the plasma storm gave you your powers, you were a smart kid. And you pulled some exceptional pranks, back in the day. Be creative. Think.”
“You’re smarter than I am now,” Kyle said morosely. “And you have my creativity — I programmed it into you. You don’t even need me.”
“Wrong. You can see — I can’t. You can find something that might help us.”
“At this point,” Kyle snarked, “the only way we’re getting back to our time period is if we stuff ourselves into a —” He broke off, staring at the useless computer screen.
“Stuff ourselves into a what? Kyle? Kyle?”
Kyle thought back. To earlier in the day. Carson Cave. The Monroe boys. And Walter Lundergaard, taking the —
“— time capsule,” Kyle finished.
“You couldn’t fit in the … Oh. Oh! I see what you’re thinking!”
“If — if — Lundergaard is a time traveler, too, then he’ll probably have something we can use to fix the chronovessel!” Kyle jumped up from the desk. “All we have to do is go to Lundergaard Research and —”
“Lundergaard Research wasn’t founded until 1989, Kyle. There’s nowhere to go.”
Kyle paced the office. “He must be nearby, though. He was at Carson Cave. He knew the Monroes — he hired them to steal the time capsule.”
“That’s true. He must have a hideout or a lab or something nearby. How do we find it?”
“I don’t know …” Kyle roamed the confines of the office, swinging his arms. Think! Think! “If I could be on the Internet for just two minutes! I just need to go to, like, WhitePages.com and —” He stopped, staring. “Hey, Erasmus? Where did they get the name for WhitePages.com?”
“The name? It comes from the olden days, when there was a book that contained the same information.”
“And the book was called White Pages?”
“Yes.”
With a cry of triumph, Kyle snatched up a heavy book from one of the bookshelves. BOURING AND SURROUNDING AREAS WHITE PAGES, it said on the cover.
“Ah-ha! Definitely old school!” He flipped through the book until he found a listing for Lundergaard, W. Not far from here, actually: over on Thorul Court.
“We’ve got him!”
First, they went back to the spot where they’d hidden the chronovessel. Kyle wanted to examine the thing thoroughly. If he was going to swipe stuff from Lundergaard, he wanted to make sure he got everything he needed the first time out.
He pulled off the tarp and whistled a long, low whistle.
“What is it?” Erasmus asked.
“It’s, uh, worse than I thought.”
And it was. When they had first arrived in 1987, Kyle had been disoriented, and it had been nighttime. He hadn’t really been able to examine the chronovessel. Now, in the light of day, he had the complete picture, and it was an ugly one.
Scorch marks scarred the sides of the motorbike, and there were new dents and dings all along its body that Kyle knew hadn’t originally been there. The wheels — which were really just for balance, since the thing didn’t run anymore — had melted to the rims. The whole chassis appeared to have been caught in a shoot-out somewhere and then gone over with a flamethrower. It was a miracle that the video camera and control board were still in good shape.
“This is not gonna be good….”
Kyle muttered as he pried open what had once been the gas tank, where he’d installed the components for time travel.
What he found was a melted, fused, burned hunk of circuits, wires, and motherboards. It was as though he had thrown it all into a microwave. It was ten times — a thousand times — worse than he had imagined.
“We’re in trouble,” he told Erasmus, and rolled up his sleeves. Time to get to work.
An hour later, he had most of the chronovessel disassembled and spread out before him in a rough sort of triage system: broken parts that could be fixed, broken parts that were hopeless, and parts that could still be used.
Sadly, the third category was almost bare.
For that matter, so was the first.
“Okay, walk me through this again,” Kyle said to Erasmus. “And don’t lose your patience this time. The antimatter production disks …”
“… need to be made of titanium or better,” Erasmus said, exasperated. With Kyle’s superintelligence still not fully active, he was relying on Erasmus to remind him how they had originally built the chronovessel, and it was wearing on the AI’s patience. Kyle suddenly realized how other people probably felt around him … and he didn’t like it.
“And then the conduits from the dark energy collector —”
“To the dark energy collector!” Erasmus exploded. “The conduits run to the dark energy collector! Or maybe you want to create a superdense black hole in the middle of Bouring and suck half the solar system into oblivion!”
“Right. Right. I remember now. You don’t have to be so mean.”
“You’re right. I should be kinder and take your feelings into consideration and let you blow up the planet when you reverse the power flow from the neutrino combiner and back up chronons into the storage matrix.”
“Point taken.” Kyle still didn’t like it, though. “I think we have a complete list. Do we?”
Erasmus sniffed, an impressive feat given that he didn’t have a nose. “Well, assuming you’ve reported accurately the status of all the components, yes.”