by Betsy Uhrig
“Here’s your bag,” said Mom.
Luke sat up, took the paper bag, and started breathing into it.
“Why did you get your ear pierced anyway?” Mom asked.
“Just felt like it,” Luke mumbled into his bag.
“It’s because you turned thirty, isn’t it? Feeling a little less hip than you’d like?”
Luke put the bag aside. “I think I’m okay,” he said, pushing himself to a stand. “Look at my ear, though. It feels like it’s on fire.”
“It’s a little red,” my mom said after no more than two seconds of inspection. “But that’s normal right after you get it pierced. You can’t drive a metal spike through a piece of flesh and not expect a little irritation.”
Luke’s face turned ghastly white. “Oh my god,” he moaned. And down he went.
“At least he landed on the sofa,” I pointed out.
“Put his feet up on a pillow,” said Mom. “I’m going to call Shannon. Where’s my phone?”
“At home on the counter,” said Alice helpfully.
“Where’s Luke’s phone?”
We looked around and didn’t see it.
My mother sighed. “Would it kill them to have a landline? Check his office, Jason. Alice, that’s way too many pillows.”
Luke’s “office” was a portion of the basement that he had walled off, mainly with junk. He did something with computers, but that was all I knew. I walked through the kitchen and downstairs into the basement. I looked around his messy desk for his phone and didn’t see it. Then I checked the other likely surfaces. I was about to give up and go back upstairs when I saw several flat cardboard boxes tucked in vertically beside his desk.
Something about them caught my eye.
And that something was two words, printed on the first one:
PRESCIENT TECHNOLOGIES
Chapter 34
“NEVER MIND ABOUT THE PHONE, Jason,” came Mom’s voice from upstairs. “It was in his pocket.”
By that time I was pawing through those boxes like they were going to tell me something important. They didn’t. They all had the Prescient name on them, but nothing helpful like an address or a website. I sat down on Luke’s ratty office chair to think.
The boxes hadn’t been used—no tape shreds, no labels—so Luke hadn’t gotten something in the mail from Prescient. This was weirder. It looked like he was the mailer, not the mailee.
I’m not proud of what I did next, but this history hasn’t really been about things I’m proud of up to this point, so why should that change now?
I started shuffling through the piles of paper on his desk, looking for anything else with Prescient on it. If he had boxes, maybe he had envelopes or stationery or a business card.
He did not.
Then I went beyond casual snooping and entered the territory of outright prying. I opened the file drawer of the desk. I thumbed through his files, which were (sort of surprisingly) in perfect alphabetical order. And there it was: a big fat file folder labeled “Prescient” in Luke’s sloppy printing. I was about to move beyond outright prying and enter into some creepy CIA-ish realm of actual spying when Alice appeared in the doorway and bellowed, “We’re leaving now. I have a tap lesson. What are you doing? MOM!”
I closed the desk drawer and leaped away from the desk, as if I’d look less guilty by putting some distance between me and it.
“Nothing” was my brilliant comeback.
Fortunately, Mom was in no mood to listen to Alice’s latest grievance. Shannon was on her way home to deal with Luke, and Alice was late for tap. We practically burned rubber out of the driveway.
* * *
Let me state for the historical record that Alice Sloan was one mean tap dancer. In both senses of the word “mean.” That she was mean in the nasty sense should surprise no one who has been reading this entire history and not skipping the Alice sections. Here are some of the things she said to her fellow students of tap, while they were dancing:
“Faster, Jessica! This isn’t ballet.”
“Are those arms or noodles, Ellie?”
“You’re supposed to tap, not stomp, [name redacted to protect the victim’s privacy]!”
The teacher intervened with that last one, but Alice waved her off. Or was she doing jazz hands? I couldn’t tell.
Mom just sat there behind the non-soundproof glass in the studio, reading a book. When she finally looked up, toward the end of the class, all she did was smile at me and say, “That kid can dance, can’t she?”
“Who knew there was trash-talking in tap class?” I said.
My oblivious parent chuckled and went back to her book.
Meanwhile, when I wasn’t being simultaneously horrified and impressed by Alice, I was thinking hard about the whole Luke-Prescient thing. I arrived at a few conclusions. Among them:
Luke either worked for or in fact was the mysterious “entrepreneur” behind Prescient Technologies.
Luke probably just worked for this person. I simply could not picture my goofy uncle as some kind of tech genius.
Luke hadn’t told Shannon about this job. I concluded this because I was sure Shannon would have mentioned it when I talked to her about Prescient.
If Luke hadn’t told Shannon about it, it’s because he’d been instructed not to. Luke was almost filterless, especially with Shannon.
So Luke secretly worked for a company that (a) had access to future security recordings of the Flounder Bay Upper School cafeteria and (b) seemed to want the H.A.I.R. Club to see them.
The main question was still why it wanted us to see them. But that was only one of the many, many questions I now had.
My final conclusion was this:
Luke needed to be pumped for information, and Shannon needed to be there when he was.
Chapter 35
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT MIGHT SURPRISE you as much as it surprised me. Because things haven’t tended to go right for me so far in this history. But now, two things did in a row.
First, my mom decided to swing by after Alice’s class and see how Luke’s brain infection was coming along.
Second, when we got there, Alice insisted that it was her “turn” to play on Luke’s swivel chair, “because Jason was hogging it earlier.” My mom went down with her to make sure she didn’t spin so hard she puked.
So there I was, alone with Luke and Shannon. Exactly what I wanted. Now was my chance to stop dithering, to take charge and move this investigation forward. The problem was how to begin. I wasn’t one to just sit down with a couple of adults and start chatting.
Shannon was perched on the very end of the sofa, which Luke was still flopped on. He had an ice pack on his earlobe and kept asking her to check if he was getting frostbite. I was in the armchair opposite, drinking a caffeinated soda my mother didn’t know about and working up some liquid courage.
“So, Jason,” said Shannon, when she’d assured Luke his earlobe wasn’t turning white or blue or any other color that meant frostbite, “any progress on the H.A.I.R. Club mystery?”
This got the conversational ball rolling in the right direction, anyway. Now I just needed to kick it into the goal. Which I managed as awkwardly as I possibly could have. I remembered each and every word for the historical record because I kept replaying them in my head and hearing how dumb they sounded.
“No,” I said, my eyes on Luke. “I can’t figure out what’s going on with Prescient Technologies.”
Yup. That was me, Jason Sloan, Expert Interrogator, raking my uncle over the coals. I looked so hard at him I was kind of squinting and waited for him to crack.
The weird thing is, he did.
He tried to meet my penetrating gaze for a second or two. But he couldn’t hold it. He looked away, first at the ceiling, then at Shannon, then at the TV, which wasn’t on.
I upped the intensity of my laser-like focus on him. If my eyes had been real lasers, his whole face would have needed that ice pack. And he felt it—oh yes, he felt it. He mo
ved the ice pack over his eyes.
“Luke, what are you doing?” Shannon asked. “You’re going to freeze your eyeballs.”
“Can that happen?” asked Luke, yanking the ice away.
“I don’t know,” said Shannon.
“I’ll woozle it,” said Luke, grabbing for his phone.
“What? No!” said Shannon. “We were talking to Jason about his club. Don’t be rude.”
“So, yeah,” I said, leaning back fake casually. “I feel like I need to know more about Prescient Technologies, but there’s nothing out there. I mean, who are they?”
Luke went to clap the ice pack over his eyes again, but he was still holding his phone, and he accidentally clunked that onto his face instead. It was not his finest moment.
Did I mention that Shannon is smart? She is, and she knows her husband really well. “Are you okay?” she asked him when he’d put the phone down on the coffee table and the ice pack on the wrong ear. Then, without waiting for a response, she said, “Prescient Technologies.”
He flinched like she’d flicked him.
“Prescient Technologies!”
He flinched again, like she’d slapped him.
“Luke,” she said, “is there something you want to share with the class?”
He groaned and put a pillow over his face.
“We can still see you.”
“I can’t talk about it,” he said through the pillow.
“It’s only us, honey. Your loving wife and your adorable nephew.”
“I can’t” came through the pillow.
Shannon looked at me and shrugged.
The adorable nephew shrugged back.
“Why can’t you?” she asked Luke gently.
He removed the pillow from his face and hugged it like a stuffed animal. “There’s an extremely aggressive confidentiality agreement,” he said. “And they have a picture of me.…”
“They have one of me, too!” I said.
“They could also come after me legally,” said Luke. “In ways I don’t like to think about.”
“So you both signed a confidentiality agreement with Prescient?” said Shannon.
We nodded.
“Doesn’t that mean you can talk to each other?”
I told you she was smart.
Chapter 36
SHANNON LEFT THE ROOM SO Luke and I could discuss Prescient freely.
Which got awkward right away.
“So, ah, you know about Prescient Technologies?” I began. Jason Sloan, Expert Interrogator, had left the building. Caffeine will only get you so far.
“Uh, yeah. I’ve done some work for them. And you know about them too?”
“Yeah. That’s what we do in H.A.I.R. Club. Monitor the security stuff they gave the school.”
We both looked longingly at the TV, which still wasn’t on.
“So who are they?” I asked him.
Luke shrugged while holding the pillow to his chest and the ice pack to the wrong ear. “I don’t know. They approached me in a very roundabout way with this weird proposition. It’s not like they’re evil or anything. Just secretive. Not, like, spy secretive. Just… I don’t know.”
“So what did you do for them?” I asked.
“I put together some equipment, based on their specs, and shipped it to the school.”
“You built that stuff? The laptops and screens and stuff?”
He shrugged again. “That’s what I do. Their designs, though. Which were like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“Wow.” I should say here that I had never been the least bit curious about what Luke did for work. It had certainly never occurred to me that it was something interesting.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s amazing. Almost futuristic.”
I had just sipped from my soda and came close to spraying it out my nose.
Luke raised one eyebrow but didn’t comment.
“So did you, like, program the laptops too?” I asked.
“I downloaded the software and files they provided.”
I knew we were running out of time. Alice was going to get dizzy soon, and even if she didn’t, my mother’s patience wasn’t endless.
“So you must have a way to get in touch with them,” I said. “Right? The help screen is doing some strange stuff, and we have questions about some of the, um, files, and it would be good if we could ask them.”
Luke was already shaking his head. “Sorry. The communication has been almost entirely one way.”
“But how is that possible?”
“It’s complicated. They contacted me through Warren.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“It’s not a person. It’s an online game. It has to do with rabbits. I know it sounds silly, but it’s really gripping when you get into it.”
“What do you do?”
“Each player is a rabbit, and there are different levels of warrens. And you want to move up to the next level, but to do that you need carrots—those are the currency of Warren. So to earn carrots you have to pass these intelligence tests, and also perform various skills, and also help out other rabbits.”
“Community service?”
“I guess. The more you do, the more carrots you earn, and the easier it is to get into an elite-level warren.”
It sounded utterly stupid and pointless, but I nodded.
“Anyway, the Prescient people contacted me through Warren and asked me to build the one set of equipment for the school. They gave me the specs and sent the files to me through Warren. I never got any contact information, and as soon as the job was done, they disappeared.”
“But they must have paid you. Didn’t that have a name with it?”
Luke went really red and briefly moved his ice pack back to his eyes. Then he yanked it away and tossed it on the floor. He mumbled, “They paid me in carrots.”
“Carrots?” I repeated.
“Carrots?” came a shriek from the kitchen area.
But that’s when Alice puked, so I did not get to see what happened as Luke tried to explain to Shannon that he’d built all that futuristic equipment in return for a bushel of virtual vegetables.
Chapter 37
I BELIEVE I MENTIONED AT the beginning of this historical account that I don’t rush into things. So I didn’t go right to my fellow club members with this information from Luke. Instead, I opted to think it through on my own for a while. Was this this a smart decision? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
What I came up with on my own was this: Whoever was behind Prescient, they were smart enough to send files from the future back in time through an online game. They knew Luke well enough to know that he played the game and that he could build the equipment. They knew me well enough to know that I would join H.A.I.R. Club at school and be called a dork at home. And finally, they seemed to want to torment me, and possibly the other club members, with disturbing glimpses of our senior year.
So they were smart, they knew my family, and they were mean.
Who did that leave, really?
Alice Sloan. That’s who it left.
Laugh if you want, but for me, all indicators now pointed to my sister as the future evil genius who created Prescient Technologies.
I’m not quite as much of a fool as you are thinking I am. I knew I needed to test my theory. And the only way I could think of to do that was to go back to the T.W.E.R.P. screen and see if I could get it to admit that it was Alice.
Of all the issues I was facing, this one seemed pretty easy. If I knew anything at all, it was how to get a rise out of Alice. I’d been training for that for years. I was sure that if I could get some time alone with the help screen, I could bother it until it ran screaming for Mom. And then I would have proof. And afterward? I’d think about that when the time came.
* * *
So there I was, after school on Friday, in the office, pretending to need a bus pass. When the secretary went into the back to get the unnecessary pass from the printe
r, I casually took a key to the H.A.I.R. Club janitors’ closet and slipped it into my pocket. Simple as that.
I didn’t see anyone in the basement, and I was feeling proud as I let myself into club headquarters and carefully shut the door behind me. I put down my stuff and sat at one of the desks. I opened the laptop and prepared to get right to business. Which is when I noticed that the help screen was already up and ready to go.
“Huh,” I said (out loud, to myself).
Had we left the program running since our meeting? It seemed unlikely. And wouldn’t it have timed out? It had an irritating habit of doing that. All this wondering took only seconds in real time. At which point I noticed that the words on the screen weren’t:
Hello, Jason. What do you want to know?
They were instead:
Hello, Lara. What do you want to know?
Lara hadn’t even logged on yesterday. So why did the help screen think it was talking to her now?
“Huh,” I said again (again out loud).
The important thing to remember here is that I was the club historian, not the club detective. Which is why I didn’t immediately put together the fact of Lara’s name on the help screen and the additional fact that I hadn’t needed to unlock the door to let myself into the closet. I’m sure I would have figured out what was going on eventually. But I didn’t have to.
An aggravated sigh came from under the desk I was sitting at. And then a voice asked, “Can you move back so I can get out?”
If she hadn’t sighed first and at least given me that small amount of warning, I’m pretty sure I would have shrieked when she spoke. Instead I moved my chair backward so fast I skidded into the wall and knocked over a push broom left over from the closet’s heyday.
I was still sitting in the chair next to the fallen broom when Lara crawled out from under the desk, looking maybe one-tenth embarrassed and all the other tenths annoyed.
“What are you doing here?” I managed as I righted the broom.
She stood up and dusted off her pants. “What does it look like?” she asked, gesturing at the help screen with her name and the blinking cursor.