by M. E. Castle
The teachers were on strike.
All but one. As Fisher and Alex navigated the hall, Ms. Snapper came rushing out of a classroom door, spinning in circles while she tried to round up the students and assemble some kind of order.
“Fisher?” she said, wincing, as if she were expecting him to leap at her throat with bared canines.
“Ms. Snapper!” Fisher said. “Are any of the other teachers here?”
“Two or three,” she said, bending down to pick up a discarded orange juice carton. “We’re trying our best to round everyone up, but there just aren’t enough of us. Nobody warned us they were going to be striking. They showed up just long enough to post notices on the door, or they didn’t show up at all.”
“Everyone’s been acting really weird lately,” said Alex, glancing sideways at Fisher.
“I admit I’ve been quite out of sorts, too,” said Ms. Snapper. “When I got home from school yesterday, I was so mad that I picked up a shoe and threw it right through my TV. But a good night’s sleep seems to have helped me.” She ducked as an empty tennis ball can flew through the air. “I just wish I could say that about everyone—or anyone—else.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” said Alex.
“I don’t know if there’s much that can be done,” said Ms. Snapper, “but thanks, boys. We’ll take any help we can get. I’m going to get to the chem lab before anything dangerous gets broken.” She left at a quick trot.
“I don’t know what …” Fisher trailed off when he spotted Veronica walking out of a classroom nearby. His stomach tensed up.
“Fisher?” she said nervously. Her hands were clasped in front of her. “I … I’m really sorry. I overreacted. I was so mad yesterday … I yelled at my parents and ended up getting … grounded,” she said the word barely above a whisper. “First time in my life. No TV, computer, phone … they didn’t even let me read. So I mostly just sat on my bed and thought about things. I guess it helped me pull myself together. Alex, have you seen Amanda? I owe her an apology, too.”
“Not yet,” said Alex, looking around worriedly. “But I hope I find her soon. It’s a war zone in here.”
“Yeah,” said Fisher. “Things are getting … is that a cafeteria cart?”
Alex and Veronica turned to follow Fisher’s gaze. At the other end of the hall, a large cafeteria cart was rolling slowly into view. Sitting on top of it was a huge cooking pot.
“I’m getting the feeling that something really bad is about eight seconds from happening,” said Veronica.
The three middle schoolers behind the cart started pushing it faster as they moved down the long hallway. Kids who saw it coming backed out of the way, and those who didn’t got bowled to the side.
The cart accelerated faster and faster. As it got closer, Fisher recognized the bitter, musky scent.
“Oh, no …,” he said under his breath. “Gravy.” He switched to a shout. “It’s the cafeteria gravy! Duck!”
Even as he shouted, the three kids finally let the cart fly free. It careened sideways into a bank of lockers and ricocheted into the middle of the hall, where it tipped on its side. The pot splashed its vile gray turkey gravy in all directions, and the spray traveled a good thirty feet.
Fisher, Alex, and Veronica had thrown themselves into a nearby classroom, but many others weren’t so lucky. Wompalog gravy spattered the ceiling, walls, lockers, doors, and students. It marked clothes, papers, and backpacks with splotches that would be almost impossible to remove with anything other than fire. The smell of overcooked scrapings of who-knows-what filled the hallway.
Immediately, an angry mob took off after the three perpetrators, who had begun running away as fast as they could as soon as they had released the cart. Clashes erupted between other kids who, furious and covered in mystery gravy, just felt like reaching out and whacking the nearest objects they could find. A mop duel erupted in the middle of the hallway.
“We have to try and restore some order,” Alex said. “This is getting completely out of control.”
“Agreed,” said Fisher. “I think I have an idea. Here’s the plan.…”
A few minutes later, Fisher stood on a table in the middle of the mostly empty cafeteria. A few kids were asleep on chairs or tables, and the rest had decided to steer clear of the place. He crossed his arms, waiting patiently.
A tiny squeak of feedback sounded over the loudspeakers, followed by Veronica’s warm, rich voice. “Attention, attention. King of Hollywood is serving a free, all-you-can-eat buffet in the cafeteria, starting immediately.”
Fisher heard the thunder of running footsteps within seconds. The entire school swarmed into the cafeteria. Alex helped herd them in and then quickly slammed the door shut behind them, so no one could escape. At that moment, Veronica set off a precisely timed, much louder feedback squeal, quieting everyone down enough to hear Fisher banging a metal bowl with a spoon. They turned to look at him.
“Hello, everyone!” Fisher said, fishing the short speech that Veronica had written for him out of his pocket. “I’m afraid there is no food.” As the kids started shouting in protest, he raised a hand in the air. “Wait, wait just a second! I haven’t got food for you, but I can give you something better.” There was a brief silence before kids murmured and whispered to one another curiously.
“I can give you something, in fact, that tastes even better than spicy fries. Something you have never tasted before.” He paused when he reached the word power in the speech. Then he smiled.
“Power.” The room went quiet. “The teachers are gone. Principal Teed is gone. We could run around goofing off, or we could take control for ourselves. Teach our own classes. Choose our own lunch. Even design a whole new schedule. This school is ours for the taking. I say, we take it!”
“Okay,” said an eighth-grade boy standing nearby. “But who put you in charge?”
“Yeah!” a girl near the back said. “Like you said, all the people who make the rules are gone. So why should we listen to you? Why should we listen to anyone?”
Sections of the crowd shouted in support. Fisher faltered. Veronica, Alex, and he hadn’t had time to prepare a longer speech, and he hadn’t anticipated push back.
“Keep at it,” Alex told Fisher. “You’re doing a great job.”
“Are you serious? I’m choking up here,” whispered Fisher as the chatter of the crowd started to grow.
“Trust me,” Alex said. “You can do this.”
“No more rules!” an eighth-grade girl was chanting. “No more rules!”
“Shut up, Tanya,” someone else said.
“Make me,” she said, whirling around.
“There!” Fisher shouted as loudly as he could, getting people’s attention again. “There, you see? If we all try to do things our own way, we’ll be so busy fighting that we’ll never have any fun. Anarchy is exactly what Principal Teed will be expecting to happen. Do you want to prove him right? Or do you want to show him what we’re really capable of??”
Cheers erupted from across the cafeteria. Fisher had them.
“All right!” he said. “Brody! Willard! Leroy!” He pointed to the Vikings, who had stopped pummeling one another during his speech. “To the gym! You can teach, uh … gym stuff. Picking up heavy things, or whatever you do.” Leroy and Willard turned to Brody. Brody was still scowling, but he nodded. The Vikings headed off.
Alex had located Amanda in the crowd. Fisher couldn’t tell if she was still affected by the crazy-mood plague, but at least she didn’t have anyone in a half nelson.
“Amanda!” he said, pointing to her. “History and politics!” She crossed her arms, but nodded. “Alex! Science! You can talk to Ms. Snapper about who covers what. Veronica Greenwich will be teaching English and French.”
He went on, assigning various subjects to kids who knew enough to teach them. Then, exhausted, he retreated to Principal Teed’s office, which he’d decided to use as headquarters. He resisted the urge to spend all day spinning aro
und in the creaky, old, brown leather chair.
The experiment was, for the most part, a success. It turned out that the students were mostly happy, as long as they felt they had some level of control.
Near the end of the day, Fisher heard a loud pop from the classroom down the hall. He rocketed out of his chair. But before he could head for the hall, he saw something—no, two things—moving in the ventilation grate in the wall by the door. It was the very grate he’d hidden in not so long ago when Alex, then still just Two, had been called to Teed’s office and escaped with a tissue stink bomb.
Two white blurs zipped out of the grille and started scampering in circles around the floor. They paused momentarily at Fisher’s feet.
“Einy? Berg?” he said. Einstein and Heisenberg were the science lab mice, who had been cared for by Mr. Granger before he turned out to be an evil mastermind.
The mice took off up Fisher’s legs and jumped onto his arms. He managed to grab both of them gently in his palms. Their tiny legs kicked and battered at his fingers. Moments later, Alex opened the office door, his face and hair dusted with soot, slightly dazed.
“Uh, we had a slight … chemistry malfunction,” he said. “But everything’s perfectly fine. We’re all fine now.… How are you?”
“Einy and Berg just ran in here like there was a buffalo stampede ten seconds behind them,” Fisher said, indicating to the mice in his hands.
“Oh, you got them!” Alex said. “Great. They broke out of their cage. Clever little guys. Help me put them back?”
The hall seemed clear as they left the principal’s office and made their way to the chemistry lab.
“Well,” Fisher said with a sigh. “It’s been a crazy day, but I think we helped. A little, anyway.”
“Things are still pretty rough, but I think we can count this as a victory,” Alex said. “We thwarted Three’s attempt to turn the school upside down.”
“A small victory,” Fisher said as they walked into the lab. “We’re still no closer to knowing where he is and how he’s controlling everybody.”
Alex led Fisher to Einy and Berg’s cage. As they restored the mice to their home, Fisher noticed that several bars in the cage had been bent to form an opening.
“This must be how they got out,” he said, kneeling down to look more closely. He frowned. “I wonder how they managed it. These bars are pretty sturdy.”
Alex shrugged. “I didn’t even realize they’d escaped until I saw them running around the lab.”
Einy and Berg had a quick sniff around the cage before Einy went to his running wheel. As it spun, Fisher saw something stuck in it. He stopped it with his hand, sending Einy tumbling to the bottom.
It was a tiny piece of paper. He sucked in a quick breath.
“Alex,” he said, in a strangled voice. “He was here. He was right here.”
It was a note in the same theirs-but-not-theirs handwriting.
This is only the beginning. The dark side of humanity will soon rise from the deep.
“Only the beginning …,” Alex repeated. A worried crease appeared between his eyebrows.
“If things get much worse,” Fisher said, crushing the note in his fist, “it won’t just be the school that shuts down. Strikes will be just the beginning. People will fight in the streets. The whole city will collapse.”
He felt an electric current running from his feet to the top of his head, making every hair along the way stand up at attention. And in his mind, he could see a pair of cold, dark eyes that weren’t so unlike his own, staring him down, daring him to make the next move.
Not everything in this world is black-and-white.
There are, in fact, eight different shades in between.
They are numbered on that knob for your convenience.
—Lord Burnside, Professional Toaster,
Autobiography/User’s Manual
Lord Burnside was happily humming to himself as he popped out slice after slice of crunchy toast. He was still the only appliance in the kitchen not on strike. FP walked around the kitchen table where the Bas family sat, occasionally being handed down a bite of the crispy whole wheat.
Fisher, Alex, and their parents sat around the table, several flavors of Mr. Bas’s patented nonperishable jams between them to give their breakfast a little variety. Mr. and Mrs. Bas seemed back to normal. Their fight from several days earlier was obviously forgotten, and except for the lack of televisions in the house, Fisher had almost forgotten about it, too.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mrs. Bas said, washing down a bite of toast with a sip of tap water. At least they hadn’t made the sink intelligent enough to question its own loyalty.
“Me neither,” said Mr. Bas. Both of the corporate research labs they worked at during the day had closed down, since most of the employees were on strike. In fact, striking seemed to be a popular theme throughout Palo Alto. “Something must be affecting people. But what is it?”
Fisher and Alex shared approximately their four hundred twentieth significant glance. The microscope lens they’d found in Three’s abandoned hideout had turned out to belong to Stanford’s chemistry lab. A visit to the lab after school had proved largely fruitless. But they had seen many more examples of the ever-spreading chaos.
Stanford was a circus, in some cases literally. The students were climbing the buildings. Some swung from homemade trapezes attached to windowsills or columns. The boys had even run into a mime, who’d almost caught them before they built an invisible box around him with their hands.
There had been only one unusual thing in the chem lab, and they’d very nearly missed it: a single blade of grass in the microscope storage area. It might not mean anything. Any number of people could’ve carried it in on their clothing or shoes. But it was all they had. Fisher and Three had immediately begun their analysis; they were waiting for the results of their pollen-imprinting-comparison test now.
“Well, I guess I’d better get some work done here at home,” their mom said. “I don’t care what my boss says; I can’t just halt scientific progress because she wants more vacation days. At least I can finally get some work done in the garden. There’s finally some thermos-sized rice ready for picking. It would be a nice break from toast.”
“Maybe I’ll spend some time with the telescope,” their dad said. “I spotted a new extrasolar planet a month or two ago and haven’t had the chance to research it much.”
The parents left the table, and Fisher sighed. Mr. and Mrs. Bas were as successful as they were partly because of their incredible ability to focus on their work, no matter what might be happening around them. It made them a little tough to live with sometimes. But Fisher and Alex had free rein to hunt Three down.
“So what now?” Fisher said.
“Still nothing from Agent Mason?” Alex asked. Fisher shook his head. “Well,” Alex said. “I have some new ideas about how the crazy pox might be spreading. Let’s go talk to CURTIS.”
Fisher walked into his room, with Alex at his heels, and booted up his computer.
“We know Three must be lurking nearby,” Alex said. “Three’s broken into Wompalog twice, so he must be fairly close. Dr. X may have engineered him to be evil, but he still needs to eat and sleep. Just in case the grass angle doesn’t pan out, maybe we can run a search for illegal entry, supermarket theft, that kind of thing.”
“That could take a while,” said Fisher. “There’s probably been a lot of petty crime lately, and sifting through search results won’t be easy.”
Alex patted Fisher’s computer. “What good is having artificial intelligence, trained under an evil mastermind, if you don’t put it to good use now and then?” he said. “CURTIS can analyze, cross-reference, and examine a search in no time.”
“Good thinking,” said Fisher. “Hey, CURTIS,” he said as the AI woke up, “we could use a hand with something.”
“Is that so?” CURTIS said. “I guess you must need some kinda help, since that’s the only tim
e I get any attention around here.”
“Well, yes,” Fisher said, desperately hoping that CURTIS was just being his usual, wisecracking self. “You’re an AI. Helping people is your job. And you’ve always been happy to help me in the past, right?”
“You know,” CURTIS said, “I don’t think you’ve ever bothered to ask if I was happy before. I could almost believe you didn’t care.”
“I cared enough to save you from being blown up with the rest of TechX,” Fisher said. “Remember that? You’d be scattered across the troposphere right now if it wasn’t for me.”
“Yep, yep,” CURTIS said. “Ya saved me. So you could plug me into this tiny box and badger me around all day.”
“CURTIS,” Fisher said, struggling to maintain his temper, “if you think I’ve been treating you unfairly, I promise we’ll talk about it later. But right now something bad is happening and we need you to run a search.”
“Run your own search,” CURTIS said.
“CURTIS, we do not have time for this!” Alex shouted.
“No,” said CURTIS. “I don’t think I have time for it, either.”
A series of small beeps followed, and an error message appeared on screen.
“He—he—” Fisher couldn’t even say the words.
“He wiped out your hard drive,” Alex said grimly.
Fisher had triple backups of all of his files, but the AI had still rendered his computer completely unusable.
“CURTIS …,” he said, his fingers twitching as if they wished that CURTIS had a neck. “You have thirty seconds to restore my hard drive.”
“I’m sorry, Fisher,” CURTIS said in a flat, lifeless voice. “I can’t do that.”
Fisher sat at the desk and tapped at the keys so fast, they started to feel warm beneath his fingertips.
“What are you doing, Fisher?” CURTIS said as Fisher used his special codes to bypass CURTIS and restore manual control over the computer. “Stop, Fisher …,” the AI went on. Fisher found CURTIS’s central control routines and shut him down. “Fiiiisherrrr, Fiiishuuurrrrr …,” CURTIS droned as his routines stopped running, one by one, until he was effectively turned off.