by Ben Zackheim
Seth Brennan is the leader of Alpha Squad. “Nanoagents: Induction” is a story about how Seth landed that job.
Here is a snippet from Seth’s chronicle of the story, picked up from when his best friend, Chen Yang, disappeared…
INSIDE THE NET
For the first time I can remember, I couldn’t fault Chen for not reading the manual.
It was just basic installation instructions. Nothing more than what I’d read when I was at school. I was hoping that there would have been more details on the disk, but it was just an installer.
The easy thing to do would be to just slap on the goggles and launch the program. That’s probably what Chen had done, though, and look where it had gotten him.
My mind raced as I thought of how I could track what this technology was doing so I could control it. Then it hit me.
If I ran a real-time debugger, I could watch the code as it loaded. I could even go step-by-step while it ran to see what it was doing. Everything would be shown in hexadecimal, which would make it very challenging to decipher on the fly, but I could at least keep my hand over the keyboard and break the code should anything weird start to happen.
After hooking everything up, I ran the program without the goggles on, and quickly went into debug mode.
The screen flashed that I needed to wear the goggles in order to continue.
I pressed F5 on my keyboard and the program halted execution. The screen dump showed a bunch of hexadecimal combinations that looked like “4F3ADE029D” and so on.
There was no time to unravel it. I had just wanted to make sure I could stop it if I had to, and it looked like I could.
So I hit F6 to resume the program and then I put on the goggles.
At first nothing happened except that the screen now read “calibrating.” Then the little kaleidoscope animation that I saw on Chen’s screen started to happen on mine.
Then I started feeling a buzzing in my head.
It was disorienting.
I was getting a little dizzy.
I told myself to press the F5 key, but my hand would not respond. It was as though my body had stopped allowing me to control it. I was numb.
Everything went dark.
I could hear a humming sound, but I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t move.
An instant later the world began to change.
I felt as though I were standing in an empty black room. There was no air flow, no sound but the faintest hum, and no light.
Then I noticed little blue lines starting to appear like a grid. They began glowing brighter and brighter, pulsating slightly with every heartbeat.
After the lines had gotten to a strong intensity, a bunch of numbers started pouring around the walls in all different directions. At first, it was a bunch of 0’s and 1’s and then it turned into more groupings of hexadecimal like I’d seen on my debugging screen.
I jolted back into feeling and the world became instantly too bright to handle.
Somehow I was flying high above a jumble of electricity. There were buildings and wires and tunnels and rivers. It was like being in an airplane and looking down at a bustling city.
But this city was made primarily of blue, red, green, and yellow lines. There were many colors in the spectrum, but those were the dominant ones.
I had never seen anything like this before.
Obviously this new technology was amazing, but I didn’t like that I had no control over any of it. My hope was that as soon as I touched down I would be able to control everything again. Then I’d look for a menu and get myself back home.
As I continued floating down I noticed that I was being directed away from the main city into a small area beyond the buildings.
There were a line of what looked like suits flowing all the way out into the distance. If I had to compare them to something, I’d say that they looked kind of like the space suits astronauts wear, except that these were black instead of the normal white.
They were all connected with wires, like telephone poles running down an old highway.
I was heading directly for the last suit in the line, and it was empty.
Something felt very wrong about this.
Try as I might, though, I couldn’t alter my direction.
I can’t explain what it was, but every fiber of my being told me that I did not want to be in that suit.
Forcing myself to relax, I focused all of my mental energies on my left index finger. I couldn’t see the keyboard, but I had the feeling that I was still sitting at my desk in my room. If that was true then my finger was still hovering over that F5 key. I just had to press it.
It took everything I had, but finally I felt my finger push forward.
A moment later I was on the ground in this digital world. My feeling had returned and I could completely control myself.
Somehow I knew that I had been completely separated from the real world. My body was fully inside the Net now.
I looked up and saw the suit that I had been heading for.
Then I checked out the one next to mine. Peering through the face shield, my blood froze.
It was Chen.
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Shirley Link & The Black Cat
Copyright © 2013 by Ben Zackheim
Cover & Illustrations by: Robin Hoffman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
For our cat, Evvis. We miss you!
Contents
Chapter One
The Haunted Fridge
Chapter Two
A New Case
Chapter Three
Little Treasures
Chapter Four
Flus and Clues Don’t Mix
Chapter Five
Officer Grumpy
Chapter Six
Cooldown Hill
Chapter Seven
Shirley, the Meddler
Chapter Eight
The Black Cat
Chapter Nine
Uh-oh. Jacob.
Chapter Ten
Bingo!
Chapter Eleven
Where’s Elvis?