The Lincoln Project

by Dan Gutman

  “I know Zandergoth is a mouthful,” she said. “My friends call me Miss Z, and I hope you will, too. Have you heard of me? Do you know my name?”

  “No,” murmured the group.

  “Good,” Miss Z said. “I’d hate to be a celebrity. Can you imagine enjoying a meal at your favorite restaurant, and having to stop every five minutes to autograph some scrap of paper? I wouldn’t enjoy that one bit.”

  “Your photos are cool,” said Julia. “Did you take them yourself?”

  David rolled his eyes. Is this girl some kind of a dope? he thought. Does she really think this Zandergoth lady took the picture of that astronaut on the moon?

  “No,” Miss Z said, smiling. “Photography is a hobby, a passion, of mine. Well, collecting photos more than shooting them. I think it’s human nature to collect things, don’t you? We seem to have this curious desire to hang on to material objects. We must derive some degree of pleasure from accumulating stuff. You all probably collect something, am I right?”

  “I collect glass horses,” said Isabel.

  “I collect Pez dispensers,” said David.

  “I don’t collect anything,” said Luke.

  “I like to collect money,” said Julia, provoking some good-natured chuckling.

  “Don’t we all?” Miss Z said. She turned her chair around and rolled closer to the wall of photos, pointing up at one of them.

  “I’m a history buff myself,” Miss Z said. “See this photo? Do you have any idea why it’s significant? It doesn’t look very historical. Why would I have it up on my wall?”

  David, Julia, Luke, and Isabel studied the photo. There was nothing special about it. Just an old-time street scene.

  “Give up?” Miss Z asked. “This was the first photo ever taken that had a person in it. See those men in the lower left corner? One appears to be shining the shoes of the other one. This picture was taken in Paris during the spring of 1838. Before that instant in time, no human being had ever been photographed.”

  Miss Z gazed at the photo, letting her words sink in. She was fascinated by the idea that none of the millions of people who had lived before that moment had ever been preserved in a photographic image.

  “Very interesting,” Isabel said, and she wasn’t just saying that to butter up a grown-up. She had always been interested in history, and social studies was her favorite subject.

  “Yeah, but why are we here?” David asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. “I have practice tonight.”

  “Is this a job interview or something?” asked Julia.

  “Or is this some kind of a scam?” asked Luke, who was never one to mince words.

  Luke didn’t trust Chris Zandergoth, no matter how fancy her office was. In Luke’s short lifetime, he had already figured out that almost every grown-up he’d met was running some kind of a game.

  “Oh, it’s no scam,” Miss Z replied. “Let me ask you a question. Do you kids like adventure?”

  “Depends on the adventure,” replied Luke.

  “Good answer!” said Miss Z. “Well, I hope you do like adventure, because that’s the reason why I asked you to come here today. I’d like to send you on the adventure of a lifetime.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I CHOSE YOU VERY CAREFULLY

  “WILL YOU EXCUSE ME FOR A MOMENT?” MISS Zandergoth asked the kids. “I need to go to the little girls’ room.”

  David shot a glance at the others. Little girls’ room? Who says that?

  As soon as Miss Z wheeled herself out of the room and closed the bathroom door behind her, all four kids whipped out their cell phones and Googled “Chris Zandergoth.”

  “Got ’er,” Luke whispered. “She’s thirty-nine. The picture on Wikipedia looks just like her.”

  “Born in Palo Alto, California,” said Isabel.

  “It says here that she’s a billionaire,” said Julia, impressed. Anybody who had a lot of money was impressive to Julia.

  “Check it out!” exclaimed David. “She’s the one who started Findamate.com, that online dating service.”

  In a matter of seconds, they had gathered enough information about Chris Zandergoth to write a term paper.

  Miss Zandergoth, they discovered, was a computer prodigy who’d dropped out of Stanford University after two years to start Findamate. The site took off, and by the time she was twenty, she was a millionaire several times over. By the time she was thirty, she was one of the richest women in America.

  What the kids did not discover online was exactly how Findamate had become so successful. Instead of relying on the typical questionnaires to help people find their “love match,” Zandergoth had figured out how to hack into the computers of the National Security Agency.

  As you may or may not know, reader, the NSA was founded to fight terrorism by monitoring information. After 9/11 the NSA began a secret mass surveillance program in which they scooped up data from cell phones, emails, and text messages sent by ordinary Americans.

  While the NSA was spying on every man, woman, and child in America, the agency never suspected that Chris Zandergoth was spying on them. By tapping into the NSA database, she was able to match up like-minded people much better than PerfectDate, LoveBug, or any other online dating service. Best of all, she was able to get away with it, because the NSA was too embarrassed to admit their own computers had been hacked. To this day, the American public has no knowledge of this secret. You’re reading it here for the first time.

  But as far as David, Julia, Isabel, and Luke were concerned, Chris Zandergoth simply started a hugely successful online dating service.

  “Online dating is creepy,” said Isabel.

  “Maybe we should get out of here,” said Julia.

  The two girls were about to head for the door when they heard the toilet flush.

  “What’s she gonna do?” David asked. “There are four of us and one of her.”

  “I don’t feel good about this,” Isabel whispered, getting back in her seat.

  The bathroom door opened and Miss Zandergoth rolled out into the office.

  “So,” she said cheerfully, “have you finished Googling me?”

  The kids laughed, trying to put their phones away without being too obvious about it.

  “I figured that letting you kids do a little research would be a lot easier than telling you my own boring life story,” Miss Z continued. “By now you know how I started Findamate. The Huffington Post said I’ve been responsible for more marriages than anyone in the world. That should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, don’t you think?”

  Luke looked at Miss Zandergoth’s desk again. He noticed that there were no framed photos of her family. For a woman who had helped so many people find love, it looked like she had never found the perfect match for herself.

  “What does any of this have to do with us?” asked Isabel.

  “Yeah, did you bring us here to fix us up with each other?” asked David.

  Julia glanced at the boys and giggled nervously.

  “No, not at all,” Miss Z said, leaning her head back to laugh. “But I do know for a fact that the four of you will work well together. You would be amazed at how powerful my software algorithms are. I chose you very carefully.”

  “Oh, I can see that,” David said. “Two boys. Two girls. I guess you picked me because you needed a black kid.”

  “I suppose I’m the token Hispanic,” said Isabel.

  “What, no Asian?” asked Luke. “How do you expect to win Multicultural Humanitarian of the Year?”

  “Very funny,” said Miss Z. “I matched up your personalities, your likes, your dislikes, your strengths, and your weaknesses. I chose you for your compatibility, not your ethnicity.”

  “How do you know so much about us?” asked Julia.

  “Oh, nothing is private anymore, my dear,” Miss Z replied. “You should know that. Americans gave up their privacy the day we accepted cell phones.”

  Julia thought of all the information stored on the pho
ne in her handbag—all the photos, texts, and private messages she shared with her friends. Maybe this lady had seen them all.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Miss Z continued, “I assure you that your crushes and selfies are of no interest to me. I have far more important concerns. But I promised you an adventure, and that’s what I hope to deliver.”

  “So what’s the adventure?” Luke asked.

  “Well, let me ask you this, Luke. Do you like history, or as I guess you call it, social studies?”

  “It’s okay,” Luke replied. The others mumbled similar noncommittal responses, not wanting to go out on a limb until they’d heard more.

  “Then tell me, what’s the most significant thing that ever happened in your history?” Miss Z asked.

  The four of them thought about it.

  “I went to Disney World for my tenth birthday,” Isabel said.

  “I broke both of my arms in second grade when I fell off the monkey bars,” said David.

  “I scored a million points at Centipede once,” said Luke.

  “Some guy once gave me an envelope with twenty bucks in it,” said Julia, provoking a laugh.

  “That’s it, huh? Don’t you find that sad?” asked Miss Z. She waved her arm toward the photos all over the walls. “Look around you. Don’t our lives seem trivial and dull compared with all these amazing moments? We only get to hang around this silly planet for about eighty short years. Shouldn’t we be allowed to have at least one truly memorable moment in that time?”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Luke said.

  “Well, most people can only dream about what I’m going to offer you. This will dwarf anything you will ever do for the rest of your lives.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE SMARTEST SMARTBOARD

  THE RECEPTIONIST, MRS. VADER, KNOCKED ON the door and brought in a platter full of cookies, little cakes, and other treats. She poured a cup of tea for Miss Z and set the platter down on her desk. Then she left the room.

  “We don’t know you,” David said, eyeing the platter suspiciously. “Why should we trust you? Because you gave us twenty bucks and some sweets?”

  “You shouldn’t trust me,” Miss Z admitted, taking a cookie. “It’s good that you don’t trust me. That shows that you’re smart. I could be anybody. But I’m not anybody.”

  “Yeah, you’re a super-rich lady,” said Julia, picking up a brownie and taking a bite. “That doesn’t mean we should trust you more than any stranger we met on the street.”

  When Julia didn’t topple over dead, the others took treats off the platter.

  “So what’s the big adventure?” Isabel asked, nibbling a pastry.

  “Is it dangerous?” asked Julia.

  “It could be,” Miss Z replied. “I won’t lie to you.”

  “Will we have to do anything illegal?” David asked.

  “Definitely not,” Miss Z replied. “I would never ask you to break a law.”

  “I need some more details before I commit to anything,” said Luke.

  “Smart boy,” said Miss Z. “I’m glad I chose you four.”

  “Here’s what I want to know,” David asked. “What’s in it for us? Do we get paid?”

  “Paid?” Miss Z looked hurt. “For the adventure of a lifetime? You should pay me!”

  “Well, what’s in it for you?” David asked. “Money, right?”

  “Young man, money is the least of my concerns,” Miss Z said, looking David in the eye. “Believe me, I have achieved my financial goals many times over.”

  “Look, I’m not in the mood for guessing games,” Luke said, getting to his feet. “What’s the big adventure? Tell me right now, or I walk.”

  “Okay, okay,” Miss Z said as she put down her teacup and pulled her wheelchair back from the desk.

  She rolled over to the smartboard on the other side of the room, admiring it for a moment. David, Isabel, Julia, and Luke turned to face her. They had been wondering why a wealthy businesswoman would have a smartboard in her office.

  “When I was a kid, we had plain old blackboards in school,” Miss Z said. “The teacher would write on the board with chalk. Do you even know what chalk is?”

  “Yeah,” Julia replied. “When I was little, I would draw pictures with it on the sidewalk.”

  “At some point,” continued Miss Z, “they got rid of those old blackboards and replaced them with whiteboards. You’d write on them with erasable markers. No chalk dust! No mess. And now, of course, a lot of schools have replaced their whiteboards with smartboards, which interface with a computer and a projector. You can type on the computer, draw pictures, go online, and interact with the board like a computer screen.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know all that,” Luke said. “So?”

  “Well,” said Miss Z, “now we have this.”

  She gazed at the board again, almost lovingly.

  “It looks like any smartboard,” said David.

  “But it’s not like any smartboard,” said Miss Z. “It’s a smarter board. I call it simply the Board. It makes a regular smartboard look like a dumbboard. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this is the smartest smartboard in the world. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life perfecting this technology, and I spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it. If it were to fall into the wrong hands, it could be used for any number of nefarious purposes.”

  Isabel looked up the word nefarious on her smartphone.

  “What does it do?” David asked.

  “I’m sure you kids understand that we’re surrounded by invisible fields of force at all times. Like TV and radio signals. They move through the air in waves.”

  “Microwaves, too,” added Luke.

  “Right,” said Miss Z, “and I’m sure you also realize that as the earth turns around, we’re constantly in motion. Even though it seems like we’re in one place, we’re all moving faster than a jet plane right now. What you may not know is that light travels at a constant speed of 186,000 miles per second,” Miss Z explained. “It’s sort of like a cosmic speed limit, which we call the speed of light. It works out to about 671 million miles per hour.”

  “Your point?” asked Luke.

  “Think about it,” said Miss Z. “The moon is about 240,000 miles away from the earth. So when you look out the window and see the moon, you’re not seeing the moon as it is now. You’re seeing the moon as it was a little over a second ago. In a way, you’ve traveled through time.”

  “Slow down,” David said. “Are you telling us you’ve built yourself a time machine?”

  “You might say that, yes,” replied Miss Z. “I’m not very good at explaining this stuff in simple terms.”

  I know what you’re thinking, reader. Either Miss Z is some kind of a genius, or this is some kind of a prank. Well, I won’t keep you in suspense. She’s a genius.

  “You turned a smartboard into a machine that can send people through time?” asked Isabel, incredulous.

  “That sums it up nicely, yes.”

  “Oh, come on!” Luke said. “That’s bull! That’s science fiction stuff.”

  “I can understand why you would say that, Luke,” Miss Z said. “It seems too fantastic to be true. But remember, robots were the stuff of science fiction before we figured out how to build them. Space travel was science fiction before we figured out how to do it. Just about any advanced technology was science fiction before it became reality.”

  “And you figured out how to do this?” asked Luke.

  “Look,” replied Miss Z, “if a human being could move at the speed of light, any number of paradoxes would become possible. Space time is warped by the gravity of a black hole, for instance. If you fell into a black hole, you would appear at another place and time in the universe. Einstein said nobody can travel faster than the speed of light. But space can stretch, shrink, or be deformed. And when that happens, time is deformed, too. Space and time are two aspects of the same thing—space-time. It can deform enough to carry you anywhere at any speed. Black holes are tu
nnels through the universe. Am I making any sense at all?”

  “So you can send somebody into a black hole?” asked Isabel.

  “I don’t buy it,” David said, shaking his head. “That’s crazy.”

  “Still sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to me,” said Luke.

  “Look, I could spend the next hour explaining the nuts and bolts of this technology,” Miss Z told the group. “But I have a better idea. David, let’s assume for a moment that I have created a time machine, and you could use it to travel back to any date and place in history. Where would you go?”

  David thought it over for a minute.

  “Any time in history?” he finally said. “I’d go back to the day Wilt Chamberlain scored a hundred points in a single NBA game. It would be cool to see that.”

  “A hundred points in one game?” asked Luke. “Now that’s crazy. I know that Michael Jordan’s high game was sixty-nine points, and that was only because the game went into overtime.”

  “It happened,” David insisted. “My dad told me about it. He doesn’t lie. Wilt Chamberlain scored a hundred points. And it wasn’t in overtime.”

  “Of all the things in history to witness, that’s what you choose?” asked Julia. “Who cares about some silly basketball game?”

  “I care,” David said. “What would you do, travel back in time to witness the opening of the first Abercrombie & Fitch store?”

  Julia looked hurt.

  “Please don’t argue, children,” said Miss Z as she rolled over to her computer. “I specifically matched you four up because I thought you would get along. David, when was that basketball game, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” David replied. “Before I was born. Nineteen sixties, I think.”

  Isabel looked it up on her smartphone. It only took a few seconds to get the answer.

  “It was March 2, 1962,” she said. “The game took place at the Hershey Sports Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania.”

  “Thank you, Isabel,” said Miss Z. “David, would you mind going over there and standing in front of the Board, please?”

  “What are you gonna do to me?” he asked nervously. “Zap me with laser beams?”