by Pete Hautman
Mrs. Tisk accompanied her husband to the hospital. My mom contacted Dottie’s grandparents, and they said they’d be happy to have Dottie stay with them. My mom said she’d give Dottie a ride, and they left together. My dad and Gilly had to get back to the ACPOD neuroprosthetics lab to try to reverse engineer the REMEMBER machine. Mr. Rausch would not be much help, according to Gilly. He had loaded the entirety of Wikipedia into his brain.
“All of it?” I said.
“So it seems,” said Gilly. “All eight hundred million pages.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Yes. It didn’t leave room for anything else. And he did it without an animal to store his deleted memories. I’m afraid Ernest Rausch doesn’t even remember his own name. He’ll probably have to be toilet trained all over again.”
Myke had captured all the kittens and had them back in their basket. “I’m going to take these back to Clawz-n-Pawz,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind, Billy. This little orange one likes you.”
After Myke left, it was just me, Billy, and Alfred.
“That was a pretty good punch, Alfred,” I said.
“I am programmed to eliminate many varieties of invasive species,” Alfred said.
“Anyway, good job.”
“Thank you.”
Billy and I watched him roll off on his motilators.
“I think we’re going to have to do some more tweaking,” Billy said.
“I kind of like him the way he is.”
Billy laughed, then said, “By the way, I got a hit on your e-book hacker.”
I had almost forgotten about that. “Was it the Tisks?”
“Nope.”
I waited for more.
“You’re not even going to believe this,” Billy said.
40
The Hacker
“You again,” said Ms. Pfleuger.
I was standing in front of her desk with my arms crossed, looking up at her.
“It was you,” I said.
She tipped her head quizzically. “Me?”
“You hacked the e-books.” I looked to make sure Billy was still with me. He was, but he was standing back a ways, looking rather nervous.
“Oh. That.” She laughed. “My little demonstration.”
“Demonstration!” I said.
“Yes. In every sense of the word. I hope that you will take the lesson to heart.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “Lesson?”
“Yes. Storing information digitally is dangerous and unreliable. Books, on the other hand”—she gestured at the thousands of books surrounding us—“are solid, real, and dependable.”
“What if your library catches on fire?” Billy asked.
“If these books are destroyed, there are still thousands of other copies in other libraries all over the world. But if an e-book is damaged, every other copy of that e-book might suffer the same fate, as you have seen.” She looked at me. “What did you do when your digital copy of Charlotte’s Web was altered?”
“I looked for the paper-book version,” I admitted.
“Exactly.”
“But you broke the law,” I said. “And what about all the kids who are trying to read Charlotte’s Web on their tabs?”
“I feel bad about that.” Ms. Pfleuger looked slightly chastened. “But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
“It’s got nothing to do with omelets!”
“True,” she said, looking down at her lap.
“And kids are not eggs. You’re supposed to be a librarian.”
“I am a librarian!” she said, her face slowly reddening.
I was too mad to be scared, so I just kept on going. “Every kid who tried to read Charlotte over the last few days thinks it’s a really awful book that doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“It was just for a few days,” she said in a small voice. Her eyes looked funny, or at least what I could see of them through those thick glasses. “I changed it back this morning.” Her voice sounded funny too. She held up the laptop on her desk and turned the screen toward us. “See? Charlotte’s Web has been restored to its original version.”
A tear dribbled down her cheek. The Pformidable Pfleuger was crying.
Suddenly all the anger drained out of me.
“But why?” I asked.
She pushed up her glasses and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, looking anything but pformidable. “It was not my finest moment,” she said.
“How?” Billy asked. “That was a first-class worm you set loose. How did you know how to do that?”
“It was a simple hack, really.” Ms. Pfleuger took out a paisley handkerchief and blew her nose. “I haven’t always been a librarian, you know. Up until ten years ago I worked for your father as a software engineer. But then I decided to follow my dream of being a librarian. I just really love books.”
“E-books are books too,” I said.
“I know that.” She sighed. “But I worry that people will forget paper books the same way we’ve forgotten scrolls and stone tablets. I wrote that virus a few months ago, just to see if it could be done. I didn’t plan to use it, but then that awful man Mr. Tisk showed up, and . . . I was afraid he’d convince the town council that my library was irrelevant. We’ve been having money problems, you see. The council is already cutting back our funding. They say that Flinkwater County Library—with all their computers—better meets the needs of the people. Flinkwater Memorial could be shut down.
“So I set the virus loose. Just for one book, Charlotte’s Web. Just to show people how important it is to have real books. I always intended to change it back.” She blew her nose again. “I see now that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”
“I don’t see why we can’t have both paper books and e-books,” I said.
“Perhaps you are right. I don’t suppose e-books will be going away.”
Billy said, “You know, I still remember coming here when I was a little kid. You used to have Saturday story time, remember?”
Ms. Pfleuger nodded. “A lot of kids came here back then.” She looked at me and frowned. “Some of them chewed gum, as I recall.”
“I really liked story time,” Billy said.
“Me too,” I agreed.
“I stopped doing that when the groups got smaller and smaller, and one Saturday nobody showed up.”
“You should start it up again. I bet my cousin Kellan would come. He’s three. And I know he’s got lots of friends from preschool.”
Ms. Pfleuger smiled sadly. “That would be nice, but I’m afraid I won’t be working here for long.” Her shoulders slumped. “I’ll lose the library for sure now.”
“Maybe not.” I looked at Billy, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. “Everybody makes a mistake now and then, right?”
41
Tuna Fish
When I got home, Dad was in the kitchen eating a sandwich. Barney and Mr. Peebles were both there, looking lovingly up at him. Or maybe they were looking at his sandwich.
“Dad,” I said, “we have to save the library.”
He said, “The library needs saving?”
“Yes! Ms. Pfleuger says the city council is going to take away their funding.”
“I thought you weren’t a big fan of paper books.” He took a big bite of his sandwich.
“I’m not, but . . . Is that tuna fish?”
He nodded, chewing.
“I thought you didn’t like fish,” I said.
“I don’t,” he said. “But for some reason I had a yen for tuna. By the way, I have good news. Gilly figured out how the REMEMBER machine works. I got my missing memories back. I remember Barney now. It turned out to be quite simple. The animals where our memories were stored have wireless transmitters implanted in their cerebellums. All that’s necessary to reverse the process is to put that headset on and let the machine run for a few minutes with the animal nearby. The tricky part was matching up the right animal
with the right person. We were able to unscramble enough of Rausch’s notes to do that. Billy’s memories are stored in that bulldog, as you know. Next time you see him, he should be back to the old Billy.”
“What animal were your memories in?”
“Mr. Peebles here.”
“Mrowp,” said Mr. Peebles.
“Maybe that’s why you’re eating tuna fish,” I said. “Some of his cat memories might have leaked into your brain.”
He looked at the sandwich in his hand and set it down. “That had not occurred to me.”
“It might also explain why Mr. Peebles risked his life to save me. Because part of you was inside him.”
He regarded Mr. Peebles thoughtfully, then tore the remains of his sandwich in half and gave it to the cats. “That might also explain some other odd thoughts I’ve been having. I keep seeing the words ‘some pig.’”
“Dad, that’s from Charlotte’s Web!”
“Really? I’d love to read that book!”
“I gave it back to Dottie Tisk. It’s her favorite book ever.”
“Interesting. Dottie’s missing memories were also stored in Mr. Peebles. There must have been some leakage.”
“Dad! Gross!” I was horrified. It’s one thing to have a father who is part cat, but a dad who is part teenage girl . . . that was too much.
“Speaking of cats, your friend Myke Duchakis just stopped by with a basket full of kittens,” he said. “I told him we had all the cats we could handle. He’s a very nice young man. Quite handsome, don’t you think? Ginger? Are you okay?”
“Sorry. I just threw up a little in my mouth.” I didn’t tell him that Dottie had a crush on Myke. It would only confuse him more.
“You should go rinse it out,” he suggested.
“Good idea.” As I left the room I heard somebody—I couldn’t tell whether it was Mr. Peebles or my dad—say, “Meow.”
• • •
Okay, kind of weird having a dad who was part cat and part Dottie Tisk, but even worse would be having a fiancé who was part bulldog. I grabbed my dad’s WheelBot and took off for the neuroprosthetics lab.
I was too late. I arrived at the lab just as they were disconnecting Billy from the Rauschinator. Gertrude was on the floor next to him licking her butt.
“Billy?” I said.
Billy looked at me. His eyes lit up and he smiled.
“Ginger!” He got out of the chair and came toward me and wrapped his arms around me, and he—
—licked my face.
42
Leakage
“Eww!” I pushed him away.
“What?” he said with a hurt, hangdog expression.
“You just licked me!”
“I did?” He looked confused. “I’m just glad to see you. Again. I mean, I remember everything now.”
“Great, but I think maybe you remember some stuff you shouldn’t.”
Gilly was watching us and smiling.
“It’s not funny!” I said.
“Actually, it is,” Gilly said.
“What if he tries to lick his own butt?”
“Don’t worry—it won’t last. A certain amount of memory leakage is unavoidable, but a few days from now Billy’s memories will settle back into their old neural pathways. The remnants of Gertrude’s memory will fade away.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Having my face licked once is quite enough.”
Billy said, “You don’t mind when Gertrude licks you.”
“Gertrude is a dog!”
“Okay, no more licking. I also promise not to chase balls or chew on bones. At least not when you’re around.”
As I have mentioned before, I can be somewhat sarcastic at times, but I do not like it when other people are sarcastic with me. I gave him the evil eye, but he was grinning.
“It’s really nice to have you back in my head,” he said.
“It’s nice to be there,” I said, which made no sense at all, since I myself had never visited the inside of his head. But he knew what I meant, and that was what was important. I think if Gilly hadn’t been sitting right there we would have had a nice boy-girl-style kiss.
“I have some more good news,” Billy said. “The library is saved!”
“I’ve agreed to make a substantial contribution to that dusty old museum,” Gilly said. “Despite the fact that Olivia Pfleuger, who used to be one of my best programmers, quit ACPOD to bury herself in dead trees.” He was trying to sound grumpy, but he couldn’t help smiling. “After all, we can’t have one of the smartest software engineers on the planet out there vandalizing our literature, right?”
“So she’s not going to jail or anything?” I said.
“Certainly not. But I will require her to make sure every person who attempted to read the corrupted version of Charlotte’s Web is notified, apologized to, and offered a free paper copy of the book.”
“That sounds really complicated. How can she track down all those people?”
“Olivia may be a fool, but she also happens to be a genius. I’m sure she’ll figure out how to do it.”
• • •
All that happened a few weeks ago. Since then, Ms. Pfleuger has added two computers to her library and restarted her Saturday morning story-time program. Last week twenty preschoolers and kindergarteners came to hear her read Where the Wild Things Are. I was there too, volunteering to help with kid control. Those four-year-olds are monsters!
Dottie Tisk is living with her grandparents now, and she’s back at school. Last week I saw her wearing one of Myke Duchakis’s ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE TOO T-shirts. Billy was right. A girl who would crash through a closed garage door on an ATV was a lot tougher than she appeared.
Ernest Rausch never did remember who he was or what he had done, but he seemed to know pretty much everything else. He had not only downloaded Wikipedia, but all 400,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. He immediately began sharing information with anyone who would listen. Do you want to know how fast an aardvark can run? Rausch is your go-to guy. Questions about the royal family of nineteenth century Portugal? Ask Rausch.
“He’ll probably have to be institutionalized,” Dad told me. “The man knows everything, but he can barely feed himself. Knowing a lot is not the same as being smart.”
“He’s still going to jail, right?”
“There’s no point in bringing him to trial. He remembers nothing of what he did. In a sense, he is not Ernest Rausch anymore. He’s a completely different person.”
“I guess that’s a good thing. I didn’t much care for the original.”
Billy is back to normal, almost. He does bark now and then, but I think he does it just to bug me. I try to ignore it. Gilly, whose missing memories were divided between the goat and Gertrude, occasionally lets out a random bleat. Dad no longer eats tuna fish, but he does curl up on the sofa and purr sometimes.
Fortunately, this is Flinkwater, where eccentric behaviors are considered normal.
Speaking of Flinkwater, I got an incomplete on my report for Mr. Westerburg because, well, I didn’t complete it. But I did solve the mystery eventually. Just last week, as a matter of fact.
43
Walter Funk
I’m still a big fan of e-books, but after the Pformidable Pfleuger’s vandalism I’d been thinking more about how easy it would be to alter any digital file. Every time I read an e-book I had to check it against a paper copy, because people could be out there vandalizing e-books all the time and I’d never know it.
I had just read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and loved it, but it was so different from the movies that it made me wonder if it had been hacked, so I went downstairs to see if my dad had a paper copy.
I checked his shelves from top to bottom. No Lord of the Rings, but there were a lot of really strange books that used to belong to his grandfather—things that aren’t even available as e-books. I was looking at a book from 1911 called Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle when a framed black-and-white pho
tograph on the wall between the bookshelves caught my eye. Dad had lots of old photos on his wall. I had never paid much attention to them, but this one was a picture of a sign with letters made out of painted wooden slats. The sign read:
Flinkwater? The picture looked really old—older even than the book I was holding. I noticed a barely legible note scrawled in the margin: Uncle Walt’s Farm, 1886.
1886. That was a year before the founding of Flinkwater. So why did the sign say Flinkwater when Flinkwater didn’t even exist yet? And who was Uncle Walt?
I stared at that photo for a long time. Did it really say FLINKWATER? It looked like two words, “FLINK” and “WATER.” And there was too much space between the A and the T in “WATER.” And the bottom of the L in “FLINK” looked like it had been broken off. I stared and stared, and all of a sudden it hit me.
“Daaaaad!” I yelled in my Help-I’m-being-eaten-by-zombies voice.
It took him forever to get there—if there’d been actual zombies, I’d be lunch.
“What is it?” he said, completely unsurprised by the absence of walking dead.
I pointed a shaking finger at the photo.
“What. Is. That?” I inquired.
“That. Is. A. Photograph,” he replied.
“Of what?”
He squinted at the picture.
“I found that in your mother’s collection. It looks like an old sign.”
“No duh! But what is it?”
“I suppose it’s a sign at the edge of town from way back when.”