by Pete Hautman
“Who is Uncle Walt?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Mooooom!” I yelled. Dad clapped his hands over his ears and backed out of the room. A minute later my mother peeked in through the doorway.
“Are you all right?”
“No! Who is Uncle Walt and what is this picture?”
She examined the photo and read the inscription.
“Walter Funk was your great-great-great-granduncle,” she said. “He settled here back in the 1870s.”
“Before Flinkwater was Flinkwater.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “How is your research going?”
“Very well, no thanks to you! Do you know how many hours I spent trying to figure out why Flinkwater is called Flinkwater?”
“And now you know. That sign”—she pointed at the photo—“probably originally read ‘FUNK, WALTER.’”
“I sort of figured that out,” I said.
“Part of the U broke off, the comma fell off, and the L in Walter disappeared. When new settlers arrived and incorporated the town, they saw Uncle Walt’s old sign and assumed it said ‘Flinkwater,’ so that’s what they named the town.”
“You let me do all that research when you knew the answer all along?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because I knew you could do it.”
The funny thing was, I wasn’t even mad. It was actually kind of cool that Flinkwater, Iowa, was named after my family, and Mom and I were the only ones who knew it. We were the Keepers of the Secret of Flinkwater.
“I guess it’s better than if they named the town Funk,” I said.
“That’s right, and don’t you ever forget it.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I never forget anything.”
Present or Future?
Ginger Crump and her friends live in the future. How far in the future? Who knows? More than a year, but less than fifty years. Ginger’s world is not all that different from ours. People in Flinkwater use cell phones; they text; they use the Internet. But they have a few things we don’t have: robot butlers, antigravity drones, and guns that fire invisible stun rays. How much of Ginger’s world will become a reality in the near future? How much is real already?
Chapter 1 • DustBots
DustBots are small machines that scurry around the house picking up all sorts of dust and dirt. In Flinkwater, just about every home has several of them. Today, we have Roombas, Neatos, and several other brands of automatic vacuum cleaners—sort of like big, clunky versions of the DustBot, but they don’t empty themselves, and they aren’t nearly as cute! Future! Soon!
Chapter 3 • E-books
Everybody knows about e-books—you might be reading this on one right now! But most books today are paper books made out of dead trees. Will e-books ever completely replace paper books the way paper books replaced papyrus scrolls and stone tablets? Maybe, but not for a while. Present!
Chapter 4 • Alfred
Alfred, the Bateses’ robot butler, reminds me of the robot from the 1960s TV series Lost in Space. We do have human-size robots that can perform various tasks, but compared to Alfred, they are very limited. We might have robot butlers some day, but not for many, many years. Future!
Chapter 13 • Antigravity drones
Everybody knows drones are real. The military has been using them for years, and you can buy a propeller-driven drone at your local toy store right now. But Gilly’s AG-3601 drone uses antigravity instead of propellers.
Today we have maglev trains that allow heavy trains to glide over miles of track without touching the rails. They use electromagnetic force to lift the train, but they do not actually cancel the force of gravity. Simple propellers are similar—they counter gravity by pushing air down. But the antigravity powering Gilly’s drone is a more advanced technology, and one we do not yet have. Future!
Chapter 19 • WheelBots
Gyroscopically controlled unicycles are available right now! They might not be as fast as Billy’s WheelBot, but they’re still pretty cool. Present!
Chapter 26 • The REMEMBER machine
Is it possible to insert information into the human brain? In a way, that’s what reading does! But downloading complex information from a computer directly to the brain is not yet possible, and even if we figure out how to do it, it might not be all that useful. For example, if you could download this whole book into your head in a few seconds, you would lose the experience of reading the story, and what fun would that be? Future (maybe)!
Chapter 26 • Memory overload
When you learn something, do you have to forget something else to make room in your brain? Maybe. The human brain has been estimated to have a capacity of between ten and one hundred terabytes. Today, Wikipedia contains around ten terabytes of information, and it gets bigger every day. So if you could download all of Wikipedia into your brain, would your head explode, or would some of the information already there get pushed out? I used to know the answer, but I forgot! Future (maybe)!
Chapter 40 • Bookless libraries
Today, computers have become a big part of the services offered by most libraries—and there are a few libraries that have no paper books at all. Present. Will bookless libraries become the norm in the future? Who knows?
Chapter 40 • Hacking Charlotte’s Web
Could a book really be altered on every server and every reading device in the world? Maybe not today, but as our devices become more and more connected, it is conceivable. Paper books matter! Future!
Pete Hautman is the author of The Flinkwater Factor; Godless, which won the National Book Award; and many other critically acclaimed books for teens and adults, including Blank Confession; All-In; Rash; No Limit; Invisible; and Mr. Was, which was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Pete lives in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Visit him at PeteHautman.com.
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Simon & Schuster, New York
Visit us at SimonandSchuster.com/kids
authors.simonandschuster.com/Pete-Hautman
Also by Pete Hautman
The Flinkwater Factor
Blank Confession
All-In
Rash
Invisible
Godless
(Winner of the National Book Award)
Sweetblood
No Limit
Mr. Was
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Pete Hautman
Jacket illustrations copyright © 2016 by Rayner Alencar
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The text for this book was set in Excelsior LT Std.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hautman, Pete, 1952- author.
Title: The forgetting machine / Pete Hautman.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young
Readers, [2016] | Series: The Flinkwater chron
icles ; book 2 | Summary:
“Ginger Crump solves the mystery of why people in her town are forgetting things they should definitely know.”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044664| ISBN 9781481464383 (hardback) | ISBN 9781481464406 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Science fiction. | Memory—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Science & Technology. | JUVENILE FICTION / Science Fiction. | JUVENILE FICTION / Mysteries & Detective Stories.
Classification: LCC PZ7.H2887 Fo 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015044664