Sven Carter & the Android Army

by Rob Vlock

  “Hope you’re not too disappointed it’s not a monkey,” I replied with a smirk.

  Dix’s smile faded. “Uh, yeah. I guess I made a pretty lousy first impression on you guys with that monkey thing, huh? I can’t believe that was, like, the most important thing in the world to me.”

  “You mean it’s not anymore?” Will asked.

  Dix raised his eyebrows. “Well . . . maybe number two.”

  “So what now?” Alicia shifted her weight from foot to foot impatiently. “By my count, there are still three Ticks out there. Where do we find them?”

  I grinned at her. “I think I can help with that. 808, my friend: Where to next?”

  “Beats me,” 808 said.

  My grin disappeared. “What? I thought you were connected to the Tick network. I mean, you brought us here.”

  “Yeah, about that.” 808 hesitated. “It looks like I’ve been locked out of the network. Guess they realized I was helping you guys out.”

  Alicia dabbed at a bloody scratch on her cheek with a tissue she had pulled out of her backpack. “So we’re at a dead end?”

  We all looked at one another.

  It was Dix who broke the silence. “Maybe not. Ivy, Sven, and I are all Ticks, right? Sven and I were adopted, and Ivy was in foster care. Because we weren’t born to human parents. We were . . .” He swallowed hard and spat the words out. “We were made. And then we were placed among humans to help us blend in. You with me so far?”

  “Tell us something we don’t know, brainiac,” Ivy said.

  “I’m getting to that,” Dix told her. “So I was thinking there must be some sort of records for adoptions. There has to be a lot of paperwork to fill out and stuff. If we can see the records, maybe we can find them that way. Sven said the next two Ticks are twins. All we have to do is find twins that were adopted over the last, let’s say, fifteen years . . .” He left the rest of his argument unsaid.

  The hint of a frown played across Alicia’s face. “That doesn’t seem like the type of information they’d just post on the Internet for anyone to see. And besides, there must be millions of adoption records out there. Even if we could access them, it’d take weeks to go through them all.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he responded. “So let’s hear your better idea.”

  Alicia scratched an abstract pattern in the gravel with her toe.

  * * *

  The public library in Cody was a modern, angular building situated next to a placid little pond. We walked through the lobby and made our way to the computer room, where a dozen desktop machines sat atop a double row of tables that lined the moss-green walls.

  “Take a computer,” Sam instructed. “If you find an online database of adoption records, let everyone know, and we’ll help search it.”

  The six of us each sat and started our searches. Thor lay down, curled up on my feet, and closed his eyes. Within seconds, he was snoring.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize how hopeless the whole exercise was. Each state had its own rules and regulations regarding what type of information was available, and most had a whole series of hoops you had to jump through just to even start looking at records. It was like looking for a needle in fifty different haystacks, each of which was protected by a ten-foot-tall electric fence.

  Still, we had to try. I clicked on one link after another, but each led to a dead end. Then, one led to a different kind of end.

  “Hey!” I cried as the screen of my computer suddenly filled with the image of . . . something. It was fleshy and sort of roundish with streaks of black scrawled on its surface.

  “What the heck?” Alicia blurted. “What is that?”

  “Is it a piece of fruit?” Dixon asked. The computer in front of him displayed the same photo.

  Will’s monitor showed the image too. “No, I think it’s a—”

  “It’s a butt!” Ivy yowled.

  “Is that what it is?” 808 asked. “Huh. There was one of those on the Bing flesh sac, but I only ever saw it from the inside.”

  It was a butt. A butt with the words HA! HA! written on it in black ink.

  I looked around the room. Every monitor in the place showed the same image!

  “What’s going on?” Dix wondered. “Why is there a big old heinie on our screens?”

  “Because someone’s mooning us,” Ivy explained. “Duh!”

  Thor, who had been woken up by all the commotion, yawned and looked at me, blinking sleepily. He glanced at my monitor and growled at the derriere.

  I navigated to a different website, but the butt was still there. I tried three or four more URLs—nothing changed.

  “It’s like the whole Internet is just one big keister!” Will remarked. “I mean, it’d be kinda funny if we didn’t have the world to save.”

  Alicia pulled out her phone. “Maybe it’s just the computers here. Let me see if . . . nope, it’s on my phone, too.”

  “It looks like someone’s hacked the Internet,” Sam said, scratching his bird’s nest of grizzled hair. “The entire Internet.”

  “Is that even possible?” I asked. “I know there have been some serious cyberattacks against individual sites. Even groups of sites. But the whole Web?”

  “Apparently.” Sam’s expression was grim. “And without the Internet, we may be dead in the water.”

  CHAPTER 26.0:

  < value= [Nothing Butt Problems] >

  THE FUR ALONG THOR’S BACK rose into stiff spikes, and he growled angrily at my computer monitor.

  “What is it, boy? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Needless to say, he didn’t answer. But he did place his front legs on the table and paw at the monitor.

  “He doesn’t like the tushy,” Alicia said. “I can’t blame him.”

  I had been trying to avoid looking at the butt any more than absolutely necessary. But the way Thor was acting . . . it was like he was trying to call our attention to something on that screen. So I gritted my teeth and looked the butt right in the face.

  It was pretty much like any other rump. Except, of course, for the words. Maybe what Thor was reacting to wasn’t the butt. Maybe there was something else in the photo that bothered him.

  In the upper-right corner of the image, a patch of blue sky speckled with fluffy white clouds was visible through a window in the background.

  I leaned in close and squinted at that corner. It was pretty overexposed, but I could just make out something in the sky.

  A dark shape. Something blackish and roundish and—

  I gasped, sucking a sharp breath in through my teeth as I recognized the shape of that object.

  “Guys! Look at this!” I pointed at the screen. “There’s . . . there’s a UFO in this picture!”

  Will grabbed my shoulder and squeezed hard. “Oh my gosh! The Ticks are in this with the aliens! It’s worse than we thought!”

  Alicia leaned over to look at my screen. “Please. It’s not a UFO.” She grabbed my mouse and zoomed in on the dark shape. As the image grew to fill the screen, more details emerged. Soon we could see the flying saucer wasn’t a flying saucer at all.

  “See? It’s a building.” She pointed at the towering supports that held up the flying saucer–shaped top of the structure. “It looks familiar to me.”

  “It’s the Space Needle. In Seattle,” Dix informed us.

  “Yeah, right.” Ivy rolled her eyes. “Space Needle. You’re totally making that up.”

  “That’s what it’s called. It’s a big landmark in Seattle,” he explained patiently. “I played there just a couple of weeks ago for a three-night run. Roz wouldn’t let me out of the hotel room, so all I could do was sit there and look out the window. And that’s what I was looking at.”

  “Okay, well, that explains the UFO. But then what’s that?” Will pressed his finger against the screen.

  There was definitely something there. It was flesh-colored and shaped a little like a slipper.

  “An ear, reflected i
n the window!” I said as my brain finally made sense of the cluster of pixels Will was pointing at. “It must be the ear that’s attached to the person attached to that booty!”

  “I think it’s safe to assume that whoever is in this picture is behind the hack,” Sam reasoned.

  Dix looked at him. “Do you think taking down the Internet might be part of the Ticks’ plan?”

  Sam shrugged. “All I know for sure is whoever did this possesses a level of sophistication that’s beyond anything I’ve seen before.”

  I blurted, “They’re mooning the entire Internet! That doesn’t seem so sophisticated to me!”

  “All I mean,” Sam explained, “is that it’s long been believed that this kind of Internet-wide outage was impossible. Hackers might be able to target individual companies or even regions, but taking down the entire Web? Anyone who can do that is doing some next-level stuff.”

  “What are we going to do?” Will shifted his weight from one foot to another. “I know searching adoption records was a long shot. But without being able to get online, it’s no shot at all.”

  “I think we should try to find out more about this picture,” Alicia suggested. “Let me pull up the source code. I heard sometimes hackers leave kind of a clue or something. Like they’re daring people to find them.”

  She right-clicked on the butt and selected View Page Source from the menu that appeared.

  A new window appeared on the monitor.

  1
  2
  3 PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”

  4 “DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

  5 %htmlDTD;

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11 Sayonara, losers!

  “What’s that?” Dix asked pointing at the only words we could make out among the jumble of characters.

  After processing the lines for half a dozen seconds, I knew what we were looking at. “It’s a limerick.”

  “A what-rick?” Ivy asked.

  “A limerick. It’s a silly form of poetry. My dad used to try to make them up at the dinner table. He thought they were hilarious. They weren’t.”

  Sam copied the words on a scrap of paper and read it aloud a couple of times. “Hmmm. Chapeau noir. French for ‘black hat.’ It’s a term that hackers use to describe bad guys.”

  “Yeah, well, all I see is a bad piece of poetry,” 808 said. “Whoever wrote that deserves a good stinging!”

  “Forget the limerick.” Alicia closed the source code. “I want to know more about that reflection. I wish we could see the face that goes with that ear.”

  Will cleared his throat. “Maybe we can. Sam, do you have any photo editing software on your laptop?”

  In Sam’s RV a few minutes later, Will fired up the laptop, saved a copy of the butt picture, and opened it in an application called PhotoEditER.

  “I went to computer camp last summer,” Will narrated as he clicked through various settings and filters. “We did this whole unit on digital design. There are all kinds of things you can do to bring out different colors and details in images.”

  He dragged a bunch of sliders left and right. The picture went blue and then red and then bright and then dark. Eventually, Will’s mouse-clicking slowed and finally stopped.

  “Check this out!” Will declared. “I messed with the contrast and the brightness. And I bumped up the highlights and . . . well, look! We have a face! Right there in the window!”

  My stomach did a flip. I knew the grinning face reflected in that window! I had seen it before when I was inside the deer’s head. It belonged to a Tick. An Omicron like me.

  “You know what this means?” I asked.

  Will scratched his nose. “What?”

  I stood up. “We just found the butt that needs kicking.”

  CHAPTER 27.0:

  < value= [Thumbs-up!] >

  “SO LET ME GET THIS straight.” Sam looked at me with more than a flicker of doubt. “You think the boy you saw in the deer’s mind is the same one whose face was reflected in a window somewhere in Seattle.”

  “I know it was him,” I corrected.

  “So let’s say for the sake of argument it’s him—”

  “It is!” I interrupted. The expressionless faces of those Ticks in that pond were indelibly imprinted on my memory.

  “Fine. I believe you,” he said, even though his expression made it clear he wasn’t sure. “But how are we going to find him?”

  I scratched my head. “Maybe we can figure it out. We could see the Space Needle through the window, right? How many places in Seattle would have a view like that?”

  “Um, all of them?” Dix answered. “The Space Needle is, like, the landmark for the whole city. And with all the hills in Seattle, you can see it from everywhere.”

  My heart sank a little. How on earth were we going to find the mooning boy and his twin sister? All we had was a city.

  Alicia stood up. “Well, we can’t just sit here and wait for the end of the world!” she declared. “We have to go to Seattle! Come on, Sam! Drive!”

  Sam just slumped lower in his seat and gave a halfhearted shrug. “Mmnnngggghhh,” he muttered.

  Alicia turned to Dixon. “You’re with me, right?”

  Dix looked at his shoes.

  “Will?” She locked her eyes on him. Her eyebrows arched in a wordless plea.

  “Ummm . . .” That’s all Will managed to get out before he started compulsively opening and closing a cupboard door.

  She regarded each of us in turn. No one met her gaze. Even Thor refused to swivel his eyes in her direction.

  Her eyes landed on me. I tried to smile but produced something more like a grimace. “Um . . . well, I guess . . .” I wanted to humor her, but the sheer impossibility of tracking down a single Tick in a city packed with hundreds of thousands of people tied my tongue in a tangle of knots.

  “Fine!” Alicia raged. “I’ll get there myself! I’ll find those Ticks! And I’ll stop them even if I have to hitchhike.”

  Without another word, she opened the door and stormed out. We all watched as she stalked across the parking lot and stopped by the side of the road. Even though there wasn’t a single car in sight, she raised her thumb and held it out toward the empty stretch of asphalt.

  I tried to beat back the achy sensation building somewhere behind my sternum. We’d been through so much together over the past several days that I felt almost as close to her as I did to Will. She could have killed me when she first discovered I was a Tick. But she hadn’t. More than that, she’d risked her life to save mine. And she’d barely escaped alive.

  My face burned with shame. I couldn’t bail on her now. She’d lost her parents to the Ticks. She’d left the Settlement in Chernobyl—all by herself—to try to put a stop to the Ticks’ plans.

  Finding a couple of Ticks hidden in a big city may be impossible. But if Alicia was willing to attempt the impossible, I sure as heck wasn’t going to leave her to do it alone.

  I stood up, left the motor home, and joined her by the side of the road. I didn’t say a word. I just stuck my arm out and raised my thumb.

  She turned her head in my direction and gave me a curt nod before swiveling her gaze back to the empty stretch of pavement.

  A few minutes later, another thumb joined ours.

  Will!

  I slung my arm around his shoulder.

  “Got room for one more?” Dixon asked, adding his thumb to the collection.

  “Two more, you mean, dummy,” Ivy corrected, lifting her tiny thumb toward the sky.

  We watched as a small object a mile or two down the street resolved itself into a car. But it made a left turn onto a dirt road a few hundred yards before
it reached us and disappeared from sight.

  Something wet glided across the back of my hand. It was Thor’s tongue. He planted his butt down in the dirt and sat patiently with us, panting in the hot midday sun.

  And there we stood. Six chumps on an absurd quest. Waiting for a free ride to failure.

  Until a seventh thumb joined in—a short, stubby thumb that was kind of hairy.

  “Um, Sam?”

  “Yes, Sven?” He stared straight ahead at a rusty road sign that trembled slightly in the gentle breeze.

  “Why are you here?”

  “It was kind of lonely in the RV all by myself,” he told me. “Anyway, if you’re ready, maybe we should get going. It’s a long drive to Seattle.”

  * * *

  Sam, his gut straining at the fabric of his top, swung himself into the driver’s seat. The ancient engine let out a long, asthmatic wheeze before coughing to life.

  As we rolled through the streets of Cody, Ivy gave me a questioning stare. “I don’t get it. How can a picture of this kid’s stupid butt all over the Internet help destroy humanity? That’s what he’s supposed to do, right?”

  I pointed out the window. “Look. It hasn’t even been two hours yet.”

  We passed a bank that had a large sign taped to the front door. SORRY, NO WITHDRAWALS.

  That hadn’t stopped a large crowd from gathering in front of the building, rattling the locked doors and screaming.

  “It’s my money!” a woman dressed in a sharp business suit screamed.

  A man clad in grimy overalls tried to push in front of her. A second later, he was on his back end, holding his hand up to a heavily bleeding nose.

  The woman stood above him, shaking her fist and glowering. “Try to cut in front of me again and I’ll kill you!”

  We passed a line of cars a mile long, motionless along the side of the road like a humungous dead metallic snake. The giant queue of vehicles ended at a gas station. A large piece of weathered plywood was propped up in front of the pumps. NO GAS, it read in neon orange letters.

  I turned to Ivy. “It’s not just his butt on the Internet. I have a feeling he’s hacking into everything. Stores, banks, gas stations.”