The Time Hackers

by Gary Paulsen

  … into what looked like Dorso's living room, with his mother standing there.

  “Mom?”

  “It's another hologram. Keep moving, past the blurry edge, run!”

  But Dorso was with him now, knew it was all fake, and he dove through his mother's image, through the replica of his living room, then his own room, then a hologram of his bicycle (My bicycle? he thought), then a montage of blurry images of everything from Custer to Beethoven to his locker and cadavers and finally a wall, with another door, and they piled through that door to find themselves not in a living room but a garage, a plain old garage on the side of a house that had been turned into a workshop. There, at a high work chair by a workbench, sat what Dorso could only think of as the perfect 1990s computer geek: a thin, semibald man of about forty with a pocket protector in his shirt pocket full of pens (nobody used pens anymore; very few people wrote at all except electronically). He had thick glasses (nobody wore glasses anymore, since they had corrective eye surgery). On the bench in front of him was a laptop.

  “Wait a minute!” Frank stopped dead. “You're the game master? You look like Elmer Fudd from those old cartoons!”

  But Dorso was moving too fast to stop and he hit the man full on, knocking him sideways. The chair went down with the man on top of it. He had grabbed at his laptop on the way down and held one side of it with Dorso catching the other, his own three laptops flying off into a pile in the corner near where Frank stood.

  There was a beat when everything seemed to stop. Frank stood, the man lay on the floor with his laptop in his hand, Dorso on top of him holding the other side of the laptop, the keyboard twisted. Then the man looked at him and smiled a sad little smile and said in a soft voice, “Thank you, and goodbye.” Then he pushed Dorso five or six feet away and hit F1 and WS on the keyboard. There was a brief flash of light—though not nearly as intense as before—and he was gone.

  Dorso and Frank were still there in the workshop, but the man was gone.

  “Man,” Frank said, “you almost had that laptop!”

  Some seconds passed while Dorso thought about what had just happened. Then he stood and brushed his knees where they had ground into the dirty garage floor. “He's gone.”

  “I know. I saw him vanish.”

  “No. I saw his eyes. Something was there, something … not quite right. The way he smiled and said ‘Thank you, and goodbye.' Like he was really sad. I think he's gone, and what's more—”

  He was interrupted by a rustling in the corner where he'd thrown the three laptops. As he and Frank watched there was a blur of light and a wiggle and the two captured laptops vanished. Dorso's, which had been resting on top of them, dropped an inch to the floor.

  “I mean, he's gone.”

  “Where?”

  “It will be like he was never here. The chip in my computer is gone, all of the images, the changes in time are gone.”

  “I'll bet he went back,” Frank said, “and killed his grandfather.”

  “Maybe. Something like that. Maybe. Heck, I don't know. Nothing like this has ever happened before—how could anybody know?”

  “But if he's gone, I mean, like he really wasn't there to begin with, then how come we still know about him? How can he be in our memories …” Frank trailed off. “I just had a really bad thought.”

  Dorso smiled, a small smile not unlike the one the man had given him. “Just one? I've had about four hundred, and that's just in the last three or four minutes. Like how about all the good that could have been done instead of just a game and all the silly pranks? We could have saved Lincoln, saved JFK, could have maybe ended wars before they began, stopped the plague—”

  “Where are we?” Frank cut in. “Not just when, but where? With that whole transporter thing we could be anywhere in the world.”

  “I think I know, but let's step outside to make sure.”

  They went to the side door in the garage. Dorso opened it and they moved out into a bright, sunshiny day. Birds were singing, small clouds moved serenely across a blue sky, and before they had taken two steps Frank yelped.

  “We're on Fourth Street! There's Anderson's Funeral Parlor…. ”

  Dorso nodded. “And more to the point, we're in the present. He just used this garage as a place to meet us. It's not really his workshop. He doesn't live here. It was just a place to bring us so he could get the laptops.”

  “But he didn't need to,” Frank said. “All he had to do was go back in time and make them not happen.”

  “Right,” Dorso said, smiling. “I'd forgotten that.” He sighed, tired now—exhausted—but more too: sad. Why, he thought, am I sad? “Maybe he just wanted to meet us.”

  “Sure. Man cheats time, makes a game of destroying the universe and then wants to meet a couple of podunk kids from a small town. Happens all the time. I'll tell you what I think, I think he's vanished in time and we'll never see him again, and I'm glad it's that way. He scared me half to death with those eyes and pens and pocket protector. I mean, you don't know what he might do.”

  “I don't know. I'd like to meet him again. There was something in his eyes that I kind of liked. But I suppose you're right—we'll never hear from him again.”

  But this time Frank was wrong.

  Weeks passed, then months, and at first there was some investigating because the time security officer remembered that he had jumped through time and a whole bunch of people had shot his desk full of arrows and then the arrows had strangely disappeared. But there was no odd chip in Dorso's computer, and the factory had no indication of anything strange happening, and there was no sign anywhere of the little man with the pocket protector and the ballpoint pens.

  In time the security man's memory faded and when there was no evidence and no further strange happenings even Dorso and Frank stopped talking about it.

  Frank went back to trying to cheat the morality blocks and had some success; he was fairly certain he had seen Helen of Troy's bare upper arm and elbow, or it might have been a knee. Dorso finally worked up the courage to ask Karen Bemis to go to a movie and to his immense shock and surprise she accepted—this was after he had taken some time to explain that he didn't have a “problem” but that the faucet near the materials closet had sprayed him on the way by.

  The date, if it could be called that, went off almost without a hitch, except that Dorso was so afraid of saying the wrong thing that he nearly didn't talk at all and later had absolutely no idea what the movie was about, even though it had been fully interactive with motion, sound, smell and taste.

  He walked her home in a daze and she kissed him on the cheek, which further unnerved him, so that he walked nearly another block before he realized that his laptop, which was rolled up in his back pocket, was insistently signaling that he had an urgent message.

  The message was anonymous. It said:

  “Please go look under your front porch.”

  That was it. It could have been a prank, but he knew it wasn't Frank because Frank could not resist using his icon— an outline of a nude—when he sent e-mail. He didn't know anybody else well enough for a practical joke.

  Under your porch …

  And he knew. He did not know how he knew, but he was certain the message was from the time hacker. Nor was he afraid. He didn't know why, but nothing about the circumstance frightened him. This was a request and he hurried home to comply.

  Dorso's house was old-fashioned and had a lattice around the underside of the front porch that half hid the space beneath it. Darling played there often, in the cool darkness, because the cat kept trying to hide there and she chased him wherever he went.

  There was an opening near the right side and Dorso crouched and worked his way through. There on the ground, glowing slightly, sat a laptop. Above the keyboard on the screen was the message:

  “Hit F1WS while holding the computer.”

  And Dorso did it without hesitating. Much later, he considered it and realized that nothing in the world could have ke
pt him from hitting the keys.

  There was a flash of light, though controlled and subdued, and Dorso found himself standing under a giant oak tree in a thick forest on a summer afternoon. Sitting on a log nearby was the hacker.

  “Hello,” he said. “Glad you could make it. When I had that chip in your computer I could tell where you were but now I just had to use the regular computer systems.… It's very frustrating.”

  “I see you're back at it, playing with time,” Dorso said. “Moving me around.”

  The man laughed, though not unkindly. “Not this time. Or not so much. Where we're standing is where your front porch will be in two hundred years, nine months and sixteen days. We moved in time but not space.”

  “I would like,” Dorso said carefully, “for you to tell me just what's been going on. If you would. Please.”

  The hacker nodded. “That's why I called you. I had hoped that your friend would be with you because the two of you really saved my life and I wanted to thank you both. But without that chip I couldn't tell anything about you or if he was with you. You can explain to him later.”

  “Explain what?”

  “Exactly.” The man laughed. “Tell him exactly what…” He paused and watched a bird fly past and Dorso realized that the forest around them was alive with the sounds of birds singing. “Don't you think this is much nicer than a housing development?” the man asked, but Dorso could tell he didn't really expect an answer because he was thinking. “How to start… Well, here, let's do it this way. I am an engineer and I made some fundamental discoveries that will change how we think about everything forever. How's that?” He smiled at Dorso.

  “Too quick. How come you're the only one who did this, who understood this?”

  The man looked at the trees again, then nodded. “A good question. Sometimes the most amazing discoveries are made by one person who has a bit of luck. Madame Curie discovered radiation—and it killed her later because she didn't know how deadly it could be. One man in a Texas garage discovered that silicon would let current flow only one way, and that led to transistors, which led to chips… well, you get my drift. One day I was sitting in the lab—I worked for the computer company that makes your laptop—and I remembered that many years ago a man named Michelson discovered that light, the photons of light, have mass. I theorized that if images are made of light, which has mass, and can be moved through time and space—as we have been doing with historical holograms—then why not the bigger mass, the actual person or thing. I worked to develop a chip that would incorporate my thinking, or several chips working together, and one day I sent a banana from my lunch back ten minutes. Then a week later I sent my cat, Richard, back a day with no ill effects. The following week I sent myself back a month.”

  “And nobody at the company knew you were doing this?”

  “Correct. I kept it secret for two reasons. One, it would make a devastatingly destructive weapon in the wrong hands, and I am a peace-loving man.”

  “And the second reason?” Dorso almost smiled, thinking of Frank and his always having two reasons.

  “That's a bit more complicated. Part of it is that I have always been poor and do not believe in wealth, but with this discovery, I am ashamed to admit that I started to think in terms of personal gain. And the other part is pure ego. I had made a stupendously colossal discovery that could change the world, and if I let it out it would no longer be just my discovery.”

  “And it got out,” Dorso said. “The two gamesters found out what you were doing.”

  “Precisely. I was not as secure as I thought. One of them hacked into my computer when I was online gathering some of the initial data on how Michelson discovered the mass of light. Eventually they got my address through further hacking and the two of them showed up at my door. They took my computer by force, and two extra chips that I had been working on, and told me I had to continue to keep it all a secret or they would destroy me and the rest of the world.”

  “And you believed them?”

  “Not at first. But you saw them, you saw their eyes! Then they started playing that game about one trying to change time while the other one tried to stop him, playing a game that could literally end everything, and I realized they were telling the truth. They would do anything.”

  “Why didn't you go to the authorities?”

  “It was impossible. The hackers could act faster than me, and although I manufactured two more chips without them knowing about it, they would know if I tried anything. They also worked at the company and watched me like a hawk, both digitally and on camera. There was nothing I could do. So I worked out a kind of plan—a thought, really—that if I could somehow get somebody else involved maybe that person could do something.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why not? They wouldn't suspect you, you're young, you seemed to be bright, judging by your work on the computer—I looked in the memory when I worked on it. And there was the time issue. I was running out of it, to be blunt. They were starting to play dumber and dumber tricks on each other, and it was just a matter of time … I guess it wasn't much of a plan”—he smiled again—“but as you can see, it worked.”

  “Why the pranks? The bodies, the worms … all of it?”

  Here he laughed. “The chips are not static. They learn by doing. Initially they were not complete but had to learn to make the jumps through time. I did some of the pranks just to get the chips started, and then they did more of their own pranks while they learned. When they locked in—I believe it was the first time you saw Custer looking at you— I knew they were close and I stopped the pranks. In the beginning they keyed to the same points in time and space as one of the—what did you call them, the gamesters?—but as they learned, they would go anywhere any of the other chips would go.”

  “We could have been hurt or killed!” Dorso said. “We were in danger, attacked—arrows were shot at us.”

  “We could all have been killed. We probably would have all been killed if it hadn't have been for you and your friend.”

  “Frank.”

  “Yes. Frank. I tried to help but I couldn't do much. …”

  “What about at the end? What was all that in the room in the garage and the holograms of my sister and my mother and my bicycle?”

  “I thought… well, perhaps I didn't think as much as I should have, but I had a small hope that once it was all over perhaps I could somehow get your laptop back without you knowing who I am or what really had happened. I was wrong.”

  “Why not just do what you finally did do? Just go back and erase the chip and everything? That's what finally happened anyway. In fact, why didn't you just do that in the first place?”

  “Once they started watching me I couldn't really do anything overtly, and before that there wasn't really a problem, was there?”

  Dorso thought about it, or thought as much as his whirling brain would let him. There were still a thousand questions he wanted to ask, and he wished Frank was there to help him.

  “I know it all seems confusing.”

  “Confusing is a good word,” Dorso said. “Another one is insane, as in am I going insane?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  “So why did you come back? Why did you come to see me?”

  “Because you helped me so much by getting the computers away from those two. I thought I owed you some kind of explanation, and then too I thought I owed you something for all your trouble. As you said, you could have been killed.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now I will leave and I will spend the rest of my life moving through and studying time, and making certain that if this is ever rediscovered it will only be used for good purposes.”

  “What about me? And Frank? And the gamesters?”

  “Ah, yes. Well, as for the gamesters, they're doing surprisingly well. The one in Victorian London has struck up quite a friendship with the young lady you left him with— her name is Lily, by the way—and the one in the cave, well, let's just say
that Cro-Magnon man is more compassionate than I thought, and he has joined one of their clans. As for you boys, as I said, I thought I owed you something. Soo …” The man suddenly looked up. “Oh, look, a flight of passenger pigeons—white men hunted them to extinction, you know. Aren't they beautiful?”

  Dorso watched the enormous flock of birds as they wheeled over the clearing and disappeared. There must have been ten or fifteen thousand of them.

  “They used to darken the sky.” The hacker looked after the birds.

  Dorso waited. Then: “You were saying about Frank and me …”

  “Oh, yes. Well, in a moment you'll hit F1WS on the laptop and that will take you back to beneath your porch in the present. About twenty seconds after you arrive the laptop will disappear. You will then go to Frank's house and get him and come back to your yard, and about three feet from the northeast corner of your garage you will instruct Frank to kick the ground several times, whereupon you will discover a small, half-rotted wooden chest buried in a shallow hole.”

  “What's in it?”

  “Confederate gold coins that a small group of men were taking west in the last year of the Civil War to start a small army in Mexico. They were waylaid by bandits and all of the men on both sides were either killed right there or died of their wounds a short time later. It's important that Frank discover it because he gets half of the gold, and that way your parents won't object because it's on your land.”

  “Did you … I mean, were you… I guess I want to know how those men died.”

  “I see. No, I didn't hurt them. As I told you, I hate violence. They killed each other. All I did was move the gold from where they initially buried it, which is now under a freeway overpass seven miles south of town. I promise.”

  “You talk like this is a lot of gold.”

  “Well, I guess that depends on what you consider a lot. By some standards it's not so much, but it should put you through college, both of you, and your sister and Frank's brothers and sisters, and set you up in business if that's what you want. In today's market, with gold better than forty-four hundred dollars an ounce or about seventy thousand dollars a pound …”