Unbelievably Boring Bart

by James Patterson

  Fame? No thanks, man. All I wanted was for people to have fun with this game.

  Okay, maybe a certain person.

  THE BILL BEAN FACTOR, PT. 2

  This whole city has gone crazy.”

  This was my dad, a.k.a. Bill Bean, speaking. He always thinks the city, the country, the world (or whatever) is going crazy. But it appeared he really meant it this time.

  “Bart, you’re never going to believe what I saw driving home from school today,” Dad continued. “People are acting like zombies! I had to stop the car three times to make sure I didn’t run somebody over. And then… and then… !”

  (Dad was getting pretty revved up now. He tends to repeat the phrase “and then!” for emphasis, even though the first “and then!” worked just fine.)

  “… some people actually gathered around my car and pointed their phones at me! I had no idea what they were doing.”

  I mumbled, “Maybe they were trying to save you?”

  “Huh? Save me from what?”

  “Um, aliens,” I told him.

  “What? Bart, are you okay?” Dad reached over and felt my forehead. “Are you running a temperature?”

  “Dad, I’m fine.”

  “Let me find the thermometer…”

  “Wait—I’m not sick.”

  Patiently, I explained to my dad the concept of this online augmented reality game called Hecklr. Only, I didn’t call it a “virtual reality game.” Instead, I told him Hecklr is a new kind of outdoors challenge that requires your smartphone. I even used sports-y words that I thought he’d respond to.

  “People can team up to fight the Lerkians, Dad! Or players can try to combat them one-on-one. The goal is simple: the more aliens you chase away, the more points you get.”

  But Dad was still hung up on a word I used earlier. “Did you say… aliens?”

  Oof. He didn’t hear a word I said.

  So I tried another strategy:

  “I heard it’s pretty rad. Want to go outside and try it out for yourself?”

  Nothing doing. Bill Bean shook his head. “Since when did you need a cell phone to go outside and run around and have fun? Sounds like a huge waste of time!”

  Ugh, and then we were off on another Bill Bean Lecture™ about how “electronic devices” were the downfall of modern civilization or whatever. I used the opportunity to tune out and do a little mental coding.

  But then Dad looked at me. “Bart.”

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “You’re not playing that stupid game, are you?”

  “Um…”

  NOPE. NOT ME. UH-UH. NO WAY.

  A few days later, I was walking home after school through the scorched wasteland of El Rancho Verdugo when something weird started happening.

  Plink.

  I blinked, then touched my face. No. It couldn’t be. I looked up, wondering if any Lerkians had somehow escaped their cyberworld and made it into the real world. And now they were seeking revenge on their creator.

  But there were no Lerkians to be seen. And then it happened again. And again. And again!

  Plink. Plink. PLOP.

  Right on the top of my head with a fat messy splat. Alert the media, people—it was raining in Rancho Verdugo.

  You have to understand something about my new city. It’s been under a severe drought watch for something like 7,438 years (give or take). My dad explained that was an unfortunate drawback to living in a “beautiful” and “sunny” place with nice weather all of the time.

  So when it rains here it catches everybody by surprise. Including me, who hasn’t packed an umbrella since I left my hometown back in Pennsylvania (where it rains pretty often, especially when you want to go outside).

  I ran for it.

  Luckily, I was only a few blocks away when the deluge began. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly a flood. But my T-shirt was sort of vaguely damp by the time I reached the apartment complex. I brushed the rain out of my hair as I approached CyberGirl03’s balcony.

  But she wasn’t there. Huh. I thought maybe the sudden rainstorm forced CyberGirl03 back inside her apartment.

  As it turned out, she wasn’t staying dry. She was catching Lerkian invaders.

  CyberGirl03: We’re in serious trouble, Boring Guy.

  BoringBart: We are?

  CyberGirl03: We’re under attack!

  BoringBart: Nah, that’s just rain.

  CyberGirl03: Ha, ha. No, you know those Lerkian things? Well our apartment complex is pretty much crawling with them! I’ve got one trying to eat the camera on my computer.

  BoringBart: I don’t think they eat anything. They just destroy stuff? I think?

  CyberGirl03: What do you mean, you think? You’re the one who first showed me this game!

  BoringBart: Well, there are hardly any Lerkians in my apartment. Guess they don’t like me much.

  Heh heh heh.

  This is a fib, because I control the number of Lerkians in Rancho Verdugo and where they appear. If I wanted, I could fill my entire bedroom with wall-to-wall Lerkians.

  I knew that CyberGirl03 stayed at home a lot, so I made sure there was plenty of alien action for her to tackle right in her own bedroom.

  But me? Play the actual game?

  I didn’t have time. I was too busy trying to keep the game from collapsing under the weight of all these new players!

  BART FALL DOWN, GO BOOM

  Despite all the Hecklr hoopla, my troubles at school really didn’t change all that much. I was still forgettable ol’ boring… what’s that kid’s name again? I was the loser who kept to himself, typing on his phone instead of playing sports or goofing around with friends or chasing Lerkians around the school property.

  (Little does anyone know I’m coding like crazy just to keep the game running smoothly.)

  And in some ways, the game only made them worse.

  My hallway nemesis, Giselle the Golem, became a huge Hecklr fan. You would think this would be a good thing, right? The Lerkians should be keeping her too busy to smash into me in the hallway.

  Well, you would be wrong.

  Because now Giselle, staring at her phone, was more oblivious.

  She knocked me down like a bowling pin responsible for the death of the bowling ball’s best friend… or something.

  So I was forced to improvise. Whenever there was even the slightest chance of a Giselle sighting on campus, I would quickly order all the Lerkians to be somewhere else—the gym, the cafeteria, the Griffith Observatory, Uzbekistan, wherever.

  Genius, right?

  Wrong.

  This just meant that Giselle would be in an even bigger hurry to get to the gym, the cafeteria, the Griffith Observatory, or wherever. And for Giselle, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. It’s a line that has me in the middle. She’s like a heat-seeking missile, twisting and turning through the air as she seeks out her moving target…

  Me.

  She routinely crashed into me like she was a safety test vehicle and I was a crash test dummy.

  I guess I could look on the bright side: Giselle was obviously a fan of the game. Which was, in a twisted way, flattering. I wonder what would happen if I told her that I was the guy who created the whole thing, down to the last Lerkian?

  Who am I kidding? I’d probably get three words out of my mouth—

  “Hey, Giselle, guess wh—”

  Before—

  El smacko.

  And I’d be smooshed into the linoleum tile of the school hallway.

  ERROR MESSAGE 3740: YOU STINK

  Hey.”

  I felt a hard poke in the middle of my back. At that moment I was pretending to pay attention to American history while thinking about all of the super-serious coding I had waiting for me during lunch period. The life of a brilliant secret game designer is not an easy one.

  Then came another poke. One that I’m pretty sure bruised my spinal column.

  “Hey.”

  I didn’t turn around beca
use I knew who was poking me: Nick the Mimic. Somehow, he knows to pick on me at the worst possible moments.

  “Hey, Bartholo… stew,” he says. “I’m talking to you.”

  That was Nick’s new gag: ridiculous variations on my first name. It started a week ago when Mr. Lopez, our homeroom teacher, remembered (for once!) to call out my name. For some reason he didn’t just say, Bean? He said my whole name: Bartholomew Bean?

  I cringed, because at that same moment I saw Nick’s eyes light up as if someone had given him a billion dollars. Because for the next few days, all I heard was:

  “Hey, Bartholo… poo.”

  “Hey, Bartholo… glue.”

  “Hey, Bartholo… pew!”

  (I guess I should have been grateful that he didn’t play around with variations of my shortened first name, Bart. Yes, I know. Please don’t go there.)

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned around and yell-whispered: “What? What do you want?”

  “You’re always on your phone,” Nick said oh so casually, as if we were just hanging out, shooting the breeze.

  “So are you,” I replied, trying not to raise my voice above a harsh whisper. “So is everybody. Who cares?”

  “No,” Nick said. “All of us normal people are on our phones playing Hecklr. But you’re just on your phone doing… well, what are you doing? Why aren’t you catching aliens like the rest of us?”

  I turned back around. I couldn’t tell him the truth—that I designed the game—so I decided to say nothing at all.

  “What, are you too good to play? Got better things to do? Bartholo… pew! pew! pew!”

  With every fake laser-blast sound came another poke, harder than the one before. I wished I could order a team of Lerkians to drop from the ceiling, tangle Nick up in a huge ball, and roll him like a tumbleweed up into the Verdugo Mountains.

  Because here’s the problem: Hecklr is super-popular. Way more than I ever expected, actually. I really thought that maybe, maybe… best case… CyberGirl03 and a couple of other nerds would discover it and play around with it for a while. I had no idea that Lerkian-mania would sweep through the entire school. No idea that teachers would become obsessed with tracking down aliens.

  But with so many people logged on to the game, I’m always checking my phone to deal with all the system bugs that have been popping up.

  And with a game that pretty much covers all of Rancho Verdugo, there are only a gazillion bugs to be fixed.

  So why am I not “catching aliens like the rest of us,” Nick? Believe me, that would be awesome, if I had a microsecond of free time. I don’t even have time to do homework like I used to.

  And as much as teachers tend to think I don’t exist, it’s only a matter of time before somebody notices.

  THE LERKIANS MAKE FRIENDS

  I had another problem: people were starting to play Hecklr in a weird, backward kind of way.

  I call it “double agent mode,” and it was definitely not something I had originally programmed into the game.

  See, there are some players (I’ve discovered) who actually think the Lerkians are “cute.” Oh, yeah. I read the comments people leave for the game. And my jaw drops open when I see stuff like:

  They’re just precious little tumbleweed monsters! A treasure, not a menace.

  Awwww, they’re just widdle babies who need to be protected!

  Let’s not scare them away! Let’s save them all!

  Yeah! How about we team up to protect them from all the meanies in Rancho Verdugo?

  I, for one, welcome my new Lerkian overlords.

  This, people, is why you should never, ever read the comments section. People may think the Lerkians are cute, but I’d love to see you try to hug one of them. Ick.

  But anyway, some players began protecting the little Lerkian jerks. Hence, “double agent mode.” They’ll pretend to be on the good guys’ side for a while, helping to shoo away some of the aliens from, say, an electronics store.

  (Lerkians love to snack on smartphones, BTW. It’s like popcorn to them!)

  But secretly, these double agents are actually encouraging the Lerkians, helping them avoid the other human players and showing them other devices they can attack. When I programmed the game, I never imagined that someone would actually want to assist the little buggers in their quest for technological domination.

  People are weird.

  All of which means there are more bugs for me to deal with. Double agents soon discovered that helping the Lerkians made them really powerful. And sometimes, the Lerkians “win,” completely shutting down a game location—I’m talking total devastation. Until I can get it up and running again, that is.

  So in addition to trying to keep up with all of the system bugs, I had to deal with the double agent problem. Which meant that most days I was too busy to talk with CyberGirl03.

  CyberGirl03: Are you busy catching aliens, mister boring guy?

  BoringBart: No, HAH.

  CyberGirl03: You should have seen the one that was trying to rip apart our TV. That took some serious talking to get him to finally go away. I called him a “scroodly-oodly noodle brain.” That got his attention.

  BoringBart: Wow.

  CyberGirl03: So what are you up to?

  BoringBart: Nothing much.

  CyberGirl03: I get the feeling that I am bothering you.

  BoringBart: No, sorry, just busy with a lot of homework.

  CyberGirl03: Got it.

  Honestly, I wanted to say more than two words to CyberGirl03, but I happened to be in the middle of some particularly gnarly debugging. I tried reaching out to her later, but either she was away from her phone—or she’d taken my contact information, printed it out, carried it into the courtyard, then set it on fire.

  Worst of all, I only had myself to blame. There I go, dissing my only real friend in this city!

  BIG TROUBLE IN EL RANCHO

  Dad returned home from work one day just as I was struggling with the latest round of Hecklr bugs. It was getting to the point where I’d blink and see nothing but numbers and symbols on the inside of my eyelids.

  Pickleback’s loud barks gave me plenty of warning about Dad’s imminent arrival, but I was still bummed to have to put away my work. I had SO much to do!

  Dad peeled off his baseball cap and threw it onto the dining room table. Something was wrong. He looked like someone had swiped his favorite catcher’s mitt, or whatever. (Sorry, I’m not good with sports metaphors.)

  “You’ll never believe what’s going on at the school next week,” Dad said.

  “What’s that?” I asked, half-listening just to be polite. I had my own problems to deal with. What kind of trouble could Coach Bean possibly have? Did someone put chili pepper in the jock straps? Were the soccer balls under-inflated during the big game? Whatever it was, it didn’t compare to my daily coding nightmares.

  “You know that stupid game? With the aliens and stuff?”

  Now this had my attention. “Uh, do you mean Hecklr?” (That is to say, the game I totally never play and completely didn’t invent, as far as you know, Dad?)

  “Yeah. That one. With the monsters that look like dental floss.”

  That wasn’t exactly fair to the Lerkians, but I ignored the insult for the moment. “What about it?”

  “Because of that stupid game, I’m going to have to take all of my gym classes inside for a full week.”

  I felt a tiny knot in my stomach, but I didn’t quite know why. “What do you mean, inside? What’s wrong with the field?”

  “They’ve commandeered the field all week long to set up the stage, monitors, cameras, and whatnot.”

  “For what?”

  Dad blinked. “You mean you didn’t hear? Some cable channel about video games is coming to Rancho Verdugo to broadcast a special about that dumb game. They’re going to have kids playing it live.”

  WHAT!

  Inside, my heart started pumping like a kick drum in a techno song. I felt dizzy. I un
derstood what my dad had said, but the words stubbornly refused to make total sense in my brain. Video game channel? The game? Broadcast? Live?

  Dad must have noticed that my face suddenly took on the appearance of very old cottage cheese. “Bart, buddy, you okay?”

  I tried to recover as best I could. “Yeah, I’m fine, Dad. Just got a lot of homework piling up.”

  “Well,” Dad said, “I was going to take Pickleback up to Frosty’s for a little snack. You want to come along with us?”

  “I really should get back to work.” (Which was the truth. Sort of.)

  “Homework can wait. I’m a teacher, too, you know. And sometimes a break can help you do better work.”

  “Can you bring me back something?”

  “And what, juggle two soft-serve cones and a crazy dog? I don’t think so. C’mon, walk with me. You don’t want to disappoint Pickleback, do you?”

  We go out, and Pickleback does go crazy for Frosty’s soft-serve. We pretend we’re “sharing” one of our cones with him, but Dad only has a lick or two before surrendering the rest to the pooch.

  You should see the look in Pickleback’s eyes. He’s all like:

  Really? I can have a lick? For real? Oh, wow… wait… I can have another lick? You are sure? Well, okay, if you’ll let me…

  And in a matter of seconds Pickleback has licked the soft-serve clean down to the cone. Which he then chomps in half. And before Dad can say, “Whoa, Pickleback, take it easy—”