The Rendering

by Joel Naftali

“There’s no time,” Larkspur said. “Back to the Cray room. We need to jack in.”

  Cosmo led the way. Poppy hesitated for a moment, but Larkspur’s huge metal hand spun her around, and she followed.

  “This time,” Cosmo said, turning the corner in front of them, “someone check the football scores. The Titans are playing the … urk!”

  “The Urk?” Poppy said. “What are you—”

  She stopped when Cosmo’s body flew past her.

  And from around the corner rolled a security droid, an armored robot with a segmented cylindrical body swaying on top of massive bulldozer treads, like a cobra rising from a basket.

  Three of the droid’s segments were armed. From top to bottom:

  explosive mini-missiles

  robotic grappling arms

  short-range electrical pulses

  As Poppy dove to the side, the droid hit her with enough electricity to power a small city.

  She flew backward and smashed into the wall.

  Then the droid fired a surface-to-surface missile at Larkspur. He dodged—I told you he was fast—but couldn’t fight back, not with the uplink in his arms. He curled into a ball instead, cradling the uplink, waiting for the mini-missile to explode behind him.

  Instead, it sped back the other way—screaming toward the droid.

  “Right back at you,” Cosmo said from behind Larkspur.

  He’d caught the mini-missile in his slingshot and whipped it back—which is about as easy as catching a bullet between your teeth.

  The missile hit the droid dead center. It staggered backward, almost fell, then straightened and made a horrible shrieking noise.

  “Watch your language,” Cosmo said. “There are ladies present.”

  He glanced at Poppy, who was still slumped against the wall, and bared his fangs in a smile, which only widened when the droid sped past her, calculating that she was no longer a threat.

  Here’s a little hint for all you droids out there: Poppy is always a threat.

  The droid caromed toward Cosmo, one robot arm slashing forward for a killing punch.

  Which never landed.

  Poppy’s chain whipped around the security droid’s top segment and spun it toward her. Then, using the momentum of the spin, she landed a double kick directly on its faceplate.

  The droid swayed—you could tell she’d crunched some wiring inside—and shot another pulse of electricity at her.

  Not fast enough, though. The bolt just singed her tail fur and blasted past.

  Poppy swore and twitched her tail.

  “Watch your language,” Cosmo said. “There are gentlemen present.”

  In one smooth motion, he dove away from a mini-missile and pulled a grenade from his belt. He hurled the grenade at the droid’s robotic eyes and rolled back to his feet.

  Except that was no regular grenade. That was a little device of Cosmo’s own invention, combining a toy from the big-box store, some cleaning supplies, and a few circuits from Jamie’s TiVo.

  The “grenade” splattered over the droid’s visual sensors and oozed goo: a sticky, acidic goo that corroded inorganic material. The droid shrieked again and staggered toward Poppy.

  She grabbed one robot arm and levered the droid over her shoulder. It flew down the corridor, smashed through a set of double doors, and lay still.

  Smoking.

  “Now that,” Poppy said, brushing the singed fur from her tail, “was almost a real fight.”

  “The uplink,” Larkspur reminded them. “Dr. Solomon doesn’t have much time.”

  They ran down the hallway toward the Cray room. Turned the corner.

  And stopped.

  Three more security droids were waiting for them.

  SOME DAYS YOU NEED TO VENT

  Maybe you’ve had tough-guy daydreams about charging into a desperate situation and saving the day. I know I have. But there are three things those daydreams never cover.

  Riding your bicycle to the rescue. Not very tough-guy. You don’t see Batman wearing a bike helmet. You don’t see Wolverine on a Huffy.

  Trembling from fright so hard that you can hardly stay on the bike.

  Watching your plan fall apart before any of the “saving the day” stuff happens.

  Of course, there was some good news, too: Jamie finally checked out the drainage pipe with me.

  The drainage pipe ran from a ditch across the street into the school basement—or at least, toward the basement. School lore said that a bunch of kids once broke into the school through the pipe, but I’d never been able to convince Jamie to crawl inside to check if that was possible. Didn’t even look that bad: just a strip of dirty water at the bottom of a four-foot concrete pipe.

  But whenever I tried to get her to explore with me, she’d just call me Bug and give me a look.

  This time, though, she followed as I snuck into the ditch across the street from the school and eyed the pipe. Cramped, dark, and damp. Still, I’m not saying the place smelled pleasant, but it wasn’t that bad.

  Anyway, I’d spent the night in the root canal. What was a little more mud?

  We crept down the pipe, hunched over. We figured the fuse box was in the main janitorial closet, not too far from the basement.

  All we needed to do was follow the pipe to the basement, climb the stairs and zip across the hall to the janitorial closet, and turn all the fuses off.

  Easy, right?

  Well, we got into the basement. And just like the school gossip said, the grate at the other end of the pipe was loose. We squeezed inside.

  Then we climbed the stairs. So far so good.

  Until we tried to open the door.

  It was locked.

  That’s what I mean about having your plan fall apart. You think everything’s going fine; then you run into a locked door.

  Now, I don’t know about you, but Jamie and I don’t know how to pick locks or anything. They don’t teach that in school—and even if they had, I probably would’ve gotten a C.

  So we were stuck before we’d even started. Meanwhile, in the auditorium, a hundred yards away, our town was being scanned into the VIRUS data banks. Including Jamie’s parents.

  Jamie ranted for a while and started kicking the door. I stopped her, though—afraid Roach’s soldiers would hear—and she finally calmed down and sat beside me on the stairs.

  And started to cry.

  We sat there for a bit, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I gave her a hug.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I looked around. I saw an aluminum ventilation shaft running across the basement, hanging just below the ceiling.

  “You think that’s air-conditioning?” I asked Jamie.

  She looked. “I dunno.”

  “You think it’d support our weight?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Would we even fit inside?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing. “Sounds like we have a plan.”

  I dragged a desk over and stacked a bunch of milk crates on top. Then we climbed the crates, opened a grate, and squeezed inside.

  A tight fit. But the vent didn’t collapse. And we managed to worm our way forward.

  We crawled into the maze of ventilation shafts, ready to save the day.

  FUZZY, WAS HE?

  The three security droids charged forward, robotic arms grasping and missile turrets swiveling.

  “Poppy,” Larkspur said, “you distract them. Play defense, though.”

  “My pleasure.” She bounded forward with a series of acrobatic martial-arts moves. The droids fired and missed. She did a handspring off the nearest droid’s head and flipped behind the three of them, trying to split them up.

  “Cosmo, you take the uplink. I’ll smash a—” Larkspur stopped and stared at Cosmo. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Cosmo was winding the toy car he’d customized in Jamie’s bedroom. “All work and no play makes Cosmo a dull boy.”

  He put the
little toy car on the floor and it zoomed forward. When it reached the treads of the first droid, it burst open and spewed goop like an oil tanker hitting an iceberg. Slippery goop. Which coated the floor and immobilized the droids. They were spinning their wheels on a sheet of lubricant, unable to advance.

  “Pretty good,” Larkspur said.

  “No, no.” Cosmo shook his head. “You say, ‘Now that’s slick.’ ”

  “Get Poppy and follow me.”

  “Because it’s like an oil slick, see?”

  Larkspur grunted, rammed a hole in the wall, and walked into the next room. He rammed a hole in another wall, leading to another room. Then he rammed a hole in a third wall and ended up in the Cray room.

  “Instant hallway,” he said. “Now let’s jack out of here.”

  He turned to Poppy and Cosmo … but they weren’t there.

  They were still back in the first hallway, fighting the droids.

  Poppy was having too much fun to leave. She’d figured out how to use her crowbar to disassemble the droids. She’d leap on top of one, ram the bar into a seam, and yank backward. Once she dug deep enough, she’d rip out a handful of wiring.

  That did the trick.

  Cosmo, meanwhile, decided he should practice his hand-to-hand skills. Just because he likes to play around with darts and toy cars doesn’t mean he’s not deadly in unarmed commando combat. So he spun and crouched in front of the first droid, dodging mini-missiles and electric pulses and exchanging blows with the robot arms.

  Until suddenly:

  Cosmo sort of … fuzzed for a second. His edges blurred and he seemed almost transparent. And when he returned to normal a moment later, he looked like he was stuck in slow motion.

  Like he was moving underwater.

  His agility and speed were half what they’d been, and the droid smashed him in the chest and aimed a missile at his head.

  “Poppy,” he yelled, “911!”

  Poppy pivoted and leapt toward him. Then she fuzzed, too!

  Right in middle of her leap. Instead of hitting the droid, she landed on a batch of the slippery goop, flipped head over tail a few times, and crashed into a wall.

  The droids spun toward them. They were stuck on the slippery stuff, but they could still fire.

  “I’d give my stripe for a rocket launcher right now,” Cosmo said.

  And the droid fired.

  NO

  I stared at the newest intersection of vents, which looked like every other intersection of vents.

  “Which way?” I whispered.

  “We came from over there.” Jamie pointed. “Um. Didn’t we?”

  “I think I recognize that panel.”

  “The panels are all identical!” she said.

  “Yeah, but …” I sighed. “We’re lost.”

  “How about … that way?”

  “Why not?”

  We crawled through another intersection and heard Roach’s voice.

  “Next!” he called faintly.

  And we knew that in the auditorium, another person had been scanned in.

  We looked at each other and crawled toward the noise. Not just Roach’s voice, but all the weeping and begging. We followed the sound into a vent leading to the auditorium.

  Peering through a grate, we saw that the line in front of the scanning booth was smaller, with only a dozen people remaining. And Jamie’s parents were almost in front.

  “We have to do something,” Jamie said.

  “Let me think, let me think.…”

  “We can find the fuse box and—”

  “There’s no time, Jamie,” I hissed.

  What could we do? Dozens of VIRUS soldiers. Plus Hund—who counted for dozens more all by himself. The auditorium was mostly empty now and strewn with trash and papers, a briefcase, a baseball glove …

  Focus, Doug!

  Roach still stood on the stage. Hund still wore a hundred pounds of killing machines. The glossy black scanning booth still looked like death.

  But there, behind the booth: an uplink! Plugged into the scanning booth, like the booth couldn’t work without it.

  “If we can damage that uplink—” I started.

  “Oh, no,” Jamie said, her eyes wide. Her father was next in line.

  We were too late.

  “Next!” Roach called. And the soldiers shoved Jamie’s dad into the machine.

  The door shimmered. The booth hummed.

  And he was gone.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Jamie said under her breath.

  “Next!” Roach called.

  They pushed Jamie’s mother into the machine, and the door shimmered again.

  “Noooooooo!” Jamie yelled as the booth digitized her mother.

  The soldiers heard her. They looked up and saw the grate.

  They sprang toward us.

  SODA POP

  An instant after the missile launched, a soda vending machine flew over Cosmo’s head. It smashed into the missile and exploded into shrapnel and sugar water. Smoke billowed through the corridor, hiding the skunks.

  Larkspur appeared at the end of the hallway, from where he’d thrown the soda machine. He grabbed Cosmo and Poppy, put one under each arm, and ran back toward the Cray room.

  “You should’ve said, ‘Have a Coke and a smile,’ ” Cosmo said from under Larkspur’s arm.

  “I told you to get Poppy,” Larkspur said. “Not to play around with those droids.”

  “Not his fault,” Poppy said.

  “You should know better.” Larkspur dropped Poppy and Cosmo on the ground of the Cray room a little harder than necessary. “Both of you.”

  They stood up and wiped themselves off. “Something happened,” Poppy said. “We lost power.”

  “What?”

  “We were doing fine; then we lost power.”

  Larkspur checked his wrist display. “It’s starting. What Dr. Solomon warned us about. Dissolving into a bundle of information.”

  “You didn’t feel it?” Poppy asked.

  “Not yet. The suit has its own power source, so I can last longer than you. A little longer. Time to go.”

  Larkspur grabbed the uplink and flickered out of existence.

  But the uplink stayed behind.

  Big problem.

  In a moment, Larkspur rematerialized. The other two skunks stared at him.

  “Don’t say it,” Cosmo said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “We can’t do it. We can digitize ourselves, and a little extra, like our gear. But I can’t digitize the uplink. It exceeds my capacity.”

  “I told you not to say it.”

  “So how do we get out of here?” Poppy asked. “And how do we get an uplink to Dr. Solomon?”

  , my aunt said, broadcasting a message directly into the skunks’ digital caches.

  , Larkspur replied.

 

  And the connection died.

  “Great,” Cosmo said.

  “I don’t care if I am reverting to pure information.” Poppy smiled her scary smile. “These colors don’t run.”

  “You’re not in color,” Cosmo said. “You’re black and white.”

  “This isn’t about running,” Larkspur told her. “We don’t have time to play around. We have a duty to Dr. Solomon, we need to help the chi—”

  CHUNG CHUNG CHUNG CHUNG CHUNG.

  Larkspur stopped talking, and they all looked down the hallway.

  The droids were back. And they’d brought friends.

  HUMDRUM

  The soldiers ripped the grate off the wall and grabbed us.

  I’d go into detail about how they pulled us from the ventilation shaft as we tried to scramble away, but why bother? The truth is, they were soldiers and we were kids. We never had a chance.

  “Bring them her
e,” Roach said.

  The soldiers shoved us forward.

  Hund glowered at me. “How’s your leg?”

  Too scared to say anything clever—or even anything stupid, for that matter—I just stared at him.

  He pulled his knife. “Remember this? My favorite blade?”

  I swallowed hard.

  Hund stepped closer and grabbed the front of my shirt. Then he lifted me three feet into the air.

  I heard Jamie yell, “Let him go!”

  Pretty impressive. I didn’t feel like yelling anything except “Mommy!”

  “I could do that,” Hund said, and shook me. “Or I could snap him in half.”

  “Make him give you the Resloc first,” Roach said.

  “Gimme,” Hund snarled at me.

  “Um—” I swallowed. “I—I don’t know w-what that is.”

  “The place where you downloaded a copy of the Protocol,” Roach said. “Oh, yes, very clever. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

  “I d-don’t know what you’re t-talking about,” I stammered.

  And I didn’t. Maybe if I hadn’t been so bone-deep terrified, I’d have realized he meant the skunks. That was where the Protocol had been downloaded. But at that moment, I could barely remember how to breathe.

  “Don’t play with me, boy,” Hund said.

  He stared into my eyes, and I could see my reflection in his implanted yellow lens, and I looked scared.

  He tightened his grip on me and brought his blade closer, and everything started to go black. I guess I was about to faint.

  “I have it!” Jamie shouted. They all turned to her. “Don’t hurt him. I know the Resloc.”

  “And who are you?” Hund sneered.

  “I’m the girl who knows the Resloc number: 21c07lr84-84.”

  Roach cocked his head when she rattled off the numbers. “A child with a brain. How unusual.” He tapped a few keys, then nodded in satisfaction. “You downloaded the Protocol into the test animals?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “A pity the animals were incinerated.” He turned to Hund. “Everything is going perfectly. The scans were flawless; the first stage is complete. The digitization of a neighborhood. Next comes a small city, then a state. And then”—he smiled his freaky smile—“perfect order. Perfect logic.”