The Rendering

by Joel Naftali

  And I fell out the back and looked down and saw cornfields far below.

  Only then did I realize I was in midair.

  And

  NEXT TIME, DIGITIZE FLYING SQUIRRELS

  Larkspur yanked Cosmo and Poppy off the dissection grid, keeping his armored body between them and the beeping gun.

  “Detonation in twenty-two seconds,” he said.

  “No … way out,” Poppy said weakly.

  “We know there’s no way out,” Cosmo muttered. “Thanks for the bulletin.”

  “I’ll try to protect—” Larkspur said.

  “No.” Poppy pointed. “There. A way out.”

  Roach’s evacuation pod rose toward the ceiling, and Larkspur understood immediately. He wrapped Poppy and Cosmo with one arm and leapt toward the pod.

  Damaged and holding the two of them, he almost didn’t reach the undercarriage in time. But he did, his fingers digging into the metal base. Barely. The pod emerged from the underground bunker and rose above the cornfields with the skunks clinging beneath.

  Larkspur grunted. “Losing my grip.”

  “Um,” Cosmo said. “Er …”

  “What?” Poppy asked.

  “There’s a joke there somewhere,” he said. “ ‘Losing my grip.’ ”

  The carapace rifle exploded far beneath them, sparking a chain reaction. Explosion triggered explosion, and the entire underground bunker detonated like the world’s biggest Fourth of July show.

  Larkspur lost his handhold.

  They fell about five feet before the blast caught up with them and hurled them a hundred yards, where they dug three deep furrows through the cornfield.

  For a moment, none of them moved.

  Larkspur slowly stood. “Everybody functional?”

  “I’m good,” Poppy said, lying on her back, her fur still smoldering.

  “Cosmo?” Larkspur asked.

  “Skunk ’em,” Cosmo muttered. He’d taken the brunt of the blast and was in tatters.

  “Where’s Bug?” Poppy asked. Then she answered her own question. “Sweet skunkin’ samurai!”

  She pointed high into the air, and Larkspur and Cosmo looked up and saw me.

  Plummeting toward the ground.

  Cosmo drew his gun and started spinning the cylinder. “I’ve got foam in here somewhere, could cushion the fall …”

  “Not enough time,” Poppy said. She looked at Larkspur. “Slingshot.”

  Larkspur grabbed her tail and spun around like a discus thrower—one, two, three, four times—then he hurled her toward me.

  Meanwhile, I was dropping fast. I was too scared to be scared, if that makes any sense.

  I was falling from the equivalent of a thirty-story building, but I wasn’t screaming. What can you do? I was never gonna graduate. And forget about getting a driver’s license.

  Then I saw Poppy flying toward me. For a second, I thought she was really flying, like Superman—until she slammed into me, and I gasped and we fell together toward the earth.

  “Not that I mind the company,” I said, “but what do we do now?”

  The ground was fast approaching. Poppy didn’t have time to chat.

  An instant before we hit, the fear finally kicked in. I screamed, and everything went black.

  MAYBE A LOT MORE

  Well, you know I lived, because I’m writing this. The good news is that Poppy lived, too. And so did Larkspur, Cosmo, and Jamie.

  Is Auntie M alive? That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. But my aunt is still with us, and she says we might be able to reanimate her if we ever beat Roach and VIRUS.

  Right now, that feels like an awfully big if.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  As you probably guessed, Poppy managed to cushion my fall. Nothing like video game reflexes and Hog Stomper toughness. Still, I got knocked around pretty good and blacked out.

  I woke in the back of a cargo van, aching everywhere.

  “Owwwwwwww,” I moaned.

  “Doug?” Jamie leaned over me. “How do you feel?”

  I moaned again.

  “Here.” She held a bottle of water to my lips. “Drink.”

  I drank. “I hate water. You have any soda?”

  “Have a Coke and a smile,” Larkspur said, and laughed.

  I gave him a dirty look, and everything went fuzzy.

  The next time I woke, daylight shone through the windows in the back of the van. Jamie sat beside me, and Larkspur hunched nearby. Cosmo drove and Poppy sat shotgun. Fortunately, the van had mirrored windows.

  After a rest stop and a handful of aspirin, Jamie filled me in.

  “First,” I asked, “where did this van come from?”

  “Your aunt. Online rental is her Arsenal Five. She even arranged delivery a couple miles outside the cornfields.”

  “And where are we heading?”

  She named a city I’d never visited.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, at least VIRUS headquarters was blown to bits.”

  She looked at me with bad news in her eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “That was a temporary headquarters. Now that Roach transferred his data, he can set up anywhere in the country—”

  “Or the world,” Larkspur added.

  I nodded slowly. “What about your mom and dad?”

  Jamie took a deep breath. “Still trapped in his domain. All the people from town are.”

  I should’ve guessed, because her eyes were red from crying. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s more bad news,” she said. “Roach still has the Protocol and his scanning booth technology.”

  “That was all for nothing?” I said bitterly. “Everything we did, everything that happened?”

  “No,” Cosmo said from the front, serious for once. “Roach threw his fastest pitch, and we knocked it outta the park. If you hadn’t destroyed the HostLink, he’d have scanned half the country already. We stood up to him, we sprang his trap—and thanks to you, we walked away.”

  “And now we know what we’re up against,” Larkspur rumbled.

  “That’s right,” Cosmo said. “All we need is some training, and we’ll take VIRUS down. We have your aunt. We have Jamie and the dragonfly. We have you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Did you see how I kicked Hund’s butt back there?”

  “You saved our lives, Bug,” Poppy said. “You drove that truck straight into Roach’s base”—she looked proud—“and saved our lives.”

  “And if you ever do that again,” Jamie said, tapping on her laptop, “and leave me behind, you won’t have to worry about Hund, ’cause I’ll kill you myself.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “You were responsible for the gun malfunction, Douglas,” my aunt said from the laptop. “Reconstructions reveal that you caused both the helicopter cable failure and weapon malfunction.”

  “How?” Jamie asked.

  “The precise mechanism is unclear, though I presume that the Holographic Hub magnified Doug’s inborn ability to cause … bugs.”

  “So he’s a walking Bermuda Triangle.”

  “And he must learn to direct his ability to cause mishaps,” Auntie M said.

  “You’re a one-man banana peel,” Cosmo told me. “Mister Mishap.”

  Jamie laughed. “You always wanted to be a superhero.”

  “Captain Clumsy!” Poppy said.

  So Cosmo’s a commando fighter. Poppy’s a martial artist. Larkspur’s a tank. Jamie’s a virtual reality hacker.

  And me? I’m Stumbleboy.

  Still, I looked out the window and I smiled. I guess I had saved their lives. And that’s more than nothing.

  THE NEW INDUSTRIAL PLANT

  A week later we were still settling in.

  We’d moved into an abandoned factory on the outskirts of a new city. Auntie M bought it using false IDs and electronic money transfers and forged deeds. It was about the size of a football
field, with three stories and an incredible assortment of old, rusty machinery. And it was in a broken-down industrial section, so no one had noticed when we’d made ourselves at home.

  And no one noticed when my aunt started diverting shipments of high-tech hardware to our loading dock. For days, there was a constant stream of cutting-edge technology delivered to our front door.

  Roach wasn’t the only one who could put together a command center.

  And you know what? I’m not gonna claim that we won: we didn’t. But neither did VIRUS. Neither did Roach.

  Instead of taking over the world in a week, he’d lost the HostLink. Instead of dissecting the skunks, he’d watched his temporary headquarters being destroyed. Instead of working in secret, he’ll be exposed to the world. Because we’re telling everyone about him. At least, we’re trying to.

  Sure, Roach had created cyberdroids and biodroids and a whole virtual domain. But he’d also created his own worst enemy: us.

  He’d transformed me from an ordinary kid into … well, an ordinary kid whose best friend controlled a superpowerful hacking tool. An ordinary kid whose aunt became a digital Netform.

  An ordinary kid who created the CyberSkunks.

  We’d survived. We’d fought together and bled together and forged ourselves into a team. The skunks, me and Jamie, and Auntie M. And now we had a command center, with a training room and a firing range and more computer power than NASA.

  Oh, and my aunt also arranged for furniture, clothes, food, and everything else. She was like a computerized compulsive shopper. She even bought a Harley for Poppy.

  Auntie M enrolled me in a big city school, under a false name and address. I sometimes see that first-grade picture of me on the news; they tried to depict how I look now by “aging” the picture, giving me a pug nose and zits and mean eyes. But the drawing looks more like the Mole Man than me.

  Jamie went to live with her uncle and aunt, who received a series of scary phone calls from government operatives ordering them not to ask questions about the explosion at the Center—or the disappearance of Jamie’s parents and imaginary twin sister. The “government operatives” were really Auntie M, using voice-alteration software. She told Aunt Simone and Uncle Charlie to keep their heads down and live ordinary lives, for Jamie’s protection.

  At least Jamie lives only twenty minutes away, and we still go to the same school. It’s not like being neighbors, but since she comes to the Ol’ Factory most days after school, it’s pretty close.

  Yeah, I forgot to tell you about that: The Ol’ Factory.

  About ten seconds after we saw the place, Cosmo started calling our new home the Ol’ Factory.

  It’s a pun. Say it fast. The Ol’ Factory. The olfactory. Skunks living in the Ol’ Factory.

  Yeah, it’s awful. But after a while the name sort of stuck.

  Anyway, that’s what happened. That’s how I lost my school and my town and even my name and started living with skunk-people and a digital aunt.

  And there’s not much more to tell … right now. We’re still hiding from VIRUS and hunting them at the same time. And not just VIRUS: there’s more danger in the hidden sectors of the Net than anyone knows.

  More on that later. Guess I’m done for now.

  Oh, except one last thing.

  I was daydreaming in class one day when something occurred to me. So when I got home, I cornered Cosmo.

  “Remember when you were on that grid,” I said, “with Roach dissecting you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, you’re skunks, right? So why didn’t you … y’know?” I fanned my hand behind my butt.

  “Do a chicken dance?”

  “No, no. The thing is, skunks can, y’know, if they feel threatened or something, they can … stink.”

  He laughed. “You want to know why we didn’t spray them?”

  I nodded.

  “You figure that regular skunks are stinky enough, right? So we should have chemical warfare stink bombs, huh?”

  “Well, that’s what I was wondering about.” I was kind of embarrassed. It felt like a personal question. “So can you? Can you spray?”

  “Sure. We are skunks, after all.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “Because it stinks.”

  “That’s the whole point.”

  “No, Bug. It’s awful. Repulsive. Gross. Just because we’re skunks doesn’t mean we like the way it smells. You get that in your tail—phew!—you reek for a month. Disgusting! You smell so bad you’d—”

  Right then, the alarm sounded, and we rushed to the console.

  “I’m tracking an unusually high level of secondary activity in one of Roach’s encrypted sectors,” my aunt said. “Looks like VIRUS is preparing something big.”

  The first thing we did was call Jamie and have her log on. Then the skunks jacked in while I—

  Douglas. You assured me that you would complete your science homework before beginning another blog post.

  I asked you not to scan my drive! Whatever happened to privacy?

  I did not scan your drive. But your reaction confirms that you have not yet done your work.

  Oh. Gave myself away, huh?

  Let me just finish with this: Roach is still out there. Hund and VIRUS, too. Somewhere, lurking behind the codes and Web sites of cyberspace, they’re out there.

  Planning. Plotting. Preparing to digitize the world. To scan everyone in.

  Even you.

  But we’re out here, too:

  Me and Jamie, helping when we can.

  My aunt, keeping watch.

  And the CyberSkunks, battling in virtual reality and on the streets.

  It’s not an easy fight. Sometimes I think we can’t win. But I promise you this: we’ll never give up.

  Oh, and one more thing: does anyone out there understand cell structure? I swear Mr. Lannister never covered any of this stuff in class.

  All I need are the answers to questions one through seven on page 88 of Elements of Scien—

  Good-bye. Be well. Eat your vegetables.

  COMMONLY USED TERMS

  ANFSCD: And Now for Something Completely Different.

  BattleArmor: An ultrapowerful suit of combat armor made of an incredibly dense alloy for protection, with a built-in AI that provides enhanced speed and strength.

  Digitized: Transformed from a living organism into computer code.

  Holographic Hub: The main processing unit of the Center. The hub looks like an empty room but is actually seething with information. And it doesn’t just crunch data; it optimizes all available code.

  HostLink: A prototype device that can scan minds from a distance, thousands at a time. Designed as a research tool, but with the right modifications, the HostLink turns into a terrifying weapon.

  Mainframe: A commercial-grade supercomputer capable of serving thousands of users simultaneously, often located in a secure, climate-controlled room.

  Memory Cube: As big as a pack of cards, and with more memory capacity than ten thousand zip drives.

  Modified stem-cell self-extraction media (aka “Steaks”): Although they look like T-bone steaks, they’re actually the material from which digital files can grow into physical bodies.

  Monkeybeast: An early version of Roach’s biodroids. Imagine orangutans with elephant skin and glowing helmets for heads. And gun barrels sticking out of their armpits.

  Motorcycle chain: Like a bicycle chain, but bigger and heavier. In Poppy’s hands, a motorcycle chain is a deadly cross between a whip and a chain saw.

  Protocol: Ultrapowerful software that transfers living minds into digital files.

  Resloc: The virtual address of information in cyberspace. The location of some of Roach’s most valuable data.

  Scanning booths: Roach’s triumphant technology, which digitizes not only minds but bodies. Looks like a glossy black Porta Potti with a shimmering door.

  Steaks: See Modified stem-cell self-extraction media.

 
Uplink: A device that scans and transfers digitized information; hardware designed for use with the Protocol software.

  Virtual reality: A computer-created “environment” that seems like a three-dimensional reality to users, who can see, smell, touch, taste, and feel inside the program. Like the holodeck on Star Trek, or the Danger Room in X-Men.

  Virtual reality combat sim: A machine in which a soldier is immersed in various computer-generated combat scenarios for training purposes. Can be set to Nonlethal.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The author of several books for adults, joel naftali, was surprised to receive an e-mail from someone claiming to be notorious fugitive Doug Solomon. Although he cannot vouch for the accuracy of this book, and does not endorse any illegal activity, Naftali agreed to help Doug find a publisher. Naftali lives in Maine with his wife and son and lawyer, who instructed him to mention he’s cooperating fully with the authorities.