by M. E. Castle
“You’re the best scientist they’ve got,” Mr. Bas said valiantly.
Mrs. Bas gave him a weak smile. “Be that as it may, the bureau is terrified. After Dr. X’s attempts to steal my formula, they believe it’s possible that someone succeeded in removing a sample. They’ve dispatched whole teams to investigate a possible security breach. If someone stole the AGH, he’ll be found, and caught … and hopefully thrown into a jail cell to rot,” she finished fiercely.
“Uh … huh,” stammered Fisher. He could almost feel the cold concrete cell pressing around him.
“Anyway, I just need a night to relax,” she chirped, suddenly cheerful again, “and get away from it for a little bit. I’ve been answering some very personal questions about our family and my methods all week. They’ve finally cleared me of culpability, but it was a very stressful experience.” Then she bent down, placing her hands on Fisher’s shoulders. “Listen, Fisher. I don’t know how long this investigation is going to last or whether any agents are going to come to the house to investigate further, but I don’t want you to worry about it, okay? I’ll be fine.”
“That’s good,” Fisher said as his vision blurred and the room started spinning. He thought he might faint. Through the haze, he saw his parents headed for the door. “Have a good time,” he said under his breath. It took his parents several tries to make it out the door, because Mr. Bas’s silk scarf and Mrs. Bas’s shawl managed to wreathe together and tie them up neck to neck.
When the door closed, Fisher stayed in place, not even wavering, like he’d been nailed to the floorboards.
He had no idea how long he had been standing there when a crash from the kitchen made him whip around. He slipped up to the doorway and eased his head around, expecting to see a tall man in a black suit and sunglasses punching down the wall in pursuit of Fisher for his crimes.
Thankfully, the noise turned out to be a package of soup crackers that had been set down too close to the counter’s edge.
“Young Fisher,” came a voice straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. It sounded like an English butler, but was, in fact, the toaster.
“Oh, hi, Lord Burnside,” Fisher said, relieved. “Have a good day?”
“Well, I must confess that this morning I slightly over-crisped a slice of whole wheat. I’m afraid that dreadful blunder put me in the darkest of moods for much of the day. Luckily, your father likes his toast dark so at least my foul mood produced something of worth. But if I cannot reliably and consistently perform my function, what good am I?” Lord Burnside had small glowing spots on his side that served to indicate eyes, and they dipped into a melancholy frown.
“I wouldn’t let it get you down,” Fisher said, inching once again toward the hallway. He needed to think. He needed a plan. “After all, just think how many pieces of bread would be left completely untoasted if it wasn’t for your hard work!”
“Dear me,” the little appliance said, eyespots growing wider. “All of that poor, cold, utterly uncrunchy bread! That would be disastrous. Indeed, perhaps I exaggerated the importance of one mistake, compared to the vast amount of important work that I do. Thank you, young sir. You have provided a very valuable perspective on the matter.”
“Anytime, your lordship,” Fisher said. He took the stairs to his room two at a time, slammed the door, and sagged against it.
His eyes landed on the cover of Issue #412 of Vic Daring, Space Scoundrel, lying open and facedown on his bed. The artwork depicted the rakish adventurer catapulting himself free of a wrecked ship in a sleek chrome space suit, hurtling into black space, with no idea where the desperate escape might take him.
Fisher empathized. He, too, had to hurtle himself into the terrifying black space … of Los Angeles.
Twenty minutes later, Fisher was standing in front of a suitcase, which was, at the moment, still empty except for a solar-powered umbrella, a device that Fisher hadn’t really thought through before he made it. Fortunately, it worked very well as a portable power source whenever it wasn’t actually raining.
“Oh boy! LA! City of Angels! The bright lights! The stars! The big time! Prowlin’ the mean streets!”
Once again, Fisher was conversing with a machine. It was CURTIS, Fisher’s AI companion. CURTIS sounded like a pizza delivery guy from Brooklyn, but he had an extremely powerful computing mind.
CURTIS had spent most of his time on the TechX mainframe being very bored, and so had downloaded vast amounts of TV from the Internet. It was all he’d really known of the outside world before Fisher had taken him. Now he was giving Fisher advice on all the sights to check out in LA.
FP was taking careful steps around the room, trying not to touch anything that wasn’t already secured to the floor. He wasn’t doing a great job. The gel hadn’t worn off yet, and two cough-drop wrappers and a crumpled-up page of Fisher’s calculations were stuck to his legs.
“I’m not going to sightsee, CURTIS,” Fisher said, looking through his sock drawer until he found his special, super-elastic, jump-enhancing socks. “I have important work to do when I get there.”
“You know something, kid? One time, Dr. Devilish made a levitating platform with electromagnets and then played a guitar solo on top of it!”
“I’m pretty sure the music was prerecorded,” Fisher said, feeling along the upper shelf in his closet. He pulled down the camouflaging spray that he’d used to hide from the guards in TechX, along with a bagful of instant shrub seeds, which would sprout into a full-sized shrub within seconds of being watered.
“The legendary Hollywood Boulevard! The stars in the pavement! Bogart! Brando! And then there’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre! Do you know what that place was like when Star Wars first came out? It was amazing, the displays of—”
“CURTIS!” Fisher shouted, spinning around to face the computer. “I’m not going there to look at movie stars or gawk at buildings. I’ve got to find Two.”
Fisher tucked a necktie into his suitcase. It was made of a material that would expand and stretch up to twenty times its length. That was a device Fisher had invented by accident; all he’d wanted when he made it was a necktie that he could successfully knot in a half Windsor without strangling himself.
The computer made a sighing sound.
“Fine, fine.” He chuckled a few times before going silent.
“Sometimes I miss only having a toaster to talk to,” Fisher mumbled to himself, zipping his suitcase closed.
Hours later, Fisher sat on the edge of his bed, a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other. He knew he should be trying to sleep, but he’d been turning and shifting so much that FP had leapt from the bed and perched, asleep, on Fisher’s in-progress Tesla coil, hidden under a draped sheet next to his desk. Fisher hadn’t mentioned to his parents that he’d been trying to construct an artificial lightning-bolt maker. His mother would overreact he was sure.
Fisher’s pencil flew frantically across the paper until it was warm in his hand. He wrote out dozens of equations about the mission ahead. First, he took the population of Los Angeles, the city’s size, and a few other factors, and calculated the odds that he would step off the bus and run right into Two. He hadn’t seen that many zeros to the right of a decimal since he’d fallen asleep on his keyboard with his nose on the 0 key.
He also made a few entertaining calculations just to ease his mind. The density of King of Hollywood franchises in the city, which was higher than the density of humans in some Midwestern states. The odds that, at any given moment, a seagull would land on his head. He didn’t actually know enough about the behavior of seagulls for that one, so he assumed that human heads looked really comfy to seagulls.
He had just set the clipboard down and picked up the Two Tracking Unit to work out its kinks when three knocks sounded at his door.
“Can I come in, Fisher?” said his mother’s voice.
“Sure,” Fisher said as he attempted to leap back into his bed and look calm, but ended up looking like an over-caffeinated spid
er.
The door opened, and she walked in as Fisher tried to untangle himself from his top sheet.
“How was the orchestra?” Fisher asked as his mom sat down on the bed.
“Very good,” she said. “I’ve always been a Stravinsky fan. Listen, Fisher … the government shutdown of my project is serious.” Fisher nodded as slowly and placidly as he could. “I don’t know how some of the AGH went unaccounted for. It’s possible that I made an error somewhere or that something in my equipment was off. And that’s probably what happened. But I still have to consider all the possibilities.” She turned to look Fisher directly in the eyes.
“Like … what?” Fisher asked, hearing FP shift in his sleep and wishing he would swoop down and fly Fisher out the window.
“Someone might have taken it,” his mom answered. “Dr. X had plenty of people working for him. It’s even possible that kidnapping you”—there was a slight hitch in her voice—“was just a diversion, to get your father and me out of the house so that his spies could slip in and steal it. But I just don’t know.”
It took a moment for Fisher to understand the mixture of suspicion and gentleness in her expression. She suspected him. But at the same time, she’d lived through the terror of having him kidnapped and not knowing if she’d ever see him again.
Fisher felt pins of guilt sticking him in the ribs, but not hard enough to make him talk. It would be one thing if he’d taken some AGH to study it or to try and make himself taller. But there was another Fisher running around, and he wasn’t ready to see either of his parents’ reaction to that.
So he cleared his throat and said, “Who knows? Dr. X was capable of a lot. I saw that when I was inside TechX. I’m just sorry you had your project canceled.”
“It’s all right,” his mom said, sighing and standing up. “When I began to realize the possibilities for the project, I started to regret ever having done it. And the government knows just how dangerous the stuff is. The teams they dispatched to track the AGH down have been ordered to destroy anything it was used to create or alter. They’re even confiscating and destroying the giant plants I made when I was testing a prehuman version of it.”
Fisher felt his breath catch in his throat like a fishhook.
“Good night, Fisher,” his mom said, walking to the door.
“… G … night,” Fisher managed to push out as she closed it behind her.
A lot of things had been on the line before. Now, everything was. If he failed, not only could he be arrested and imprisoned … Two could be killed.
CHAPTER 4
“School bus” is the normally used term because “asylum on wheels” is considered impolite.
—Fisher Bas, Personal Notes
A big, white spitball sailed over the seats like an artillery shell over a trench. The hum of conversation had swollen to a deafening roar, and small objects whizzed back and forth without warning. During the seven-hour trip to LA, the shouting, cascades of Cheetos and spilled Pepsis, and flying, spittle-encrusted pieces of notebook paper, had quickly turned the bus into a mobile trash heap.
In other words, it was just like any other Wompalog Friday, only in a small, cramped space from which there was no escape.
Fisher had hoped he’d be able to talk to Veronica during the trip. Not helping his cause was the fact that seats had been assigned, and she was sitting two rows in front of him, next to Trevor Weiss. Fisher could only imagine what they were talking about. Trevor’s two favorite subjects were his collection of handmade pencil cases and the history of trout fishing.
Another spitball nearly grazed Fisher’s head. He had spent time working on a quickly deploying anti-spitball shield system, but he hadn’t figured out a way to get the reaction time right, and tests had ended with the shield smacking him in the head as often as the spitballs.
As soon as his head had hit the pillow the night before, visions of dark-suited figures, eyeless behind pitch-black sunglasses, had filled his head. They chased him around street corners. They chased him through dark forests. He had even, at one point, tried to dive into a lake and swim to safety, only to be pursued by a sinister agent riding a giant grouper.
What if the investigation led to him and Two? Would Fisher be locked in a military laboratory and forced to make more clones? Would Two be cryogenically frozen while teams of researchers analyzed his chemical composition and cellular structure?
Then a still more chilling thought hit him. Fisher had made Two. What if he was forced to lead the team that took Two apart? He couldn’t imagine accepting the task. But what would they do to him when he refused?
It was an unexpected relief when Ms. Snapper decided to play a documentary on earthworms to “entertain and enlighten.” It was doing neither, but it was, at least, helping to keep Fisher out of his head.
“And so, with the coming of the April storm, the soil becomes saturated and the noble creatures, knowing their peaty homes shall soon flood, inch ever upward until they majestically break the surface and look blindly upon the cloudy sky.…” The whining monotone of the narrator’s voice was barely audible, but still loud enough to be annoying.
Fisher poked his head cautiously above his seat, straining to see even a bit of Veronica’s beautiful golden hair. But his field of vision was filled almost instantaneously by the head of Warren Deveraux, which popped up like a champagne cork.
“Hey, Fisher! Nice bus, huh? It’s got screens and everything! Hey, d’ya think we can actually get TV on here, or just videos? And look how clean the windows are! I bet they wash them twice a day. What do you think? Twice? Maybe three times?”
Warren was a boy with exactly two settings: on and off. Fisher had learned this well.
“How about the cushions?” Fisher said. “Are they comfy enough?”
Warren popped back into his seat to investigate.
“Wow, yeah, this is—zzzzzz …”
Fisher shook his head.
“Fisher! Hey! We need to plan!” Amanda snapped her fingers in front of his face. Fisher turned to her sheepishly.
“Sorry,” Fisher said. “I was, uh, seeing if the earthworm made it out of the ground.”
“Uh-huh,” Amanda said, jotting something down in a spiral notebook on her lap. She gave him a quick glare before turning back to her planning. “Look. LA is a big city. It’s going to be hard enough to find Two even with a good plan.”
“What have you come up with so far?” Fisher leaned against the window. His eyes drifted back to Veronica, or what little he could see of her (mostly an elbow).
Amanda chewed on the end of her pen thoughtfully. “What about the studio that’s casting the new commercial?” she said, writing the word STUDIO in the center of her notes. “Two must have sent his video along to them. They might have a phone number for him or something.”
“Good thinking,” Fisher said. “I could get that personal info if I pretended to be his twin brother.”
“You are his twin brother,” Amanda said. “Just not the usual way.”
Fisher took a moment to think about that. She was right; biologically, a clone was just an artificial twin. But more than that, before his disappearance, Fisher and Two had really started to become close. At first the difference in personality had made Fisher think that they could never coexist, but when they were fighting for their lives together, he’d realized how much they had in common. Now Two’s life was in danger again and he didn’t even know it.
He stretched his stiff neck, peering out the windows as he did, and his eyes paused on a sleek black car just behind and to the left of the bus. Its windows looked tinted … or was that just the reflection of the light?
Fisher sank lower into his seat. Were black-suited government agents watching him even now? Could they possibly know about Two?
But as he watched, the car began to drift farther away. Maybe Fisher was being paranoid. Would the agency really suspect a twelve-year-old of stealing the AGH from right under the nose of his genius mother?
> All the same, Fisher slipped out of his seat and worked his way up the aisle, trying to see where the black car was going. Trevor shuffled past him toward the bathroom, his face a deep green. Fisher craned his neck to keep the car in sight. He had moved two rows forward when the bus swerved severely, with no warning at all. Fisher rocketed sideways … straight into Veronica’s lap. The bus lurched a second time and came to a stop.
“Fisher!” Veronica said, surprise and concern equal in her voice. “Are you all right?”
Fisher froze, wide-eyed, his brain shouting five contradictory things at his body.
“I-I-I’m sorry, I—” he stammered at last, sitting up quickly. “I hope I didn’t—um …”
“Is anyone hurt?” said Ms. Snapper, standing up and looking over the bus, row by row. “Everybody okay?” Once she had seen that nobody in class had been hurt by the bus’s sudden halt, she turned back to the bus driver. “What happened??”
“Something’s on the windshield!” said the gray-haired man. He had pulled the bus to the side of the road. “Biggest insect I’ve ever seen!”
All the students craned their heads to look. There was a large, pinkish object slowly sliding down the windshield. It was the size of a lapdog, or a fat cat, or …
“FP?” Fisher said in disbelief. He popped up and bolted toward the front of the bus. “I, um, I’m sorry, Ms. Snapper. That’s my pig.” Ms. Snapper and the driver looked at him like he had a marmoset tap-dancing on his head.
“Why is your—um, pig—on the front of our bus?” Ms. Snapper turned back to stare at FP, who had now slid down to the bottom of the windshield.
“I honestly wish I knew,” Fisher said. “I’ll go get him.”
Fisher hopped out of the passenger door just as FP slipped off the bottom of the windshield, leaving a thin, translucent streak behind him. Mr. Bas’s hair gel! He must have been glued to the top of the bus this whole time, though how he had ended up there was a mystery. It looked like the effects of the hair gel were finally wearing off.