Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  To avoid being spotted, he’d had to spend most of his time lingering in the projected coronation of Julius Caesar. Despite the fact that the light-show figures were somewhat vapid, he was still out of place there, because even holograms are three-dimensional. But it had been adequate camouflage.

  Theo missed baseball. He missed his dimensionally intolerant family. And even if he couldn’t quite connect the dots, he knew that somehow Nick Slate was responsible for his current predicament.

  Since Jorgenson also hated Nick, their partnership had a solid foundation. Theo trusted Jorgenson, not because the man gave him any real reason to, but because he had no choice.

  When Jorgenson arrived at Accelerati headquarters, Theo, who had spent the week gathering information like a smashed fly on the wall, gave him the lowdown on all that he had seen. Then, a few minutes after Jorgenson’s meeting, Theo was horrified to see the man striding toward the exit, having completely forgotten him.

  Theo slid out of the hologram and followed him along the hallway wall. “Hey, Dr. J! You can’t leave me here! I can’t get out the way I came in without being spotted.”

  Jorgenson sighed. “Very well,” he said. As it happened, Jorgenson did have a plan for extracting Theo. When the coast was clear, he unzipped the lining of his coat.

  “I’ve added this false lining so you can slip in and I can get you out of here.”

  “No way,” said Theo. “I don’t want to hide in your clothes. That’s awkward with a capital Awk.”

  “Come now. It’s lined with titanium foil, so the scanner won’t detect you as we leave,” Jorgenson said, and added, “It’s either that or stay here, hiding in a hologram.”

  Theo sighed. I guess it’s true what they say, he thought as he slipped into the secret compartment of Jorgenson’s coat. Every clown has a silver lining.

  Jorgenson left the bowling alley and walked to his new residence, a modest town house overlooking Acacia Park. It was where Planck had lived before she was promoted to her current, undeserved position.

  Along the way he stopped in the park to take a moment to compose himself and find at least a small bit of serenity. The sun was bright, and the spring day was warm, so he removed his jacket and sat down to take in some much-needed vitamin D.

  To his left, children played in the dancing waters of Uncle Wilbur Fountain. To his right, vagrants slept on benches—even they seemed oblivious to the woes of these troubled times.

  And in this calm space something highly pleasurable dawned on Dr. Alan Jorgenson, former Grand Acceleratus: bringing back his glory days would actually be a very simple matter. All he had to do was kill Evangeline Planck. Putting it in such plain terms made him feel so much better than he had just a moment ago.

  He stood up and left the park with a renewed sense of purpose and an uncharacteristic optimism. But for some reason, and for the rest of the day, he couldn’t help feeling that he had forgotten something.

  That evening, in Acacia Park, a vagrant found an expensive-looking pink overcoat and slipped it on, certain it would keep him warm for the night.

  Mitch and Caitlin sat in Zak’s dorm room, watching over his shoulder as he cracked firewall after firewall on his laptop with lightning speed.

  “The best hackers can get in, get the information, and get out,” Zak said, “without ever being noticed.”

  “Yeah, but what about you?” Mitch asked.

  “I was talking about me.”

  Zak hit the keys with single-minded, maniacal clicking. “Okay, I’m in my mom’s virtuum.”

  “Ew,” said Caitlin. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a multidimensional virtual universe she set up within the mainframe.” On the screen were endless strings of numerals that seemed to flow out from an imaginary horizon. “It’s a numerical construct that works in eight theoretical dimensions.”

  “Is that possible?” Caitlin asked.

  “Not in the real world, but in math, anything’s possible. An eight-dimensional algorithm can generate codes that are impossible to break in three dimensions. We can only break it with something like this.”

  “The money will be in a bank account somewhere,” Mitch said. “With an account number generated by your mom’s system.”

  “No it won’t,” Zak told them. “It’s not designed to generate a static number. It generates numbers that are constantly changing.”

  “Maybe the money’s divided between hundreds of different accounts,” Caitlin suggested.

  “Maybe…” Zak said slowly. “But I’ve got another thought.” He quickly tapped some more keys, and out of the figures spewing at them, a twenty-one-digit number emerged and hovered on the screen. “There!” he said.

  “Found it?” asked Mitch.

  “Yes.” Then he pounded the desk with his fist, aggravated. “But with a dimensional quotient that’s twenty seconds in retrograde.”

  “English, please,” Caitlin said.

  Zak sighed. “I found the account where the money was twenty seconds ago. See, the money isn’t physical anymore, it’s all digital. The algorithm creates a new account number somewhere in the world every twenty seconds, then instantaneously redeposits all the money into the new account. That’s why no one but the Accelerati can access it. Every twenty seconds it’s hiding somewhere different.”

  “But you’ve got the algorithm,” Caitlin said. “So you can find it.”

  Zak shook his head, clearly frustrated. “Having the algorithm isn’t enough. All it can tell me is where the money’s just been. What we need is a nine-dimensional algorithm, which can jump ahead of it in time and predict the next number it will generate.”

  “Can you do it?” asked Mitch.

  “I don’t know.” Then Zak reached into his pocket, pulled out his deck of cards, and, of all things, began to shuffle it.

  The others watched him, a bit baffled. “I don’t think now’s a good time for a game of rummy,” Caitlin said.

  “Just shut up, okay?” said Zak. “It helps me think.”

  It was then that Mitch looked out of the window. “Uh-oh.”

  There were three opalescent sedans at the curb. A dozen agents in pastel suits jumped out and headed straight for the dormitory.

  Zak put away his cards. “Those guys aren’t exactly stealth, are they?”

  “When you can do what they can do, you don’t need to be,” said Mitch.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Caitlin.

  Mitch shook his head. “They’ll be watching all the windows and doors.”

  Zak shoved his laptop into his backpack. “I know another way out.”

  He led them to a forgotten basement utility room where a rusty ladder that had to be a hundred years old led down into foul, web-infested darkness.

  “There’s an access tunnel down there,” he said. “I don’t know where it goes, but wherever it is, the creepy dudes in the funky clothes won’t be there.”

  Caitlin looked into the univiting opening. “This might not be the smartest—”

  Mitch cut her off. “I know! Make me mad!”

  Zak looked at him like he was crazy. “What?”

  “Hit me, yell at me, just make me mad!”

  “Yes,” said Caitlin. “Do it.”

  “Are you both totally out of your minds?”

  “Just do it!” Mitch said.

  Zak tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  “No! Harder! Make it hurt.”

  Zak hit him again, but still not hard enough.

  “Here, let me,” Caitlin said, and she pushed Mitch against the wall.

  “Ow! That hurt,” Mitch said. “But not enough.”

  Zak, clearly not ready to become a wholehearted part of this, stood back and watched as Caitlin dished out uncharacteristic nastiness.

  “You stupid, half-wit loser,” Caitlin said. “Sorry.”

  “No, that’s good,” Mitch said. “Don’t apologize! Mean it!”

  Caitlin realized what she had to do. They ne
eded something cruel. Something hurtful. The kind of thing someone who really didn’t like Mitch would say. It was hard to find it within herself, because now that she’d come to know him, she really did like him. And she realized she liked him enough to give him what he needed.

  “Nobody likes you,” she said, her voice hard. “You talk too much, you’ve got no common sense, and people just put up with you.”

  She could see tears spring to his eyes.

  “Is that true?” Mitch asked, his mouth a grim line.

  As hard as this was, she knew she was almost there. “You’re clumsy, and insensitive, and loud, and oblivious to everyone’s problems but your own.”

  Then Zak, thinking it was all about insults, said, “You’re the worst—”

  “—foosball player within twenty-three yards,” blurted Mitch, blinking back angry tears.

  “Huh?” said Zak.

  “Bingo,” said Caitlin. She grabbed Mitch’s arms. “If we go down that tunnel—”

  “—we’ll all get bitten by rats and get rabies.”

  “Yuck,” said Zak.

  Caitlin continued. “We’ll find the answers we need—”

  “—back in Tesla’s lab in Colorado Springs,” Mitch said, surprised by his own words.

  Zak caught on and said, “We can get away from the creepy dudes in funky clothes if we—”

  “—do the opposite of what we think we should do,” said Mitch.

  “Okay,” said Caitlin, and she looked at Zak. “What’s the worst possible thing we can do right now?”

  “Walk out that door and right into the hands of the Accelerati,” Zak said.

  So that’s exactly what they did.

  Six Accelerati brought the three of them to the math building, to the office of Dr. Zenobia Thuku.

  “The Old Man told us to bring them to you, Z,” said one of the agents. “There were only supposed to be two of them, but this third kid was with them.”

  “Leave them with me,” Dr. Thuku said with authority. “Wait in the hallway until I’m done.”

  The Accelerati obeyed, and once the kids were alone with her, Dr. Thuku looked at her son. “Zakia,” she said with disappointment, and a little bit of fear, “what have you done?”

  “What have you done?” he countered. “I know about the money. I know what you’re using your algorithm for.”

  “There are things you do not understand,” she told him, “and there is no time to explain them now. All you need to know is that the three of you are in grave danger.”

  “Yeah, I already did the math on that one,” said Zak.

  “You must run,” Dr. Thuku said. She reached into her desk drawer and handed Zak her wallet and key chain. “You know where my car is parked.”

  From another drawer Dr. Thuku pulled a small device that looked something like a flashlight. “I’m going to open the door. When I do, aim this into the hallway and push this button.”

  “What’ll it do?” asked Zak.

  “It will give you a three-minute lead.”

  Three minutes later, Dr. Thuku went out into the hallway and looked at the six Accelerati there. “Where are they?” she asked them.

  “They were in there with you.”

  Dr. Thuku hit her palm against her forehead. “They must have a Selective Time Dilator! Didn’t you have antidilation measures engaged?”

  “Uh,” said one of the men, looking at the others, “we didn’t know we were supposed to.”

  “After them!” she shouted. “They must be heading to the new test site in New York! I’m sure of it.” Then she gave them a cold stare. “I’m extremely disappointed in your performance here tonight.”

  “Sorry, Z,” the man said, and they all hurried after the three fugitive kids.

  As Dr. Thuku watched them go, she shook her head. For geniuses, the Accelerati could be incredibly dense.

  “Do you have any idea how screwed I am?” Zak said as he drove them south to Washington. “I have finals next week. And a paper due tomorrow that I haven’t even started yet!”

  “You heard Mitch,” Caitlin reminded him. “We have to get to Colorado Springs.”

  “I couldn’t care less what Magic 8 Ball here said,” Zak muttered. “An EMP nearly wiped that place out, didn’t you hear? Why would we go there?”

  “Because that’s where we live,” Mitch said from the backseat.

  “I wasn’t talking to you. In fact, I don’t want to hear another word out of your mouth, prophetic or not.”

  “I’m sorry we dragged you into this,” Caitlin said.

  “I don’t even know what this is all about,” Zak said.

  “Oh, good point.” Caitlin looked at Mitch.

  Mitch leaned back and put his hands up. “It’s all yours.”

  So Caitlin nodded, gathered her wits, and began. “It all started with a garage sale….”

  As Zakia Thuku had discovered, a deck of playing cards is a fascinating thing. It arrives in perfect order, ace of spades through the king of hearts—but shuffle the deck even slightly and that perfect order is torn asunder. The laws of probability prove that if you shuffled a deck at the very beginning of time until now, the cards would never be in the same order twice.

  And yet we do order our cards, time and time again. Into royal flushes, and full houses, and any number of desirable combinations. This is the greatest gift of life: the ability, for a brief moment in time, to defy the laws of chaos and entropy; to go all in, and win the pot in the universe’s grand game of poker.

  The events that had led to Mitch, Caitlin, and Zak’s current circumstance were an odd shuffling indeed, and as Zak listened to Caitlin’s tale, he realized that this was truly a high-stakes game.

  And he’d just been dealt four jokers and the square root of two.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Zak said. “Your friend had a garage sale and sold off all of Nikola Tesla’s potentially deadly inventions without realizing it, and then had to get them back before the Accelerati did.”

  “We did get most of them back,” Caitlin said, “but then the Accelerati took them all—and took him.”

  “And they didn’t kill him,” Zak said, still trying to wrap his mind around it, “because Magic 8 Ball’s girlfriend said they did.”

  “Exactly,” said Mitch.

  “And why are you a Magic 8 Ball again?”

  Mitch sighed. “One of the objects was some kind of a quantum truth-telling device, and I sort of absorbed its power.”

  “Uh…okay….” said Zak.

  “Oh, and let’s not forget Nick’s father,” Caitlin added.

  “Wait, his father’s Accelerati?” asked Zak.

  “No,” Mitch said, “that’s my dad.”

  “Nick’s father told us he saw Nick,” Caitlin said, “so that proves he’s still alive. But he doesn’t remember him.”

  “Oh,” said Zak. “So he’s the kid on that flyer you made. The guy with big ears.”

  “His ears aren’t that big,” Caitlin said defensively.

  “They are,” said Mitch. “That’s why he always wears that baseball cap.”

  “Can we try to stay focused here?” said Caitlin. “We still don’t know exactly where Nick is, or how to get him back.” She growled in frustration. “And we were so close to finding him.”

  “We also need to find where that algorithm leads,” Zak said.

  “And we have to be careful,” Mitch added. “The Accelerati are everywhere, and they know we’re back in the game.”

  “All they know is that we tried to find Nick and failed,” Caitlin said. “They don’t know we have the algorithm, unless your mom tells. And she won’t, will she?”

  Zak shook his head. “She won’t.”

  Three hours later, they walked into the lobby of a Washington hotel filled with HAVE YOU SEEN THESE KIDS? posters, not unlike the one Caitlin had made for Nick, but with her and Mitch’s faces on it instead.

  They were recognized by the concierge immediate
ly, and escorted to the teacher in charge.

  “Do you have any idea how worried we were?” she asked. “We had the police scouring the city for you.”

  “We did exactly what you told us,” Caitlin said, putting on her best ditz. “You told us to go to the mall, so we did.”

  The teacher threw up her arms. “Not that kind of mall. The National Mall! The park between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol Building.”

  “See?” said Mitch. “I told you we were in the wrong place.”

  “Oh,” said Caitlin to the teacher. “You mean, like, with the really tall thing, right in the middle? You should have said so.”

  “That ‘tall thing’ is the Washington Monument,” the teacher said. Then she looked over at Zak. “And who is this?”

  “Uh,” said Mitch, “this is, uh, Ace…Diamond.”

  Zak glared at him, but Caitlin went on. “We met him at the mall, y’know? And he brought us back. He lives, like, in Denver, so he’ll be on our same flight tomorrow night.”

  “I will?” Zak said. “Oh, yeah, I will.”

  Zak got his own room. Mitch and Caitlin offered to hang with him for a while and play hearts, but he refused. “Nah, I need some time alone. You two scare me.”

  So Mitch went off with the boys he was rooming with, and Caitlin went with the girls sharing her room. But before they split up, Caitlin stopped Mitch.

  “Hey,” she said, “that stuff I said when I was trying to make you mad? You know that’s not how I feel about you, right?”

  He smiled at her. “Yeah, I know. But thanks for caring enough to say it when I needed you to.” He dropped the smile and added, “Anyway, that was the old Mitch you were talking about. I like the new one a whole lot better.”

  “Well, I like them both,” Caitlin told him, and gave him a hug before she left.

  Wayne Slate found that the business with the strange boy weighed heavily on him. So did the run-in with those two kids at the Princeton copy shop—who, for an instant, had looked familiar, and then not.

  He had kept the flyer of the boy. He didn’t know why, exactly. But when he thought back to their encounter, the oddest thing about it was a brief instant of recognition of the kid—not of who the kid was, but of who he looked like. He very distinctly reminded Wayne of himself at that age.