The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber

by Michael Seese

  “Does it work anywhere?” Julian asked, his voice rising with excitement.

  “What?” Mr. Newcomber said, lifting up the welding mask he already had put on—what the smart folks call “donned”—and turning off the blowtorch he already had lit—what the smart folks call “ignited.”

  “That shocking thing. Will it work anywhere?”

  “As in, anywhere on the planet? I think so. Off the planet? That would require some testing. Not to mention a propulsion system that rocks. But it sure would be a fun challenge—”

  “Earth to Dad. So, anywhere?”

  “What? Yes, anywhere.”

  “Yes! You are so—”

  “But its range is limited. You have to be within about one hundred feet of me. Silly Man! Your dad’s not stupid, you know.”

  “I know. One hundred feet, huh? So, what happens if I run the app when I’m farther away?”

  “Nothing, I suppose. Or who knows? Maybe it’ll send you to another place. Another time. Another dimension,” he said, waving his fingers like a mystic. “A place, a time, a dimension where little boys pick up their rooms and eat their broccoli.”

  “That place doesn’t exist, Dad.”

  “Probably not. But I can hope. Or, I can invent it...”

  Julian would have laughed. But when his dad did that staring-off-into-the-distance thing, Julian knew he was performing mathematical computations, drawing diagrams in his head, and planning a trip to Home Depot.

  “Thanks, Dad. I mean it. I do. This is really great. I’m going to go try it out. Can I test the—”

  “Of course. And you can bet your bippy I’ll be there within five minutes. Just don’t run and hide. That’s dishonest and evil—what the smart folks call ‘conniving.’ And be sure to try out the other features as well. Now, where was I?” Mr. Newcomber said, his mind already disengaged from the conversation with Julian. “Oh yeah, catching a squirrel. I’ll need some sort of bait. And an electro-magnetic generator to stun him. Or her. Just a little. I imagine a fried squirrel would smell to high...”

  Julian took the eTab and went back to the house, assuming it would be at least five minutes before his dad noticed he’d left. He decided not to test the clock right away. He knew his dad would be busily focused on his obsession du jour, building a better squirrel trap. What he didn’t know, but soon would learn, was that his dad had a weird talent—what the smart folks call an “uncanny knack”—for saying something as a joke but having it come true.

  CHAPTER 4

  Julian spent several weeks testing out the various apps his dad had installed on the eTab. Among his favorites were Sounds And Smells Of The Amazon Rain Forest, Virtual Volcano Diver, and US Navy Submarine Cam. Julian suspected that last one might get his dad in real hot water, or whatever happens to misbehaving sailors these days, if the Navy ever found out about it.

  But the coolest, he decided, was one called Bother Bill. It allowed Julian to take command of the TV dish on the roof of the house across the street, and point it at...well, anywhere but the satellite circling high above the Earth in a fixed—what the smart folks call “stationary” and the really smart scientific folks call “geosynchronous”—orbit. Julian suspected his dad meant to keep that one for himself, seeing as how Mr. Newcomber always complained about Bill’s dog doing its business in their front yard. (If the windows happened to be open when Mr. Newcomber discovered one of Napoleon’s “gifts,” Julian would learn a few new choice words.)

  Otherwise, most of the apps worked pretty much as expected. The email app did indeed send and receive emails. The internet browser did indeed browse the internet. And the word processor did indeed process words.

  Indeed, everything worked normally which, when speaking of his dad’s inventions, was highly abnormal. But then one day, something extraordinary happened...

  While walking home, Julian decided to conduct a little experiment. About seven-eighths or perhaps eight-ninths of the way there—the point being, more than one hundred feet away from the house—he pulled out the eTab, unrolled it, and swiped.

  “I wonder if I’m close enough?” he said. A mischievous grin came to his face. He tapped the large clock icon, expecting one of two things to happen.

  Nothing.

  Or, he would casually walk through the door in a few minutes and find his dad frantically looking for him.

  (Actually, a third option crossed his mind just as finger met eTab. Fortunately, the house did not go KABOOM!)

  But what did happen was the last thing he would have expected. There was a sound, kind of like the sound the vacuum cleaner makes. (Of course, since his dad had built theirs, it didn’t sound like a normal vacuum cleaner.) Then came a flash of light. Not painfully bright, but bright enough to make him blink. It was mostly like a camera flash, but without the little pre-flash flash. The next thing he knew, he was not walking home, but at home, sitting at the kitchen table, with his mother across the room fixing his snack.

  “Mom?” Julian said, feeling a little off.

  His mom whirled around, eyes wide, hand on her heart.

  “Boy! You sure came out of nowhere.”

  “Mom. I feel kind of—”

  “Hungry?”

  Julian was about to say, “stretched like a rubber band, flung across the room, and slammed unceremoniously into a brick wall.” But he thought his mother might take that as a sign of an impending illness of some sort and sprint him to the doctor.

  “That too.”

  “I’ll bet. Your snack’s almost ready, Little Man.”

  The kitchen clock read 4:03.

  Julian started to think. Quickly.

  Normally, walking at a brisk pace would get him home a bit before four. Two minutes, maybe three. That meant he had probably tapped the clock icon at 3:57. And it was now 4:03, meaning...

  Somehow, he had traveled six minutes into the future!

  I need to tell Dad about this, he thought. Right away! Right now!

  At that moment, his mother put a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a s’more in front of him.

  It can wait.

  After finishing his snack, Julian went out to the workshop.

  “Dad?” he said, walking in.

  “Julian. You’re not wearing a helmet,” Mr. Newcomber said as he put down some sort of electrical-looking thing. The squirrel desperately pacing in the cage on the table breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Yeah, I must be feeling brave—what the smart folks call ‘courageous’—today. Can I ask you something? That app. The clock. How does it work?”

  “It works like a clock. No, that’s not accurate. It works like an egg timer. You hit the button, it buzzes my cell phone, and I have five minutes—plus a one-minute grace period—to touch your eTab. Didn’t we talk about this?”

  “Yeah, we did. But my question is, how does it work?”

  “An interesting question. To be completely honest, I’m not sure. I downloaded the code from some website I found. And then I made a few changes—what the smart folks call ‘modifications,’ or sometimes ‘enhancements.’ And among software developers, ‘scope creep.’ That sure is a lot of smart folks’ words.”

  “It is. Anyway, what kinds of changes?”

  “Nothing major. The biggest one I had to come up with was figuring out some way to have it ring my cell phone, and then wait five plus one minutes. I thought about that one for a long time.”

  “And by ‘long time’ you mean…”

  “Seven minutes. Maybe eight. And then I hit upon an igneous solu—make that ingenious—solution. Though, considering what my creations often do, ‘igneous’ isn’t a bad alternative.”

  At least he realizes it, Julian thought.

  “Finally, what I decided made the most sense would be to set up a logical feedback loop, so everything else could keep running without the clock app interfering.”

  “Would that thing you mentioned—the logical feedback loop—do anything else?”

  “It shouldn’t. Why do
you ask?”

  “I don’t know. A feedback loop sounds like something from a science fiction movie. You know, warping space and time.

  “Well, then, let me think. Though I much prefer the sound of ‘ruminate,’ which I not to be confused with what cows, smart or otherwise, do when they—”

  “Dad.”

  “OK, thinking now.”

  Julian could tell by the look on his dad’s face that he really was thinking carefully about the question.

  “No,” Mr. Newcomber finally said.

  “No? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure there is no way it could—” Julian stopped himself before saying “somehow either compress time and/or launch me six minutes into the future.”

  “Could what?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. Thanks, Dad.”

  Julian knew his dad was smart. Very smart. But he also knew something really out of the ordinary had happened on his walk home today.

  He went back into the house and told his mom he would be in his room, doing his homework, studying for a big test. He ran upstairs, closed and locked the door, sat down on his bed, and looked at the eTab.

  Over the course of the past few weeks he had tried every other app on the eTab, and they all seemed to work normally. (That statement was not one hundred percent true; there was one app called ePie In The Face that just begged to be left alone.)

  Julian weighed his options. Whenever his dad faced a challenge, he would roll up his sleeves and dive right in, which is why the hair on his forearms and his eyebrows was often singed. His mother, on the other hand, tended to approach things more cautiously, though the phrase she preferred was “with a least a minimum sense of sanity, Andrew.”

  Julian teeter-tottered between the two, waving his finger, back and forth and back and forth, and around and around and around, over the icon. He wanted to—and at the same time didn’t want to—touch it.

  He made up his mind.

  Julian, like his dad, enjoyed experimenting—what his mom called “risking life and limb and house on some cockamamie whim.” But in order to experiment, one needs a plan. Julian grabbed a pen, a pad of paper, and a thinking cap. He pondered a moment, then wrote:

  STEP 1: TRY IT AGAIN.

  (As he grew older and improved his would-be mad scientist skills, Julian would learn to add to—what the smart folks call “flesh out”—his plans.)

  Recalling that his previous temporal travel had left him feeling woozy, weird, and generally out of whack, he sat down at his desk so he wouldn’t have as far to fall.

  He swiveled the alarm clock on his nightstand so he could see the face, a strange term, he always thought, since digital clocks don’t have faces like those old-fashioned ones his parents preferred. Of course, one of the reasons they preferred them was that his sister Olivia expressed her “artistic angst,” to use his mom’s words (which Julian vaguely understood, but not really), by painting funny faces on them.

  4:59.

  One minute until 5:00.

  Julian decided it was karma, or kismet, or one of those other terms meaning the same thing as fate, that he now stood (or sat, actually) on the verge of a new hour.

  He waited, his finger at the ready, for the demise of the 4:00 hour and the ascension of its successor, managing to work three vocabulary words into a single thought. He closed his eyes, waited through a moment of eternity, then opened them.

  4:59.

  Close. Wait. Open.

  4:59.

  Repeat.

  4:59.

  4:59.

  Julian wished he had an old-fashioned clock, since most of those antique timepieces had second hands on them.

  4:59.

  4:59.

  4:59.

  5:00.

  5:00.

  5:00.

  Oops.

  Lulled into lethargy by the clock’s stubborn refusal to let go of the previous hour, he lost a few precious seconds that otherwise could have been devoted to his experiment/cockamamie whim.

  “OK, this is it,” he said.

  Julian stationed his finger directly over the icon of mystery, closed his eyes, and tapped. The vacuum cleaner sound filled the room, and the flash imprinted itself on his retina even behind closed eyelids.

  Silence settled around him.

  “When I open my eyes,” he said to reassure himself, “it will be either 5:00 or 5:06.” Though in the back of his mind a little voice said, Or next year. You know your dad. He breathed out and prepared to learn once and for all whether the weird episode this afternoon was an accident or a permanent and scary-fascinating feature of the eTab

  “OK. I’m going to open my eyes now. Yup. Going to open them. Opening them in three…two…”

  KnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnock.

  Julian wheeled around.

  “Yes?”

  “Julian?” came his dad’s not exactly panicked, though clearly urgent, voice.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “I’m doing homework.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. That kind of dedicated—what the smart folks call ‘industrious’—attitude will take you far in life. But may I interrupt you a minute? I’d like to come in before my cell phone zaps me. I haven’t, as of yet, finished my squirrel testing.”

  It dawned on Julian that in his eagerness to earn his Boy Scout time altering merit badge, he had lost sight of the true purpose of the Dad Five-Minute Warning app. To call his dad and give him a really good reason—what the smart folks call “incentive”—to come running.

  “Yeah, Dad. Sure,” he said, hustling over and unlocking the door.

  Mr. Newcomber zipped in, quickly scanned the room for the instrument of his discomfort (a far cry from an “instrument of destruction,” but still…) then headed straight toward the eTab.

  “Whew!” he said, deactivating the jolt-to-be.

  “Sorry about that, Dad.”

  “No worries. So, what do you want?”

  “Want?”

  “You’re supposed to use the app to get me when you need something. To prevent me from saying ‘Give me five more minutes,’ like I often do, and then taking a day or two to get back to—Didn’t we talk about this as well?”

  “We did.”

  “So?”

  “So?”

  “So, what do you need, Son?”

  “Oh. Nothing. Sorry. False alarm. I must have hit it accidentally. My bad. I’ll try to be more careful.”

  “Oh. No worries. OK. Whew. Well, see you at dinner.”

  Julian’s dad shuffled out of the room, in all likelihood happy to know the Dad Five-Minute Warning app worked, and at the same time, happier to know he didn’t have to find out exactly how well.

  Julian grabbed the pen again.

  STEP 2: TRY IT AGAIN, SOMEWHERE AT LEAST 100 FEET FROM THE HOUSE.

  At precisely 5:20, Julian sat strategically in a carrel in a corner of the Whispering Falls Public Library. Since it was just before dinnertime in Whispering Falls (as well as most of the eastern standard time zone) the place was largely deserted. And quiet. At least it would be, until he implemented Step 2 and unleashed the vacuum cleaner/jet engine sound on the unsuspecting patrons, staff, and neighbors, that is.

  The face of the big round library clock stared back at him. The temperamental tablet lay on the table before him. Julian wanted to wait, but he couldn’t. He needed to be done by 5:55 so he could hurry home in time for his dinner. And given the uncertainty of the whole time-shifting enterprise, a technical oopsie—what the smart folks call a “glitch”—could whisk him any number of minutes or weeks beyond 5:55. And if that happened, he would be late and his mom almost certainly would launch her Shriek Like A Banshee app, which wasn’t really an app, but somehow just part of her “operating system,” and which was loud enough to be heard over the fire truck sirens at the Whispering Falls Memorial Day parade.

  Julian fixed his focus on the thin black metal strip
of the clock’s second hand as it began the painfully slow journey through the latter half of the minute. When it pointed straight up, Julian didn’t hesitate. He tapped the clock app. As he expected, loud sound, bright flash. Luckily, no librarian came rushing over to ssshhhh him for it. When the 4th of July celebration in his eyes concluded (he made a mental note to add another step: wear sunglasses) the library clock confirmed his suspicions.

  5:26.

  So now what do I do? he wondered.

  In theory, he could have repeated the experiment to see if the world would fast-forward from 5:26 to 5:32, which seemed to be the most logical outcome. But Julian decided the exercise was somewhat pointless. What if the next time jump moved life ahead five minutes? Or seven minutes? What would be the significance? None, really. Moving through time was moving through time. Unless...

  Julian drummed his fingers on the worn laminate tabletop. What if there were some way to intentionally alter the time jump? To make it longer? He drummed his fingers some more.

  He studied the clock app icon. The hands appeared to be fixed, mere multicolored pixels, just like the rest of the icon. He checked the app’s settings. But other than a “Help” button which, when pressed played a recorded message from his dad saying, “Time? Time to brush your teeth! Gotcha!” there was nothing.

  Then came a flash of inspiration.

  Both the library clock and the eTab clock showed 5:29. Julian opened the settings again, set the device’s time ahead ten minutes, and exited out to the main screen. The eTab now showed 5:40. The wall clock read 5:30. Without hesitation he tapped and waited through the customary fireworks—what the smart folks call “pyrotechnics.” Once things quieted down, he peeked with one wary eye. The wall clock now showed 5:46! Six minutes ahead of the time he told his eTab it was, and sixteen minutes ahead of the time it had truly been when he started

  That, he classified as noteworthy.

  It would also prove life-altering, though Julian could not know it at the time.

  STEP 3: GO BACK IN TIME.

  His next temporal excursion, Julian decided, should be to go back in time. But to when...

  He drummed his fingers a final time.

  I enjoyed today’s after-school snack. I could go back to the walk home.