Tape Escape

by Cameron Macintosh

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  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Macintosh, Cameron. | Atze, Dave, illustrator.

  Title: Tape escape / Cameron Macintosh, illustrated by Dave Atze. Description: New York : West 44, 2020. | Series: Max Booth: future sleuth Identifiers: ISBN 9781538384626 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781538384619 (library bound) | ISBN 9781538384633 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories. | Street children—Juvenile fiction. | Audiocassettes—Juvenile fiction. | Rock music--Juvenile fiction. | Museums-Juvenile fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.M335 Ta 2020 | DDC [F]--dc23

  Published in 2020 by Enslow Publishing LLC 101 West 23rd Street, Suite #240 New York, NY 10011

  Copyright © 2020 Cameron Macintosh. Original edition published in 2017 by Big Sky Publishing.

  Cover design and Illustrations: Dave Atze Typesetting: Think Productions

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.

  Printed in the United States of America

  CPSIA compliance information: Batch #CS19W44: For further information contact Enslow Publishing LLC, New York, New York at 1-800-542-2595.

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Prehistoric Plastic

  Chapter 2 A Nook Full of Books

  Chapter 3 A Snowie Storeroom

  Chapter 4 A Visit to the Doctor…

  Chapter 5 Sky-High Thief Hunt

  Chapter 6 Best Nose in the Business

  Chapter 7 No-good Newsflash

  Chapter 8 Drimble and the Doctor

  Chapter 9 A Snowie Good Time

  CHAPTER 1

  Prehistoric Plastic

  “Stay still, Oscar!” I yelp. “How can I reboot your snoot if you won’t stop wriggling?”

  It’s a perfect morning for another 20th century treasure hunt, but here I am re-tuning Oscar’s sniffer — again! I can think of a billion better things I’d rather be doing, but I need Oscar in full working order, fast. If Oscar’s out of action we won’t be much use to Jessie, and if we’re no use to Jessie, we’re really not much use to anyone.

  I wouldn’t have to do this if Oscar had a bit more self-control ... but he’s a complete ding-bot when it comes to robo-rats. This morning he saw one under an old desk and chased it frantically across the storeroom. He’d almost caught it when it darted suddenly under a packing case. Oscar couldn’t slow down in time to stop . and that’s why I’m presently trying to un-crumple the gaping hole where the left side of his nose is meant to be. Just another tidy-up job for my slightly neurotic metallic pet!

  At least his ears are still in decent shape ... sort of! They pop up like hot toast when Jessie knocks on our box and asks if anyone’s home.

  “Yes, we are,” I say with anticipation. “How can we help our favorite storeroom supervisor?”

  Jessie winks and hands me a plastic zip-bag with a small rectangular object inside it. “I’m pretty sure you’ll be as stumped as I am this time,” she says with a cheeky grin.

  Even though she’s twice my age, Jessie’s my best friend. Well, my best human friend. Since January last year, when Oscar and I escaped the Skyburb 7 Home for Unclaimed Urchins, she’s let us live in a cozy packing box in the museum storeroom. Jessie’s been the storeroom supervisor since 2422 - nearly two years now. She loves crazy-old stuff as much as I do, especially stuff from the 21st century - the weirdest century of all! Back then, people used to travel on the ground - on wheels! They even used to keep real animals for pets -imagine all the stinky messes they had to clean up!

  I hold Jessie’s zip-bag under my lamp and give it a closer look. The item inside looks like a flattened robo-rat.

  “You’re right,” I say, “I’ve got absolutely no idea what you’ve found this time!”

  The item’s about 10 centimeters long, 6 centimeters wide, and 1 centimeter deep, and it seems to be made of some kind of prehistoric plastic. It has two holes right through the middle of it, and an open space at the bottom.

  I show it to Oscar. He tries to sniff it but his sense of smell isn’t so great at the moment, for obvious reasons!

  “I’m stumped,” I say to Jessie and Oscar. “What use could anyone have had for such a tiny, flat chunk of plastic?”

  “It looks a bit like an under-pillow dream projector from the 2040s,” says Jessie, “but I think it’s a bit big.”

  “I think it might be even older than that,” I say thoughtfully. “It reminds me of a home-cooling control panel from the 1990s.”

  “But check out that tapey bit at the bottom. It looks a bit fragile for a hand-touch control panel.” Jessie has a point. There’s a thin, brown line of tape just inside the open space on the bottom edge. It does look kind of delicate.

  Just then, I notice the thump, thump, thump of Oscar’s tail against my right ankle. I look down and see his big electronic eyes staring up at mine. I think he’s trying to tell me something!

  “What is it, Oscar?”

  Oscar’s ears slide upward. The camera lens pops out of his right ear, and the flash unit fires up in his left.

  “Good thinking, Oscar.” I give him a pat and hold the strange object in front of his face. His left ear lights it up with a strong, white beam of light, and his right ear starts humming. A few seconds later, a panel slides open on his back and sends another three beams of light into the air. They draw together and focus a meter above him, and suddenly we’re all looking at a 3D image of the mystery object.

  “Nice work, pup,” I say. “Feed it into the Splinternet and see what comes up!”

  Oscar makes a funny whirring noise, and a green square pops up in the air above him. We all stand there expectantly, waiting for his projector to send up a search result. In the middle of the square, we can see the search icon - a pair of angry, beady eyes, darting from side to side.

  “Hurry up!” I yell loudly at the air. “We haven’t got all millennium!”

  Oscar’s shiny tail drops between his legs and his head droops.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t yelling at you, Oscar,” I reassure him. “It looks like we’ve given the Splinternet a bigger challenge than it can handle.”

  “I think you’re right,” says Jessie. “This object must have been made before the Great Solar Flare of 2037 wiped out the old Internet.”

  Suddenly the green square above Oscar’s back changes form. It takes the shape of a frowning monkey. That’s the Splinternet’s way of telling us it’s a pre-2037 item it can’t possibly recognize.

  “Grrreat!” I groan. “If it’s older than 2037, the only possible record that it ever existed would be on paper ... in a book!”

  The problem with that is, paper hasn’t been produced since 2121. That means books are now pretty hard to come by. The only book I ever owned was an old Spider-Man comic my mom gave me when I was five. It had been in the family for over 300 years. But then my parents went missing and I had to move to the Skyburb 7 Home for Unclaimed Urchins. The manager of the Home promised to look after it for me, but I never saw it again. That’s just one of the reasons I’ll never go back there ... unless of course they catch me and drag me back.

  “Don’t give up just yet,” says Jessie. “The museum still has a book and magazine collection. Maybe if we ask nicely they’ll let us spend some time in there.”

  “The last time I nicely asked the library staff to let me in, they told me to come back in ten years, with a beard,” I point out, making it clear the library staff were definitely not my favorite people.

  “Well, how about I ask this time?” laughs Jessie. “
I can’t grow a very good beard, but I’m a museum staff member. And I’m eleven years older than you - that might help too!”

  “You old people have all the fun,” I say with a wink, and Jessie pretends to shoot laser beams at me with her finger.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I’m going back to the workshop to call the library staff. And you’d better do some serious work on Oscar’s sniffer. I’m pretty sure that hole can’t be good for him!”

  “Probably not,” I say. “And it makes him look like a squished cola can!”

  Oscar’s face turns a bright shade of red. That’s quite an achievement for a dog made of metal! “Just joking, Oscar!”

  Before I’ve made any progress on his nose, Jessie’s back with a face like a raincloud. “We’ve hit a zap-wall already,” she groans. “They’re so worried about paper preservation, they won’t even let me into the library. You have to have a PaperHandling License to get through the door.”

  “Gee, I didn’t realize it was such a big deal to touch paper.”

  “Well it’s all at least 300 years old!” says Jessie.

  “Almost as old as you!” I joke.

  “Very funny, Max. But seriously, those books can go to dust in your hand if you’re not careful.”

  By now, Oscar’s had enough of the whole subject and is looking at his cushion. He uses his built-in printing dock to print me a photo of the mystery thing, and curls up on his cushion with a sigh. As I shove the photo in my pocket, Jessie shrugs her shoulders and tells me she’s got plenty of other interesting objects for me to investigate. She says we may as well forget about this one for now.

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” I say reluctantly. “It was probably just an old toilet flusher or something.”

  “I’d better get back to work,” says Jessie. “The museum needs me to polish up a pile of iron skirts for a 22nd-century fashion show next month.”

  “You’ll look lovely in those,” I laugh. “Anyway, I’d better get back to fixing this accident-prone animal’s nose!”

  Jessie takes the strange plastic thing back to her workshop while Oscar sits back in front of me, looking slightly offended again. He points his nose into the air and powers himself down.

  It takes me more than an hour to get his nose back to its proper shape. It’s definitely easier fixing him when he can’t squirm like a cyber-slug, but right now beagle-bot repairs are the last thing on my mind. I can’t get Jessie’s mystery object out of my head. I just can’t let it go like that.

  The last time I gave up on one of her finds, the museum put it out for recycling and a kid from Skyburb 4 sold it to a collector for $8,000! That was a clunky metal disc called a CD - a music storage product, last used back in 2026.

  I power Oscar back on and look him in the eye. “We’re not letting this one slip through our fingers,” I say to him with a steely look. “I’ve got a feeling this is a special one.”

  Oscar nods his head slowly up and down. Maybe his robo-feelings sensed it too.

  “We’re definitely going to find out what that thing is,” I say convincingly, “even if it means trouble ... again!”

  CHAPTER 2

  A Nook Full of Books

  Two hours later, we’re at the entrance to the museum’s library building, over on Skyburb 9. Where we come from - Skyburb 6 - there are people everywhere. Skyburb 9 doesn’t feel so friendly. It’s a jungle of warehouses and rusty factories. It’s windy and dusty and smells like a gas leak. I can’t see any other people around ... except, of course, for the security guard in the glass booth beside the entrance to the library building. He doesn’t look too friendly, so I hide in an alleyway and send Oscar ahead to check him out.

  As Oscar trots into his line of sight, the guard’s eyebrows pull together into an angry V-shape. “Hey!” he barks at Oscar. “This area’s off-limits to electro-pets. Move along, mutt.”

  Oscar lifts his leg and squirts a big dollop of battery oil onto a lamppost. Then he nods, turns around, and comes back to me with a crooked smile on his snout.

  “This isn’t looking good,” I whisper through gritted teeth. “There’s only one entrance, and that meat head’s our only chance of getting through it.” Oscar shakes his head impatiently, as if to say “There’s something you’re forgetting.” And then he flips up one of his side panels and reveals the one beagle-bot feature I still haven’t used in the three years I’ve had him — his built-in 3D printer. It’s designed to make a perfect plastic copy of anything Oscar can photograph.

  “That’s great, Oscar,” I say edgily, “but look at that security set-up. We’ll need more than a 3D printer to get past all of that.”

  The door seems to be operated by a laser light tongue-print scanner. The only way we can possibly get it open is to convince the guard to stick his tongue out in front of the scanner. Somehow though, looking at our angry security man’s face, I don’t think that’s going to happen, even if I manage to grow a beard in the next five minutes ...

  Down on the ground I hear Oscar sighing loudly at the slowness of my mind. Before I know what’s happening, he’s barking and sprinting straight toward the guard.

  “No, Oscar!” I yell.

  The guard’s face was pale pink before he saw Oscar running toward him. Now, it’s whiter than a bucket of crushed ice. “Stop right there, dog!” he shouts.

  Oscar pays no attention. He runs toward him, even faster, barking at the top of his electronic lungs. And then, just when he reaches the security booth, he bounces up in front of the surprised guard’s face. It’s not in his programming to do anything nasty. Instead, he makes his left ear flash like lightning and does a backward somersault before he hits the ground. As the guard blinks and shakes his head, Oscar leaps up and grabs his wallet from the desk at the back of the booth. Then, he runs like crazy back toward me.

  Before he crashes into me, he swerves left and drops a strange piece of yellow plastic on the ground. By then, the guard’s running after him with big, clomping steps. They both fly past me and vanish around the nearest corner.

  As the sound of their footsteps fades away, I step out of the alleyway and take a closer look at the yellow plastic lump on the ground. For a moment I think Oscar’s had a little accident, but then I remember - electro-pets don’t need to do that! I pick up the lump and take a close look.

  Oscar ... I really need to give you more credit sometimes!

  The lump seems to be a 3D print of a grown man’s tongue. It’s kind of yuck to look at - and to hold - but that doesn’t matter to me one bit at the moment. I run straight over to the doorway and wave it in front of the tongue-print scanner. Right away, I hear an electronic beep ... and then a rumble as the glass door at the front slides upward. I run in and wave the tongue in front of the next sensor. The second door, a heavy one made of metal, slides upward too.

  I look ahead of me, and gulp. It’s colossal - a huge warehouse full of shelves that rise all the way to a ceiling that looks twice as high as the roof did from the street. The shelves are squished full of books, magazines, and documents, all wrapped in see-through plastic. They trail off toward a back wall I can barely even see from here.

  I run in and look at the nearest shelf. Through their plastic covers, I can read the book titles: A Guide to 22nd Century Aqua-botics, Grover’s Concise Atlas of Jupiter — 2102, and an Archie comic magazine from 1955. They’re in no order at all, or none that I can make any sense of. The only marking I can see is a small number along the spine of each book. I need to find some sort of catalogue, and fast too. Who knows how long Oscar can keep that guard on the run out there!

  I run back toward the entrance and see a glowing screen on the left side of the doorway. Just below the screen there’s a scanner with a laser grid beaming out in front of it. I reach into my pocket, grab Oscar’s photo of the mystery object, and wave it through the criss-crossing laser beams of the scanner.

  The catalogue doesn’t seem to have seen one of these things for a while either. I wait five, then ten seco
nds. And then ...

  ... Bazingo!

  The catalogue screen fills with words and numbers:

  Audio cassette tape. 1984.

  See book 3635662295b.

  None of that means a thing to me ... except for the book number. I say it aloud until it sticks in my head, and run for the shelves. Fortunately, it looks like the books are arranged in number order, with aisle names matching the first two digits of each book number. Aisle 36 is only a twenty-second run from the catalogue screen. When I get there, I nearly faint when I see how long the aisle really is - 200 meters at least!

  I run like crazy until I get to section 356. Then I look upward. I can just read the numbers on the shelf - section 363566 seems to be about 40 meters above my head. I look around for a ladder, or a chair, or anything I can use to get closer to it. There’s nothing. That’s bad enough, but then things get even messier. Somewhere in the distance I hear electronic bleeps and the screech of squeaky brakes. That can only mean one thing - security-bots on the prowl! There’s not a second to waste.