The Cube

by Melissa Faye

  I could have sent Leslie Leslie back immediately. She was a traveler, after all, and I was hungry to rid our city of them. Timelines. Money. Advanced technology. All that stuff I worried about.

  Except Leslie Leslie was never a threat. There was no evidence that Leslie Leslie was benefiting from being in our time. She was happy to stay here and didn’t talk to many people. She couldn’t earn much money at the store, and had little interest in banks and stocks.

  Leslie Leslie easily won me over with her warm laugh and stubborn attitude. It was like she had met me before: she welcomed me into her life with open arms. Her chronogram streaks were dull and faded, as if she had been in my Present for many years, and she offered to help me with my work.

  It didn’t take long for Ridge to fall for her as well. Now she was our best resource.

  “June! I thought you were the man who owns the restaurant across the street.” I looked out the window. It was an upscale Italian restaurant. “He wants me to clean up the signs on my windows, but I told him, you can just go back to your little diner right now and leave my windows to me.”

  Leslie Leslie’s windows were covered with flyers for events that had long since passed. I smirked at the thought of her shaking her cane at a man in a business suit.

  “So what do you have for me, Junie?” She held out her hands, opening and closing them shut like a little kid awaiting her birthday presents. Still smirking, I handed her the beetle trapped in its cage.

  “Oooh!” Leslie Leslie loved my Cage of Light invention, though I could barely call it my own. A traveler left a laser cage weapon behind and it only took me a few months to add the cage capability to my own Some Gun. I didn’t understand more than a third of the science involved. Still, it was impossible to break through without advanced technology and was a fitting tool for subduing a traveler temporarily.

  Leslie Leslie turned the caged beetle over in her hands.

  “I got it from a traveler. He’s a teleporter, so I don’t know how I’ll catch up with him. And I don’t want to find him until I know what the bug does.”

  Leslie Leslie nodded and pulled off her glasses to peer closely at the beetle.

  “He doesn’t show up on the J-DAR,” I added, “which doesn’t make sense. The J-DAR always picks up living creatures.”

  “Well then there’s your answer, Junie!” Leslie Leslie announced triumphantly. “It’s not alive!”

  I squinted my eyes at the bug who clicked his legs defiantly.

  It definitely looks alive.

  “Junie! This bug must be mechanical. It’s a robot!” She passed it my way then pulled out a large cardboard box. She gestured for me to set the beetle down inside.

  I removed the Cage of Light, and we watched the beetle make a run for the edge of the box. With surprising dexterity, Leslie Leslie grabbed it, nimbly avoiding his legs and claws, and held it out to me.

  “See?” she said. She turned it upside down in her hands, avoiding the legs. “Touch it.”

  I felt the beetle’s underside. “What am I looking for? It looks like a bug and it feels like a bug.”

  “Ahhh, ok,” Leslie Leslie said mindlessly. She ran her finger along the beetle’s belly and nodded when she found something. She took my finger and placed it on the right spot.

  Sure enough, the beetle was mechanical. It had a tiny square door at its base; we could probably open it up and examine its mechanical insides. I scraped at the door with my fingernails but couldn’t get it to open. Leslie Leslie handed me the beetle and scrounged around along a nearby shelf until she found what she was looking for.

  “Aha!” she cried. She hobbled back over on her cane and held up a miniature flathead screwdriver. She pushed it against the outline of the door until it sprung open. We leaned over it and squinted. Leslie Leslie pushed me back when I got too close to a still active leg.

  “It has a port!” I cried. “I’ve never seen one like that though.” It was shaped like a pentagon, with three flat sides and a pointed roof. Sort of like a house. Nothing else was visible.

  “Hmmmm.” Leslie Leslie disappeared into the back of the store again. That was where she kept the technology she didn’t want in the hands of someone from my Present. Luckily, she often shared it with me.

  “Junie!” she called from the back. “Can you read a CDL port?”

  “No idea what that is, Leslie Leslie!” I called back.

  “Junie! What about a C3-9 port?”

  “Nope!”

  Leslie Leslie returned with two long cables.

  “Take these. The port in the beetle is ISMI. I’ll be darned if I know what any of those letters stand for anymore. But when you figure out how to use CDL or C3-9, you’ll have the wires to hack into that beetle!”

  I leaned over the counter with my head in my hands.

  “Thank you, Leslie Leslie, but I can’t exactly wait for the right tech to fall into my hands. I need to figure this out right now. We kind of...lost one.”

  Leslie Leslie threw her head back and laughed. For someone so short, she had a deep laugh that echoed around the corners of the store.

  “Junie, you will be fine,” she assured me. “Any mechanical item that acts like this runs on basic programming. This little bug gives off an electronic trace.” I raised my eyebrows. “I suppose ‘basic’ isn’t the right word. But you’ve hacked into more advanced technology in the past.”

  “You think I can get in without the cord?”

  “Of course! Take the cords with you though. Just in case. You never know when you’ll find a C3-9 outlet.”

  I returned the bug to its cage and shoved the cords into my bag. The bell on the door was still jingling as I pulled out into the bike lane and headed towards my dorm. It wasn’t roommate bonding time yet, but at least I could say hello while working some technological wizardry.

  Chapter 6

  I pedaled as fast as I could to the dorms. The air was cooler now, and I was relieved to have a clear next step. If the traveler had three robotic beetles, I was certain they were related somehow. Maybe I could use this one to track the missing one.

  The A/C unit in the suite was turned up as high as it could go, and I welcomed the cold as I tucked my bike to the side of the main room. Honey sat on the couch texting on her phone.

  “Where have you been?” she exclaimed, tossing her phone aside as it kept buzzing. “You missed it! It was insane! How do those television executives allow such garbage to be on the air. Though I guess if they said no, then we wouldn’t have been able to see it. It was so great, June, I –“

  I only met Honey a week before, but it didn’t take more than a day for us to become best friends. That’s what she said, at least, and I liked the sound of it. I never had a best friend before. So I felt like a jerk walking right past her to our room.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I called back to her. “I know I missed it! Just gotta do something!”

  I pulled out my laptop. It was more advanced than anything else I had made or upgraded. It ran faster than computers would for at least fifty years and could process loads of information in seconds. I closed and locked the door to our bedroom, calling out more apologies to Honey.

  Leslie Leslie always knew what she was talking about. A robot like this could be hacked. If I could get into its programming, I could track down the missing bug. I flipped my laptop open and began typing away.

  The beetle was giving off some sort of signal into the air, and a program I wrote years ago plucked it out of space and threw it on my screen. There weren’t even any security programs on the beetle to keep someone from looking at its system. Travelers always underestimated us.

  The beetle’s code was written in a language I’d never seen before. No surprise. Computer programming languages shifted in popularity all the time. Luckily, most languages were based on one of a few logical patterns. I stared at the code, imagining the letters and numbers shifting around in space. At least the traveler wasn’t from a time beyond our current alph
anumerical system.

  It was another one of my secrets. Programming came naturally to me, like reading a book. So did circuitry, robotics, mechanics, and most types of engineering. The travelers’ technology might seem daunting every at first, but once I pulled it apart, I figured it out fast. Ridge always wanted an explanation, but I had none. Like with my shimmering chronogram traces, I didn’t know why I was the way I was. I read technology like drivers read a traffic light.

  After only a few moments, the program mechanism fell into place in my mind. I couldn’t understand all of the code, but I found the spot where location data was stored. Travelers had the ability to track locations over both time and space without use of global satellites, and I hadn’t cracked that yet. Still, I could see how the beetle’s location was determined and how it linked to the other two beetles. I also suspected the traveler could, with a little effort, track one of the beetles down with a separate program. Though it seemed like he wasn’t carrying anything besides the box.

  The last part took a bit more time, but when I was done, I had a program that read and spit out all three beetles’ locations. I returned the beetle to the Cage and transferred the program to my tablet. By the time I finished, I realized someone was knocking on the door.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry!” I stepped out into the main room and immediately walked into something. Someone, it turned out. I stopped in my tracks, putting my hands out to keep my balance. I reached a hand into my messenger bag to make sure everything was in place before looking up at the person I had crashed into.

  He was tall. Over a foot taller than me. He had dark hair and blue eyes, with wide shoulders and a square jaw. I felt my face flush when he looked at me. I did not have time for this, but I couldn’t move.

  “June?” he asked.

  How does he know my name?

  He laughed at my blank stare. “June, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Harrison. I’m a sophomore. I live one floor up.” He pointed to the ceiling, towards his dorm room I figured, then reached out his hand to shake. I took a few extra seconds to respond. His handshake was firm, and I noticed how slim but muscular his arms were. He was built a little like the traveler I saw a few hours ago, only without the tattoos. And without a cube with attack beetles. And all the other weird stuff.

  Harrison’s face lit up with his smile. My nervousness amused him, apparently. I realized my mouth gaped open and quickly closed it. Honey looked over from the couch and snickered before returning to her phone.

  “Yes, I’m June, yes,” I stammered. “Hello. Hi.”

  “Are you a freshman? You look kinda young.”

  “Yes, well, yes.” Most of the freshmen were eighteen or nineteen, but I was only seventeen. “I skipped a grade.”

  “Brainiac?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Harrison held up a large brown envelope. I stared at it, confused.

  “I got this. It’s yours, isn’t it? They must have gotten the floor number wrong.”

  He handed over the envelope. It read JUNE MOORE across the front. I took it in my hands and flipped it over. It was sealed shut.

  “Who sent it?” I asked. Harrison shrugged. “It has no postage on it, so it’s from someone here, right? Did someone deliver it to you in person?”

  “Nope. It was in our mailbox.”

  “Someone sent you a message, June?” Honey teased. “You have an admirer!”

  “Maybe,” Harrison said. “Or someone dark and mysterious has a message for you.”

  Dark and mysterious sounds about right. I needed to get back on track.

  “I gotta go!” I cried out louder than I needed to. I backed into our room and threw the envelope on my bed. “Sorry! Thank you, I mean.”

  Harrison chuckled. “You’re going out now? It’s a little late, isn’t it?”

  “Lacey’s gonna kill you if you miss your class tomorrow morning,” Honey added from the couch. “She won’t stop talking about it.”

  “You seem like someone who wouldn’t go out this late without good reason,” Harrison announced. “I will allow it.”

  “I don’t need anyone’s permission – I mean, great. I have to go.” I pushed past him, pulling my bike from the wall behind where he stood and accidentally running over his foot. He darted out of my way. I glanced at my watch as I hurried down the stairs. It was much later than I expected and I had a ways to go before this traveler was out of here.

  Outside, I took a few deep breaths and tried to forget about the tall, dark, and handsome stranger in my suite. I didn’t date much in high school because of the time-consuming task, no pun intended, that was always at hand. I suspected college would be the same with or without a color-coded calendar. I didn’t have time for boys like Harrison with their blue eyes and flirtatious teasing.

  I pulled out Ridge’s Map and my tablet. The traveler was headed west out of the park. His location flag hopped around, like he was teleporting all over in hopes of landing on the beetles. As I watched, a pattern emerged. I looked on the tablet. I had one beetle, a second was with Ridge, and the traveler was jumping in triangles getting closer and closer to the bug. I could only beat a teleporter if I knew the location and he didn’t. I leaned against the dorm wall and swiped through my tablet to the program I created to track the beetles.

  “Ok, strange robot bug, we’re putting your brother in witness protection,” I whispered to my bag. I made a few adjustments to the beetles’ programming, shifting its location coding. If I did it right, and I usually did, the beetles would always appear to be a block away from where they actually were. One bug to go, and Mr. Greasy Hair could go home. As long as I found the bug first.

  Chapter 7

  More biking. More taxicabs cutting me off. I was still in need of a shower, and now my legs were on fire. I knew a day would come when I got my hands on some teleportation technology; I just hoped it would come sooner rather than later.

  I checked Ridge’s Map at the next intersection. The traveler was near the bug, but one block east. Not too far from Ridge’s place, but not so close that I was nervous. I smiled as the light changed.

  Next intersection. I checked the map again. The traveler was heading away from the third beetle, maybe trying to find one of the other two. I peddled furiously. If I could just get to the third beetle, grab it, and meet the traveler at one of the spots where he thought he’d find one, I could send him back.

  I passed the traveler, who was still a few blocks north of me but heading in the wrong direction. I held the map open in one hand and saw him turn towards me. That didn’t make much sense.

  Unless he isn’t tracking the beetles anymore. He’s tracking me.

  I texted Ridge. Almost caught up with #3. Traveler on my tail. Is the last beetle safe?

  No reply. I shoved the phone back into my pocket.

  I wasn’t too far from Ridge’s apartment by the time I caught up with the beetle. Maybe he missed his nice, cozy cube...or maybe he was a robot beetle and didn’t think too much on his own. Either way, he hadn’t made a break for New Jersey yet. I hopped off the bike and walked down the dark, quiet street until I landed in the right spot.

  I stood in front of the building in which that little creeper was hiding. Right next to a bodega on the corner I found the door to the apartment building held open with a brick. I kicked aside the brick and let the door close behind me. Anything to buy me time before the traveler caught up with me.

  I snuck up the first flight of stairs, then I zoomed into my location program to get a better view. Not the second floor. The third. The lights were off, and there were no windows to shed any light in from the street lights. I could barely see. I switched on my phone’s flashlight app and held it in one hand while consulting the tablet with my other.

  I wasn’t sure what sort of habits an escaped robotic beetle would follow, but I figured insects liked dark spaces. I followed along the edge of the floors with my flashlight, past layers of dust and grime. I almost
grabbed a cockroach until I saw what it was and pulled my hand away.

  Disgusting.

  I hated cockroaches.

  I heard a little scurrying noise ahead to my left and hurried towards it. I knelt down, listening hard and swinging my phone back and forth to try to catch robot beetle in action. My heart skipped a beat as I heard a clamor downstairs – the traveler had smashed through the locked door somehow.

  “You there, little girl?”

  Something snuck right past my line of vision and with a gasp, I caught sight of the beetle. I flew into action. I scrambled towards him, picked him up with one hand, pulled out my Some Gun, and trapped the final beetle in a Cage of Light. I didn’t notice the traveler was already up the stairs and standing behind me. They were always faster than I expected.

  “You have something that belongs to me, girl,” the traveler said. I turned towards him and with a triumphant look, held the Cage up for him to see.

  “You’re going to have some trouble getting him out of here, I’m afraid.” Not a single traveler had ever gotten through the bars of my Cages. The man leaned forward to snatch it and I leapt backwards out of his reach.

  It was another stand-off, only now I was more tired and much angrier about all the wasted time I was putting into this. The man stared at me from ten feet away. Neither of us moved. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket again. I was excited to tell Ridge the good news – it would be even better to brag about my victory in front of the soon-to-be-vanquished visitor. Without taking my eyes off the traveler or moving the beetle in his Cage, I pulled out my phone and brought it to my ear.

  “June? Can you hear me?”

  It was Ridge, but he didn’t sound like himself. His voice was higher than normal.

  “You ok there, Ridge? We’re almost through here.”

  “June? The strangest thing. I think everything is getting...larger.”