Cragbridge Hall, Volume 2: The Avatar Battle (20 page)

Grandpa let the man sit in silence until his memories faded. Grandpa didn’t let on what he knew. The door opened and the Trinhouses quietly slid into the room. “Did you know you were going to get caught?” Grandpa resumed his interrogation.

“That’s absurd. Why would I ever go in if I knew I was going to come here?”

But the image told a different story. Muns appeared, giving instructions. “Someone will release you, and then your one job is to find keys like this.” Muns held up the one key he had. It was the same kind of key Derick had just earned by surviving a Civil War battle.

“Did someone manage to release you from your cell last night?” Grandpa asked.

A crooked smile slowly crept across the man’s face. “Oh, you’ve got a rogue on your hands, because it wasn’t us. We slept all night on our fine accommodations.” The man spit his last words. He pictured a simple mattress in a dark room. He told the truth.

Someone was supposed to release them, but it wasn’t last night. This was very bad.

“That is better than you deserve,” Grandpa’s voice rose. “Do you know that you could have changed history? And that change could have set in motion other changes that then might have altered our own reality so much than neither of us would even exist. In fact, that change could have led to greater tragedies, perhaps wars. Perhaps your change may have led the earth and the human race into destruction.”

The man cowered back. Images of the man imagining wars and a ruined world filled the screen behind him.

Grandpa continued, his voice growing almost to a shout. Derick wondered if he was trying get the man emotionally off-balance so he would give something else away. Grandpa stepped closer to the man. “Did you ever stop to think that it was too much to risk to go back and play a
football game
?”

The man’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t . . . wait. How did you know that?” If he hadn’t been on edge emotionally before, he was now.

Grandpa grabbed him by the collar. “The side you are fighting for may kill us all. Now tell me, who at Cragbridge Hall is on Muns’s side?” Derick held his breath waiting to see who the traitor was. Would he see the Trinhouses?

No images appeared.

“I don’t know,” the man said.

“I don’t believe you,” Grandpa said.

“I’m telling the truth. I don’t know.”

After several more tries, the man still didn’t give any more useful information. The other man gave much the same results.

To make matter worse, no new information came from asking the Trinhouses questions. Either they could imagine lies as if they were real memories or they had been telling the truth. They had left the briefcase in a locked room and it had been opened the next morning. No images flashed of anyone who had come into their apartment or of any secret plan.

This was very, very bad.

21

The Impossible and Murder

Mrs. Trinhouse wore fashionable enough clothes, so she was up with the times. Her hair was well done, her makeup simple but pretty. Callouses. She had callouses on her fingers. Maybe she played guitar. She yawned again. Mrs. Trinhouse had begun her lecture, and though tired, she was just as peppy as ever. But Abby wasn’t listening very well. She was trying to be like Joseph Bell or Sherlock Holmes. She wanted any clue that might help her understand why Mrs. Trinhouse had been at the Watchman last night.

Abby logged onto her rings, selected the Cragbridge Hall homesite, and found Mrs. Trinhouse’s information page. She smiled big in her photo. No surprise there. She was from Ohio. She studied at Princeton. There was a massive list of engineering and math awards. She was married and had taught at Cragbridge Hall for seven years. In her spare time, she loved to play guitar, hike, sing and dance.

Abby had been right about the guitar. Maybe she
could
be observant. But there was nothing else there that gave Abby any clues.

“Though we normally use our virtual booths in math and engineering,” Mrs. Trinhouse said, “today I’m going to begin by using the Bridge in our classroom to show you an episode from history. Watch it closely.” She flicked her fingers and showed a three-dimensional image of someone from the past. A young man, maybe in his late twenties, walked into class. It was probably a college somewhere, and since the teacher was already lecturing, the student was late. Abby watched as he sat down and copied two problems off the blackboard.

A guy writing down math problems? Not the most interesting of stories.

The next scene showed the same young man in an apartment that wasn’t very clean. He was working on the problems from the board. He showed all the signs that it wasn’t easy—rubbing his temples, writing, then erasing, writing and erasing again. How boring was
this
? Watching someone else do homework. Doing her own was boring enough.

Abby thought about her homework. She probably looked the same way as she struggled to find the right answer. It didn’t come quickly for her either. Was that why Mrs. Trinhouse was showing the story? Was it for her?

Finally, the man started writing faster and moved his head closer to the paper. Abby saw a smile cross his face. He had done it.

The image fast-forwarded to the young man entering the same classroom as before and setting his homework on top of a large stack of papers. The professor wouldn’t get through all that for a while.

The image faded. “Now,” Mrs. Trinhouse narrated, “this is a Sunday morning about six weeks later.”

The young man lay sleeping in a simple twin bed. Someone pounded on the door. He didn’t move. Abby could relate. She had felt the same way this morning.

More pounding.

Eventually the young man stumbled out of bed and made his way toward the door. He didn’t look happy. It was probably one of the few days he could sleep in. He clumsily twisted the knob, opened the door, and stared at his professor.

“George! George!” the professor shouted, “You solved them!”

George looked down, blinked a few times, and then realized the professor was holding the pages he’d turned in. “Wasn’t I supposed to?” he asked, trying to suppress a yawn. Just watching him made Abby yawn too.

The professor looked his student in the eye. “Those weren’t homework problems, George. I put them on the board as examples of problems that leading mathematicians haven’t been able to solve.” George’s eyes grew wide. “And in only a few days you solved them both!” The professor’s arms raised into the air.

He had solved the unsolvable? He wasn’t that old. And he was still a student.

The image fast-forwarded. George was grown, no longer a student, but giving a lecture. “This is the same student later as a professor at Stanford,” Mrs. Trinhouse explained.

George spoke. “If someone had told me that they were two famous unsolved problems, I probably wouldn’t have even tried to solve them. This is an example of the power of positive thinking.” The image faded into nothing.

Cool story. Mrs. Trinhouse was obviously teaching the entire class, but was she especially trying to encourage Abby? And if so, was it sincere? Or to get on Abby’s good side, so she didn’t suspect her? That had happened last semester with her history teacher. Abby wouldn’t let it happen again.

“One of your advantages as students,” Mrs. Trinhouse said, “is that you don’t know what should be impossible. And I’m surely not going to tell you. So today I want you to start on a project that will continue through the whole semester. But you will each need one of these.” Mrs. Trinhouse walked to her desk and then returned with a flat container. She opened it to reveal a series of little spheres.

Immediately Abby thought of the sphere her grandfather had given her. The deleted one. The empty one. The one she didn’t know what to do with.

Mrs. Trinhouse walked up and down the rows, letting each student grab a sphere. Great, now Abby would have two she didn’t know what to do with.

“I want you to begin to make something all your own—your own house, your own amusement park, your own car, your own world. It doesn’t matter. Pick something. Go big. Go for the impossible. I have programmed each of your spheres with our world’s laws of physics, but otherwise, you have free rein to create whatever you like. These spheres are a blank canvas. A blank canvas is one of the most beautiful things—it has endless potential. You can create anything. Your sphere is just waiting for you to decide what is possible.”

“C’mon,” Mrs. Trinhouse said, and clapped her hands. “Let’s push some limits. Try something ambitious. Let’s follow George Dantzig’s example and do something others think is impossible. Be sure to either ask me or search our class site if you need any help with your math equations or engineering questions. All the building materials we have on file will be available to you.”

It worked. It was inspiring. But Abby was still thinking about what Mrs. Trinhouse had said about a blank canvas. Was that Grandpa’s point? Did he clear off the sphere so Abby could make her own creation on it? That’s what a blank canvas is for, right? And he did say to put the sphere back in its place and make the most of what happens.

Abby walked to her booth and put on the suit and sensors. But instead of putting the sphere Mrs. Trinhouse had given her into the console, she put in the one from Grandpa. She had to decide what to build. A house? She had always had ideas about how to put rooms together and decorate. No. She didn’t think that would be enough to get a good grade. She would probably have to be more ambitious. A car? No. That would require a whole bunch of engineering Abby didn’t understand. What about a castle? Oh yeah.

Her imagination filled with the possibilities. She knew she had to start with a design. She used her rings to search for real castles. She loved the classic look of the Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, England. Its thick towers looked so solid and majestic. It was built by a knight to defend the area against France in the Hundred Years War. But it had no rooms in the middle. All its rooms and covered spaces were on the outside in the walls and towers.

She also loved the Bran Castle in Transylvania with its towers, pitched red roofs, and spires. The info said that it was often referred to as Dracula’s castle—a place that inspired the writing of the famous book, though it really had nothing to do with Dracula.

Abby started to get an idea of how large she wanted her castle to be. She drew a plan with squares on it, each small square on the plan equaling about two feet. Based on the models and plans of existing castles, she planned her own. She could use parts from each that she liked. They would blend into something original. She spent the entire class measuring various places from the walls to the towers and the gates and calculating how tall and thick certain places would need to be. She made a decision. She wanted it to be a modern castle: screens and modern furniture, heating and air conditioning—no drafty castle for her. Maybe even a garage. She’d have to park the car somewhere, right?

She also consulted the list of materials, and in the end decided on granite. She would use various sizes of stones. She learned that just one stone in the Western Wall in Jerusalem was longer, taller, and thicker than a bus. It weighed the equivalent of two hundred elephants. She had no idea how the Jews had moved such a stone over two thousand years ago. In her virtual world, she could move it with a sweep of her hand, but she didn’t think she would need any that big.

It was only at the very end of the class period that she began to set the huge stones of the castle’s foundation. This was going to look amazing!

Grandpa suddenly appeared. He seemed just as real in the virtual world as he did in real life. Apparently the sphere still had at least enough code left to show Grandpa; it wasn’t as completely erased as she’d thought. He leaned against a large block of stone. “Well done. Some might have thought a blank sphere was useless. They might even have discarded it because it was empty. But that is precisely what makes it great. And you decided to make something of it.”

Abby felt a blanket of relief fall over her. She was on the right trail, a step closer to getting her answer.

“We could compare building on an empty sphere to life.” Abby was used to her grandpa always trying to teach her something. “Each one of us starts off with nothing, but we make decisions, we learn. In a way, it is like building something. Each choice fills our world with something new, something more. I have something else to teach you, but first I need you to build the best you know how.” Virtual Grandpa smiled and disappeared.

Awesome. Abby could work on her homework and toward finding an answer at the same time. She stacked a huge granite block on top of two others. She couldn’t help but wonder what exactly Grandpa was going to teach and how it would help her with her question—and how would that help her fight against Muns?

• • •

“Okay, I’m going into my cage to work,” Dr. Mackleprank said.

“
Sem problema
,” Rafa said.

“English . . . English,” Derick reminded. He picked out the word for “problem,” but what did
sem
mean?

“Rafa just said that it wouldn’t be a problem,” Dr. Mackleprank explained.