The Flinkwater Factor (4 page)

8

Bubbled

After leaving Addy's, I took a ride around town. Uncle Ashton was right. We were bubbled. Not an actual bubble of course, but the roads were blocked, and a bunch of men and women wearing dark gray uniforms were erecting a twelve-foot-tall razor-wire fence all around the edge of town. It looked like a war zone. And if Uncle Ashton was right, maybe we
were
under attack.

I talked to a few dazed-looking citizens and learned some things.

First, the SCIC plague had bonked half the ACPOD engineering staff. The hospital was getting full, so they were putting new patients on cots in the high school gymnasium. Second, all computer use in Flinkwater had been banned, and Homeland Security was going door-to-door
confiscating tabs and desktops. Third, no one was allowed to leave Flinkwater until a cause and cure for SCIC were discovered.

What would Gilbert Bates do?

I got home just as the Homeland Security teams were starting on our block. I put my tab in a plastic bag and hid it at the bottom of Barney's cat box. Barney observed this procedure with that disdainful aloofness that only a purebred Siamese can pull off, then climbed into the box and delicately deposited an extremely fragrant gift atop the freshly disturbed cat litter. He examined his work and pronounced it satisfactory with a little
merp.

“Good job,” I told him.

My brilliant cat-box ploy turned out to be unnecessary. The DHS guys were tired and cranky and didn't look very hard at all. They took our phones, my dad's desktop, and an old tab that I hardly used anymore. I thought they might take our DustBots as well, but they didn't. I suppose it would have been impractical, what with just about everybody in Flinkwater having a dozen of the little things crawling around the house.

As soon as they left, I dug my tab out of Barney's cat box, sanitized it with multiple applications of disinfectant, and got to work. Uncle Ashton had
told me to stay away from the Brazen Bull, but I do not always listen.

Naturally, I took precautions.

I was sitting at my desk wearing mirrored, polarized, Vaseline-smeared sunglasses and listening to some painfully loud static over my headset while watching the Brazen Bull bounce off the sides of my tab when Barney leaped into my lap without warning. Barney will jump on anybody's lap, anywhere, anytime, and more often than not scare the heck out of them. I was used to it. Barney liked to watch videos.

What I was not used to was the horrendous screech that came out of him when he looked at the Brazen Bull.

The screech punched through the static on my headset like a positronium gamma-ray laser through a tar paper shack. It sounded like—well, let me just say that for one endless moment I thought the DHS had nuked us all.

In the same instant Barney executed a vertical leap that took him within inches of the ceiling as I—and my chair—performed a backward somersault terminating in a perfect two-point landing, those two points being my knees and my face.

Painful? Yes. But as soon as I regained my senses, I realized that Barney—who had teleported
out of my room the way cats will do—had given me a clue.

The Brazen Bull had done whatever it was that the Brazen Bull did, but I remained unbonked, no doubt due to the protective measures I had taken, i.e., the greased-up glasses and staticky headset. I blacked the screen and saved the recording I had been making.

You see how clever I can be? I had set up the computer to record every instant of Brazen Bull bouncing, and now had a record of the exact moment when it did its cat-freaking people-bonking thing. All I had to do then was play it back, very, very slowly, with my now-proven protective gear in place.

Back in the 1950s there was this guy who claimed that movie theater owners could get people to buy more popcorn if they flashed momentary images of popcorn on the movie screen. He called it “subliminal messaging.” The idea was that the moviegoers would not consciously notice the one-twentieth-of-a-second image, but their
sub
conscious would see that tub of delicious popcorn swimming in butter and tell their stomachs to head for the concession stand. Since then lots of sneaky people have tried to get other people to do stuff by using these so-called subliminal messages.

But it doesn't work. Turns out it's one of those
things like perpetual motion. People want so much to believe in it they keep trying and failing.

Only here's the thing: When I played back the Brazen Bull animation, I discovered that someone had succeeded.

What I found, looking at the Brazen Bull in super slow motion, was a high-rez image of Johnston George, aka J.G., wearing a tutu and high heels, his hair in pigtails, sucking on a baby's pacifier, holding a sign reading
I AM PATHETIC
. In real time the image appeared for only .008 seconds—less time than it takes to blink. That image was followed up 1.66 seconds later by a photo of J.G. with his finger up his nose, then another photo of him squeezing a zit, and several other highly personal and unflattering images I flat out refuse to describe. It was impossible to tell which photos had been doctored and which were real. All of them had a real-time duration of less than one hundredth of a second.

It was a brilliant and horrific collection, and I knew at once who was responsible: my future husband, Billy George.

9

Billy George

Thirteen might seem too young for a girl to begin planning her wedding, but as my mother is fond of pointing out, I am quite precocious. And I do like to plan ahead.

Billy George, my intended, was also precocious, though he was still quite immature—even younger than me, by a full six months. And somewhat short. Which wasn't a big problem, but it would be convenient to have a husband who could reach things on high shelves. My biggest problem was that Billy George was J.G.'s younger brother. I was not looking forward to having a psychotic monster for a brother-in-law, but even that would not deter me. I was in major crush mode with Billy. There, I said it. Right brain talks to left brain. My corpus callosum works just fine, thank you.

Of course, Billy had no idea that we were
destined to be married—a minor detail. Like most boys, he was blissfully unaware of the outside world 99 percent of the time. Including me, for example. Which was unfortunate. But I didn't hold it against him, because with Billy it was nothing personal. He wasn't trying to be rude or mean, he was just focused. Focused as a positronium gamma-ray laser.

I found Billy in his subbasement chamber staring into his desktop display. For a moment I thought he'd bonked, but then his hand twitched, and the image on the screen—a witch with extraordinarily large mammary glands—morphed into some sort of heavily armored warrior god.

Billy was playing Ghast Wars.

I took a few seconds to admire his thick, tousled, dark brown hair. It was the sort of hair that makes you want to get your fingers tangled in it.

I said, “Hey.”

Billy did not shift his gaze by so much as a nanometer.

As I do not like being ignored, I stuck my face directly between his face and the screen and stared into his big brown eyes. He had nice lips, too. I imagined what it would be like to kiss them, but I restrained myself. It would be better if it was his idea. Besides, I didn't want him to confuse
me with some big-chested witch-warrior out of Ghast Wars.

He pushed my head aside, as if I were an inanimate intrusion blocking his view. I shoved my own lovely lips back between him and his object of fasci­nation and said, rather loudly, “Billy!”

That got him.

“Gin?” he said, blinking rapidly.

“Gin,” I agreed.

“What's up?”

“Well,” I said, “let's see. The nets are down, my cat has gone insane, the Department of Homeland Security is ready to drop a nuke on us any second now, and half of Flinkwater is bonked.”

“Bonked?”

“Comatose. Literally.”

“Cool! When did all that happen?”

I grabbed the arms of his chair and rotated him away from his screen.

“You haven't noticed the twelve-foot-tall razor-wire fence they're putting up around Flinkwater?”

“I've been busy.”

“What, playing Ghast Wars? For two days straight?”

“I'm on a roll.”

“You didn't notice the men in black going
through your house confiscating all the tabs and desktops?”

“They must have missed
my
room.”

That wasn't too surprising. Billy's subbasement room was an old bomb shelter from the last millennium. Easy to miss if you didn't know about the secret stairway at the back of the hall closet.

“I can't believe your parents didn't say anything.”

Billy shrugged. “I don't talk to them much. Most of the time my mom's busy with her yoga and exercise classes and school board meetings and charities and whatever else she does. And my dad, well, he's always at work. Being George G. George is like a twenty-four/seven deal. He hardly ever remembers I exist.”

“You didn't notice when J.G. bonked yesterday?”

“J.G. bonked?” Billy laughed.

Earlier I mentioned a couple of J.G.'s little pranks, but I neglected to mention his most infamous stunt.

A few weeks back, just before school let out for the summer, Billy George had shown up for class with a nose problem. He had awakened that morning with what he thought was a bad cold—his nose was completely stuffed-up—but he felt okay, so he got dressed and went to school. I happened to
notice that things were not right with him, nostrilogically speaking.

“Billy,” I said, “your nose has no holes.”

“No nodrils, you mea do tay?” he replied stuffily.

The school medic quickly diagnosed the problem. At some point during the night, a person or persons unknown had sneaked into Billy's room with a tube of ethyl 2-cyanoacrylate, applied it to Billy's nostrils, and squeezed his nose shut.

Ethyl 2-cyanoacrylate, in case you don't know, is sometimes called “super glue.”

It took two hours for the doctors to laser Billy's nostrils apart, leaving him with a very sore and very red nose for several days thereafter.

Of course, everyone—including Billy—knew who the unknown perpetrator was.

“How is he doing?” Billy asked, still grinning.

“You mean J.G.?” I said.

“Yeah. You said he got bonked.”

“He's in the hospital, along with a hundred-some other people.”

“Uh”—Billy's smile wavered—“oh.”

Something hit me then. Looking past Billy at his computer display, I saw that his Ghast War avatars were continuing their game. In other words, he was plugged into the net.

I said, “You're online.”

“Well, duh.”

“That's impossible. Homeland Security shut down Flinkwater. No wireless, no cellular, no satellite, no nothing. How are you getting a signal?”

“I have my ways.”