The Forgetting Machine (19 page)

“Eww!” I pushed him away.

“What?” he said with a hurt, hangdog expression.

“You just licked me!”

“I did?” He looked confused. “I'm just glad to see you. Again. I mean, I remember everything now.”

“Great, but I think maybe you remember some stuff you shouldn't.”

Gilly was watching us and smiling.

“It's not funny!” I said.

“Actually, it is,” Gilly said.

“What if he tries to lick his own butt?”

“Don't worry—it won't last. A certain amount of memory leakage is unavoidable, but a few days from now Billy's memories will settle back into their old neural pathways. The remnants of Gertrude's memory will fade away.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Having my face licked once is quite enough.”

Billy said, “You don't mind when Gertrude licks you.”

“
Gertrude
is a
dog
!”

“Okay, no more licking. I also promise not to chase balls or chew on bones. At least not when you're around.”

As I have mentioned before, I can be somewhat sarcastic at times, but I do not like it when other people are sarcastic with me. I gave him the evil eye, but he was grinning.

“It's really nice to have you back in my head,” he said.

“It's nice to be there,” I said, which made no sense at all, since I myself had never visited the inside of his head. But he knew what I meant, and that was what was important. I think if Gilly hadn't been sitting right there we would have had a nice boy-girl-style kiss.

“I have some more good news,” Billy said. “The library is saved!”

“I've agreed to make a substantial contribution to that dusty old museum,” Gilly said. “Despite the fact that Olivia Pfleuger, who used to be one of my best programmers, quit ACPOD to bury herself in dead trees.” He was trying to sound grumpy, but he couldn't help smiling. “After all, we can't have one of the smartest software engineers on the planet out there vandalizing our literature, right?”

“So she's not going to jail or anything?” I said.

“Certainly not. But I will require her to make sure every person who attempted to read the corrupted version of
Charlotte's Web
is notified, apologized to, and offered a free paper copy of the book.”

“That sounds really complicated. How can she track down all those people?”

“Olivia may be a fool, but she also happens to be a genius. I'm sure she'll figure out how to do it.”

  •  •  •  

All that happened a few weeks ago. Since then, Ms. Pfleuger has added two computers to her library and restarted her Saturday morning story-time program. Last week twenty preschoolers and kindergarteners came to hear her read
Where the Wild Things Are
. I was there too, volunteering to help with kid control. Those four-year-olds are monsters!

Dottie Tisk is living with her grandparents now, and she's back at school. Last week I saw her wearing one of Myke Duchakis's
ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE TOO
T-shirts. Billy was right. A girl who would crash through a closed garage door on an ATV was a lot tougher than she appeared.

Ernest Rausch never did remember who he was or what he had done, but he seemed to know pretty much everything else. He had not only downloaded
Wikipedia
, but all 400,000 words in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. He immediately began sharing information with anyone who would listen. Do you want to know how fast an aardvark can run? Rausch is your go-to guy. Questions about the royal family of nineteenth century Portugal? Ask Rausch.

“He'll probably have to be institutionalized,” Dad told me. “The man knows everything, but he can barely feed himself. Knowing a lot is not the same as being smart.”

“He's still going to jail, right?”

“There's no point in bringing him to trial. He remembers nothing of what he did. In a sense, he is not Ernest Rausch anymore. He's a completely different person.”

“I guess that's a good thing. I didn't much care for the original.”

Billy is back to normal, almost. He does bark now and then, but I think he does it just to bug me. I try to ignore it. Gilly, whose missing memories were divided between the goat and Gertrude, occasionally lets out a random bleat. Dad no longer eats tuna fish, but he does curl up on the sofa and purr sometimes.

Fortunately, this is Flinkwater, where eccentric behaviors are considered normal.

Speaking of Flinkwater, I got an incomplete on my report for Mr. Westerburg because, well, I didn't complete it. But I did solve the mystery eventually. Just last week, as a matter of fact.

I'm still a big fan of e-books, but after the Pformidable Pfleuger's vandalism I'd been thinking more about how easy it would be to alter any digital file. Every time I read an e-book I had to check it against a paper copy, because people could be out there vandalizing e-books all the time and I'd never know it.

I had just read the entire
Lord of the Rings
trilogy and loved it, but it was so different from the movies that it made me wonder if it had been hacked, so I went downstairs to see if my dad had a paper copy.

I checked his shelves from top to bottom. No
Lord of the Rings
, but there were a lot of really strange books that used to belong to his grandfather—things that aren't even available as e-books. I was looking at a book from 1911 called
Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
when a framed black-and-white photograph on the wall between the bookshelves caught my eye. Dad had lots of old photos on his wall. I had never paid much attention to them, but this one was a picture of a sign with letters made out of painted wooden slats. The sign read:

Flinkwater? The picture looked really old—older even than the book I was holding. I noticed a barely legible note scrawled in the margin:
Uncle Walt's Farm, 1886.

1886. That was a year before the founding of Flinkwater. So why did the sign say Flinkwater when Flinkwater didn't even exist yet? And who was Uncle Walt?

I stared at that photo for a long time. Did it really say FLINKWATER? It looked like two words, “FLINK” and “WATER.” And there was too much space between the
A
and the
T
in “WATER.” And the bottom of the
L
in “FLINK” looked like it had been broken off. I stared and stared, and all of a sudden it hit me.

“Daaaaad!”
I yelled in my
Help-I'm-being-eaten-by-zombies
voice.

It took him forever to get there—if there'd been actual zombies, I'd be lunch.

“What is it?” he said, completely unsurprised by the absence of walking dead.

I pointed a shaking finger at the photo.

“What. Is. That?” I inquired.

“That. Is. A. Photograph,” he replied.

“Of what?”

He squinted at the picture.

“I found that in your mother's collection. It looks like an old sign.”

“No duh! But what
is
it?”

“I suppose it's a sign at the edge of town from way back when.”

“Who is Uncle Walt?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Mooooom!”
I yelled. Dad clapped his hands over his ears and backed out of the room. A minute later my mother peeked in through the doorway.

“Are you all right?”

“No! Who is Uncle Walt and what is this picture?”

She examined the photo and read the inscription.

“Walter Funk was your great-great-great-granduncle,” she said. “He settled here back in the 1870s.”

“Before Flinkwater was Flinkwater.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “How is your research going?”

“Very well, no thanks to you! Do you know how many hours I spent trying to figure out why Flinkwater is called Flinkwater?”

“And now you know. That sign”—she pointed at the photo—“probably originally read ‘FUNK, WALTER.'”

“I sort of figured that out,” I said.

“Part of the
U
broke off, the comma fell off, and the
L
in Walter disappeared. When new settlers arrived and incorporated the town, they saw Uncle Walt's old sign and assumed it said ‘Flinkwater,' so that's what they named the town.”

“You let me do all that research when you knew the answer all along?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because I knew you could do it.”

The funny thing was, I wasn't even mad. It was actually kind of cool that Flinkwater, Iowa, was named after my family, and Mom and I were the only ones who knew it. We were the Keepers of the Secret of Flinkwater.

“I guess it's better than if they named the town Funk,” I said.

“That's right, and don't you ever forget it.”

“I won't,” I said. “I never forget anything.”

Ginger Crump and her friends live in the future. How far in the future? Who knows? More than a year, but less than fifty years. Ginger's world is not all that different from ours. People in Flinkwater use cell phones; they text; they use the Internet. But they have a few things we don't have: robot butlers, antigravity drones, and guns that fire invisible stun rays. How much of Ginger's world will become a reality in the near future? How much is real already?

DustBots are small machines that scurry around the house picking up all sorts of dust and dirt. In Flinkwater, just about every home has several of them. Today, we have Roombas, Neatos, and several other brands of automatic vacuum cleaners—sort of like big, clunky versions of the DustBot, but they don't empty themselves, and they aren't nearly as cute!
Future! Soon!

Everybody knows about e-books—you might be reading this on one right now! But most books today are paper books made out of dead trees. Will e-books ever completely replace paper books the way paper books replaced papyrus scrolls and stone tablets? Maybe, but not for a while.
Present!

Alfred, the Bateses' robot butler, reminds me of the robot from the 1960s TV series
Lost in Space
. We do have human-size robots that can perform various tasks, but compared to Alfred, they are very limited. We might have robot butlers some day, but not for many, many years.
Future!

Everybody knows drones are real. The military has been using them for years, and you can buy a propeller-driven drone at your local toy store right now. But Gilly's AG-3601 drone uses antigravity instead of propellers.

Today we have maglev trains that allow heavy trains to glide over miles of track without touching the rails. They use electromagnetic force to lift the train, but they do not actually cancel the force of gravity. Simple propellers are similar—they counter gravity by pushing air down. But the antigravity powering Gilly's drone is a more advanced technology, and one we do not yet have.
Future!

Gyroscopically controlled unicycles are available right now! They might not be as fast as Billy's WheelBot, but they're still pretty cool.
Present!

Is it possible to insert information into the human brain? In a way, that's what reading does! But downloading complex information from a computer directly to the brain is not yet possible, and even if we figure out how to do it, it might not be all that useful. For example, if you could download this whole book into your head in a few seconds, you would lose the experience of reading the story, and what fun would that be?
Future (maybe)!