Archvillain
Authors: Barry Lyga
by BARRY LYGA
For my brother, Eric —
my very first audience
Where Were You When the Stars Fell Down?
In the days since a massive meteor shower lit up the night sky over Bouring, residents have been asking one another, “Where were you when the stars fell down?” It’s a question that has set abuzz a town whose motto is “Bouring — It’s not Boring!”
Lacey Clark, owner of Clark’s Bakery on Wayne Street, was closing up her shop that night. “I was just locking the door when I saw a bright flash of light to the east,” she told BouringRecord.com. “I sort of stood there in shock, watching.”
“It went yellow, then white, then yellow again,” said Paul West, who was working on a utility pole on Allen Road at the time of the meteor shower. “I was up pretty high, so I had a good view of the whole thing. I swear, it was like a curtain of light or like seeing the stars fall down.”
Best estimates place the meteor shower’s landing point at or near the Bouring Middle School athletic fields and the nearby Bouring Water Tower. The shower lit up the entire town for a period of two minutes, causing many to run or drive to the fields.
When they arrived, however, they did not find a smoking crater or other evidence of meteors. In fact, according to astronomers, the meteors all burned up in Earth’s atmosphere before hitting the ground. This burning, astronomers say, is what caused the bright flashes of light.
Of course, something else was found at the scene when all those people arrived: a young boy, approximately twelve years of age, who had apparently stumbled onto the scene. Suffering from amnesia, that boy — named Mike by the doctors who took care of him — is now in the care of a local foster couple.
It’s been four days and we want to know, Bouring: Where were
you
when the stars fell down? Tell us in the comments below!
“Where were you when the stars fell down?” Idiots!
The stars didn’t “fall down.” Stars
can’t
fall down! Stars aren’t little pinpoints of light up in the sky. They’re gigantic balls of superheated gases. They’re basically enormous nuclear bombs. If a star
— any
star — came within fifty million miles of the planet, the entire solar system would be realigned by tidal gravitational forces and all life on Earth would end. So nothing “fell down.”
These people should do their research.
Second of all, it wasn’t a meteor shower. It was a focused curtain of supercooled plasma. That’s why there was no physical evidence of a meteor shower.
How do I know this? I was there.
I was in the field that night. No one knows this. I watched the plasma storm as it fell; it was extraordinary.
I don’t remember much else. Certainly not this “Mike” the article mentions. I stumbled home, then collapsed into bed.
The next thing I knew, I woke up at home days later….
ONE
Kyle Camden did not like his mother fussing over him, as she did now. “That was just the worst flu I’ve ever seen,” she told Kyle as she fluffed his pillow and urged him to eat the chicken soup she’d delivered on a tray.
Kyle also did not like chicken soup.
Correction: Kyle did not like his
mother’s
chicken soup. The broth was watery and flavorless. Kyle could make better chicken soup without even using a chicken. That’s how bad a cook his mother was. At least she kept trying, though. He had to give her points for persistence. If she kept trying, maybe someday she would get it right. Kyle figured there was a fifty-fifty chance.
“I’m fine, Mother,” he told her. Kyle knew that he hadn’t had the flu: He had witnessed something amazing the other night, out in the field by the school. And even though the local newspapers and websites apparently had never heard of that exotic practice known as “fact-checking,” at least they allowed him to catch up with what had happened since that night he’d stumbled home, delirious.
The plasma curtain had done something to Kyle. He realized it as soon as he woke up and logged on to the London
Times
website for his morning ritual — solving the
Times
crossword puzzle. (American crosswords had long ago proven too easy for him — the British ones were tough.) Instead of taking ten minutes, like it used to, Kyle had solved the toughest crossword puzzle in all of
two
minutes.
Kyle had always been smart.
Really
smart. Much smarter than his parents, in fact. Sometimes he felt a little twinge of guilt about this. His parents were nice enough people, he supposed. A bit dull. But they were kindhearted and they tried hard, which counted for
something,
right? Still, it had always been frustrating to be a genius in a family of … non-geniuses.
Kyle didn’t mention his ramped-up brainpower to his parents. At twelve years old, he already knew how important it was to keep his own business secret. It would remain between him and Lefty, the fat New Zealand rabbit who lived in a cage in Kyle’s room. Lefty was snowy white all over except for a tiny patch of brown fur on his left front paw. The rabbit placidly observed everything with his pink-red eyes as though he knew a secret he would never, ever tell.
“I don’t want you on the Internet,” Kyle’s mother said, having finished fluffing the pillow and placing it behind Kyle’s head. “I want you to rest.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Mother, I need to catch up on what’s been happening while I was sick. And I need to catch up on my schoolwork.” That last part was a lie. Shortly after waking up, Kyle had sat up in bed with his laptop and done his missed schoolwork in an hour. Then, just to be safe, he’d also done the next two weeks’ worth of work. That had taken another hour. Superintelligence could be convenient.
Once his mother left, Kyle immediately slid his laptop out from under his bed. Then he opened the window. It was cool outside, but Mom had the heat cranked up to “Volcanic.” Kyle sighed with relief at the breeze.
Lefty started tugging on the bars of his cage, demanding a treat, so Kyle shook a couple of bits of dried papaya into the cage. Lefty scampered over and devoured them.
“It’s been a strange few days, hasn’t it, Lefty?”
The last thing he remembered after the plasma storm was stumbling home, his vision blurry, his head pounding as if someone had used it for a drum solo. His parents thought he had the flu and kept him in bed for days. Now he understood that his exposure to the plasma had changed his body and he’d needed all that rest to recover.
But recovery time was over.
His father poked his head into the room. “Hey, there, sport! Now that you’re feeling better, you can go to school in the morning!”
Great.
TWO
Since all of his schoolwork was done, Kyle spent his last night of freedom thinking of ways to help his parents. They were nice enough people, and it wasn’t their fault that they were, well, “intellectually ungifted” was probably the kindest way to put it.
His mother worked in the mayor’s office, but she never really complained about work, so Kyle figured she was pretty happy there. But her cooking …
ugh
! She definitely needed help in that department. Best of all, helping Mom in the kitchen would help Kyle, too, because he could finally eat something that didn’t make him sick to his stomach. It was a win-win scenario, the best kind.
And Dad! Dad was always complaining about his weight. (How he could gain so much weight eating Mom’s cooking was a mystery that Kyle feared even his newly enhanced brainpower could not solve.) He would help his father lose weight and get in shape. Excellent!
“I am probably the best son in the history of sons,” Kyle told Lefty very seriously. Lefty cocked a red eye at
Kyle and twitched his nose, which Kyle chose to interpret as agreement.
A little while later, he found his parents in their usual spot — on the sofa, in front of the TV. Kyle had little use for TV; most of it was dumb. His parents, though, were hooked on it. They had complicated schedules to determine which shows to watch on which days, which ones would be recorded and watched later, and which ones would be put off until the DVD came out.
“Hey, guys,” Kyle said, holding up two DVDs he’d just made on his computer, “I have something for you.”
“Can it wait until the commercial, sport?” Dad asked, his eyes glued to the screen.
“I guess.”
Kyle flounced into a chair that didn’t directly face the TV and waited. And waited. And waited. Was there
ever
going to be a commercial?
Finally, the commercial break came. Kyle jumped up and waved the DVDs in front of his parents’ faces. “I made these for you. To help you.”
Mom eyed the DVDs suspiciously, as though she’d never before seen this strange, futuristic technology. “Is this one of your pranks, honey?”
“What? No!” Kyle was offended by the very suggestion. He was trying to
help
!
Kyle was on his way to becoming the World’s Greatest Prankster. His parents, his schoolmates, his teachers,
even the local police — all had been his victims at one point or another.
“Victims” wasn’t really the best way to put it, though. Kyle preferred to think of them as “beneficiaries.” His pranks weren’t supposed to hurt people. They were supposed to teach people to lighten up. It wasn’t
his
fault if they rarely learned the lesson.
“Look,” he explained, “I used some videos and instructional websites that I found online and I assembled them into a sequence designed to maximize knowledge intake in your frontal lobes, okay? Very simple. Then I accelerated the pace of the information display, optimized to your individual neural networks and optical capabilities so that the data can be presented and assimilated subliminally. Pretty cool, huh?”
His parents stared at him. Then they stared at each other. Then, for variety, they stared at him again.
“So it
is
a prank,” Dad said.
“No! No. Look, it’s just …” Kyle took a deep breath and dumbed it down for them. “These are like instructional videos, only really fast and made especially for you.” He could tell he was losing them. “They run at high speed. Hours compressed into minutes.”
“Then how are we supposed to learn from them?” Mom asked.
“Your brain will pick up on the information without you even trying,” Kyle told her. “Look, just trust me,
okay? Try them out. Mom, here’s yours.” He held it out to her. “It’s a whole series of cooking lessons, so that you can, uh …” He struggled with a diplomatic way of saying “not suck at cooking.” “Well, it’s so you can cook.”
“But I already know how to cook, honey.”
Kyle decided to deal with her later. He turned to his father. “Dad, I made this one for you. It’s a complete workout routine and weight-loss regimen.”
Dad took the DVD and turned it over in his hands, then chuckled. “Well, I appreciate the thought, sport, but it’s not that easy. You can’t just watch something faster and lose weight faster.”