The Lonely Whelk (23 page)

It’s one-to-one: four of them, four of
us
, she thought. That said, Quin might actually count as
multiple people, and the strange man who talked to himself and
thought pencils were magic might count as less than one. So maybe
they had an advantage. If it was one-to-one, Quin could take out
his immediate opponent if it weren’t Bad Face, but Bad Face could
do the same if it weren’t Quin. But if Quin counted for two and Bad
Face only counted for one… she began to calculate the probabilities
of each side winning, trying to assign numbers to each of the
obvious variables: strength, size, wits, strategy, position,
creativity. It was pleasantly distracting, but a difficult thought
kept brushing against the mathematical formulas rushing through her
mind: w
ho would win: us or them?

Either way, there was still a knife to her
throat.

She tuned back into the conversation as Bad
Face nudged her towards her office. What had they been talking
about? She sighed, frustrated that she had picked that moment to
tune out the world around her in favor of math and logic.

“
It’s in here,” John said
calmly, gesturing towards the room. “But I will have to do some
calculating, to figure out where it is and bring it
back.”

“
What do you mean, ‘bring
it back’? Doors don’t actually go anywhere! They let you go
elsewhere!”

“
This one goes places,”
John replied. “Remember? That’s the one you wanted, right? The one
that goes places?” He frowned at her, wiggling his eyebrows in a
very sarcastic manner and then continued. “At least, it moves if it
has a real person in it.”

“
And does this one have a
real person in it?”

“
It does.” John
nodded.

“
Prepare to subdue this
person as soon as the ship arrives or your intern—” Perla drew a
finger across her neck.

“
Of course.”

The crowd of people entered what was
supposedly her office.

Kaia glanced at Quin. He was frowning. Was
that a frown that meant, ‘I understand this plan and am prepared to
act when the time calls for it,’ or, ‘I have no idea what the hell
John is doing and this had better be a good idea or else’? She
gulped and felt the metal of the blade push against her skin again.
She frowned as she caught a whiff of her captor – he smelled like
sweat and oil and some kind of fruity soap.

“
It will just take me a
minute,” John said, sitting down in a chair against one
wall.

“
What is that Door?” Perla
pointed to the Door sitting in the middle of the room – the one
that was to be Kaia’s next assignment.

“
Oh, that one isn’t
important,” John replied. “It’s just one that we were going to use
for my students.”

“
Where does it
go?”

“
Downtown,” John answered,
shrugging. Kaia knew he was lying, but figured it was probably just
to protect the Door… or maybe not the Door itself, but the secret
of the Door.

Everyone in the room was looking at John,
who simply sat down in the chair and closed his eyes.

“
What are you doing?” Perla
demanded. “Bring me the Door!”

Scowling, John opened his eyes and looked up
at Perla. “Look,” he said. “Honestly, I’m trying to figure out how
to bring you the Door! You didn’t exactly warn me that you were
coming, now did you? You didn’t say, ‘Hey, heads up, John, have the
Door ready on Tuesday because I’m coming to steal it,’ now did you?
What do you expect? It’s a Door that moves around based on the
person that is in it. Now, I did program in a recall – always good
to have one of those – but I’m not sure how to figure out the
coordinates of the Door so that we can use it. Now, if you could
just get everyone to be quiet and let me think, then perhaps we can
proceed!”

As soon as John finished his tirade, he
straightened his tie, sat back against the wall huffily, and closed
his eyes again.

Kaia tried to imagine how John would program
a recall into a Door that could move about on its own. She thought
about the theories and the cognitive mathematics that would play a
role. In order for it to work, the Door would have to have an
override for the controller’s thoughts, and, as John pointed out,
he would have to know where the Door was. But maybe that wasn’t
true. If the Door in this room could really go anywhere, maybe they
could use it to function as a recall... maybe they could pull it
back from wherever it was by using another Door!

“
Uh, John?” Kaia whispered.
She froze as she felt Bad Face’s knife push into her
neck.

“
Yes?” John said without
opening his eyes.

“
I have an idea,” she
whispered, trying desperately not to move.

“
Hush, girl!” Perla
commanded.

“
You do not give orders to
my intern!” John retorted, jumping out of his feet and waving his
hands around. “Now let her talk. Bad Face, let up on that knife.”
He walked up to Kaia and looked her in the eyes. Perla nodded at
Bad Face from behind John.

Kaia took a deep breath as she felt the cold
pressure of the knife ease up. She swallowed and focused on John’s
face.

“
Maybe,” she began, “if we
used the Door...”

“
You are a sweet, sweet,
brilliant, extraordinary genius!” he exclaimed, reaching out to
shake her hand. She thought he might slip her something, like in
the movies, but he didn’t. She felt oddly disappointed. “We should
have found you years ago! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Yes.
Yes. Okay. Here’s what we have to do. Quin, put Maxwell in the
corner. Perla, please stand back.” He turned to Quin, his face
beaming and giddy with excitement. “I am going to stick my head
through the Door and you are going to hang onto my feet so I don’t
get sucked through.”

Quin nodded and turned to Maxwell. He looked
at him for a second, and then smacked his fist on the top of
Maxwell’s head. Maxwell crumpled as John lay down on the floor in
front of the Door.

“
What is going on?” Perla
demanded once again.

“
We’re doing what you
asked, so please shut up,” John said politely.

“
You had better not be
playing any games—” she began, but John cut her off.

“
Yes, yes or you’ll slice
my intern’s throat. We got it already! Quin?”

Quin bent down and grabbed John’s feet, as
John began to crawl towards the Door. Kaia swallowed carefully,
hoping that the movement wouldn’t cut her throat accidentally. She
remembered the feeling of pushing her hand through the Door, and
wondered if it felt the same way when you stuck your head through
slowly like that. Was it tingling and prickling? Was his skin being
pulled? Did it boil his brains? Did it feel like he was going to
get sucked through? What if he
did
get sucked through? What
if Quin couldn’t stop him? What if Quin got sucked through, too?
What if the Door turned into a ravenous, living creature and
swallowed everyone in the room?

Kaia held her breath and glanced around.
John was scooting towards the Door and everyone else was frozen,
just staring at him; and then, before he had even touched the Door,
everything changed.

Kaia shrieked as Quin yanked John backwards
from the Door.

At the same time, a buzzing, throbbing,
spinning, nausea-inducing swarm of furry little creatures
materialized, crawling over every wall, corner, and flat surface.
They made a scratching, gurgling noise that was quite painful –
similar to a sharpened spoon being drawn over acres of fired
pottery. Bad Face stepped back away from her and tripped over one
of the creatures. Taking the opportunity, Kaia fled over to where
Maxwell was just waking up in the corner. As she reached him, he
began to laugh in an insane, crazy sort of way.

“
It is as I thought,” he
roared. “When you remove the power from the madman he becomes just
a madman once again!” A pencil appeared in his hand and he began to
wave it around. “Chaos!” he cried. “It is mine!” He rose slowly
from the floor and darted forward into the melee.

“
Wait!” Kaia exclaimed, but
it was too late. She looked up, and suddenly her brain focused on
the fact that Perla was screaming violently, while Quin stood
perfectly still amid the chaos.

From her spot huddled against a wall,
certain things began to stand out to her. Standing in the middle of
the crowd were two women – one with long brown hair and the other
with flaming red hair. The red-haired one carried one of the furry
creatures around her neck. As she looked more closely, she could
see that the furry creatures were, in fact, some sort of monkey…
and there seemed to be hundreds of them! Where had they come from?
What was happening?

John stood up slowly, his mouth agape in
astonishment.

“
Well this is not what I
expected,” he said calmly over the noise of the monkeys.

One dropped off the ceiling and landed in
Perla’s hair. She screeched and clawed at her head, and Kaia could
see that Clyde was watching his mother like a hawk.

Then, Quin’s voice boomed over the madness:
“QUIET.”

It was an order which felt as if it was not
for her or the monkeys or anyone in particular, but for the
universe as a whole. Kaia was certain that all living things
everywhere were closing their mouths, muffling their strings, or
turning down the volume of whatever they used to communicate. The
monkeys chattered for a moment, but slowly the room fell into a
deadly silence, and the writhing mass of fur became still.

Then, from the crowd rose one monkey that
was slightly larger than the rest. He was hovering in the air,
which Kaia found very odd and a little disturbing.

“
I am Emperor Tamarin,” the
monkey proclaimed. “And I am here to take over Earth!” He began to
laugh horrifically, a sound that reminded Kaia of a spoon in a
blender.

“
Well, I hate to disappoint
you,” John replied. “But this is not Earth, and we can definitely
take you if you’re in the mood for a fight.”

The monkey laughed harder. “You know not our
strength! If you repent of your arrogance now, we might spare your
life.”

John turned to the woman with brown hair.
“Pardon me if I’m stepping on your toes,” he said quietly, and then
turned back to the monkey and stated clearly: “Two seven one one
eight zero seven bravo.”

The monkey’s eyes widened. “No,” it
whispered. “No... no...” BEEP.

Its head tilted forward and it appeared to
go to sleep. The next moment, all of the other monkeys in the room
did the same. It was a strange scene, Kaia thought. Hundreds of
sleeping – robot? – monkeys, with heads tilted down and eyes
closed, alive, and yet not alive.

“
An override?” the woman
asked, shocked.

John shrugged. “As it turns out, Lake
Oliphant programmed overrides into all of his robots, but decided
not to tell anyone.”

“
How do you know, then?”
she demanded.

“
If I tell you, will you
promise not to rat me out?”

The woman gave him a look that could melt a
steel planet floating in a time lock and surrounded by the meanest
robot aliens in the universe.

“
Okay, okay,” he said
sheepishly, running his fingers through his hair and straightening
his tie. “I stole his journal from a private collection. But I put
it back, I promise! And I will write the override down for you
before you leave.”

Kaia glanced around the room, feeling
confused. It appeared she was not the only one. Perla stood with
her arms crossed and hair mussed from the robot monkey attack,
looking annoyed; Maxwell was sitting waist deep in monkeys with a
confused expression; Quin looked as if he was wound as tightly as a
spring; and John was grinning like it was his birthday.

“
Now that we’ve gotten that
sorted out,” he said, “why don’t we see if we can figure out what’s
going on here?”

Hazel was stunned. What had just happened?
Her shop, swarming with an infestation of robot monkeys, had
suddenly materialized around the man she had been remembering, who
had essentially ordered the monkeys to shut down. And they
had
shut down. Just like that. Now she was surrounded by a
sea of strangers and dead robots. She closed her eyes and pinched
herself, but she didn’t wake up.

“
Hazel,” John said, turning
to face her. “I’m really sorry to drag you into this, but it’s so
good to see you!” He air kissed around her cheeks. “And Holland!”
He turned to face the Admiral. “I’m sorry about our awkward
meeting, but you are a legend and I consider it an honor to have
met you! My name is John. When is it in your timeline?”

“
I just woke up,” Holland
replied stonily, probably still irritated about not knowing the
override code for her own shipbot. “What is going on
here?”

“
Well, I have to admit, I
am a bit surprised that Hazel ended up on your ship, and I’m really
sorry about that. Right now we’re just in the middle of a hostage
situation and I needed the element of surprise… which, I must say,
you provided quite well.”

“
What is the meaning of
this?” a woman in a black dress screamed, stomping forward. “Where
is my Door?”

“
Why, you’re standing in
it, Perla,” John replied. “Look around you! Unfortunately, for it
to work I will have to recalibrate it to your frequency, so I’m
afraid you’ll have to give me just a few more minutes.”