The Time Hackers (4 page)

Six days passed.

Six long days in which nothing at all happened. That is to say nothing new.

The weekend roared through, Dorso's parents went back to work, school resumed, class fed into class. There was a moment of excitement when the history teacher said that no matter what they saw in time holograms, kids wouldn't understand history unless a teacher guided them through the controversy. Frank asked what controversy the teacher meant and the teacher said that all history was open to interpretation and Frank said there wouldn't be any problem at all if they would remove the blocks so that kids could see it all and not a watered-down version.

Life went on. The cat found a new hiding place by crawling through a small hole under the stairs and working his claws up into a floor joist to hang inverted like a sleeping bat. But Darling found that the vacuum-cleaner hose would just fit through the hole. She put the control dial on super-tornado-dust-atomizer-seventy-four and the cat came out nearly voluntarily and not totally bald.

So life went on, but it wasn't that Dorso and Frank
weren't working on the problem. Frank used his personal computer to do what he called logic flowcharts.

“Look, this is how I see it.” Frank propped the flex-screen up against the wall. Their personal portable computers were little more than a flexible screen less than an eighth of an inch thick that could be folded or rolled up for storage. With built-in solar charging, there was no need for plug-in power, and with all data taken and sent through infrared data ports, there was no need for wires or hookups for modems. The computers had touch-sensitive keyboards implanted in the screen in such a way that they could be stored electronically in the data chips when not needed. Of course, with voice-controlled systems coded to operate only with the owner's voice, there was little need for a keyboard.

Standing in front of the screen as though he was making a presentation, Frank said, “Tell me if this is roughly correct. This has been going on for about three months, right?”

Dorso nodded, looking at the screen. Frank had made graphs and bar and pie charts.

“Okay, we'll call each event an incident. This line here is the incident-appearance line, coupled with this bar, which represents the height or depth or maybe the best word would be seriousness of the incident.”

Oh, good, Dorso thought. An incident-appearance line coupled with an incident-seriousness bar. My life in graphs. If we could just work in a geekness-quantity pie chart my world would be complete.

“So they started kind of light, just weird images and holograms, little jokes—”

“If,” Dorso interrupted, “you can call four cubic feet of dead and rotten earthworms jammed in your locker a little joke.”

“Right. I know that at the time the subject considered these things serious, but we must have a logic base to start from. Initially, they were almost harmless pranks—”

“If,” Dorso said, interrupting again, “you consider four hundred and thirty-one pounds of rhino excrement jammed in my locker a harmless prank—and did you just call me the subject?”

Frank nodded. “We have to keep it neutral to keep it accurate.”

“I don't want to be neutral. I don't want to be a subject.”

“We're getting off track here.”

“Well, it's my track and I'll get off it if I want to and I don't want to be called the subject.”

“How about calling you Subject Number One.”

“No.”

“What do you want to be called?”

“Dorso.”

Frank seemed about to argue and then nodded. “Dorso. But let's get back to the charts. It started slowly, with silly prank holograms in your locker, isn't that right?”

“If you can call cadavers and dead frogs and lab rats silly pranks…”

“All
right!
So they weren't pranks. Still, they started at this lower level and then they got worse, isn't that right?”

Dorso frowned, remembering. He nodded. “Yes.”

“So describe how they got worse.”

“Well, initially they were just like you said—warped, weird little things, sometimes all mixed up, like they had two and sometimes three holograms combined by mistake. Or maybe on purpose. There was the ancient Greek athlete who had a headlight for a face, and Michelangelo's statue of David, only it was made out of green Jell-O with those small marshmallows and bits of fruit in it. Joke stuff. Then it went to disgusting things—dead bodies and squashed frogs and different loads of animal dung and then, finally, the scenes with Custer and Beethoven, where I know they saw me.”

“But they were still holograms, right?”

Dorso nodded. “As far as I could tell. Now that I think of it there was lots of dust and noise with Custer at the battle but it disappeared when the hologram faded. And with Beethoven I think I would have felt his hand when he hit me….”

Frank turned to the side and whispered into the computer: “Subject says severity increased with each incident.”

“Frank.”

“I'm sorry.
Dorso
says severity increased with each incident.”

“And that's it, right?” Dorso looked at the charts and graphs. “That's all we know, isn't it? Which is nothing, really. Just that all these things have happened.”

“No. Two more things.” Frank held up two fingers. “One, the mammoth. That was an amazing new step. Now it's become real. Somehow they brought a live woolly mammoth from the past and dropped it in front of you. Think if it had been that way when they brought Custer—there would have
been bullets and arrows all over you. Or if I hadn't sacrificed myself to the mammoth—”

“Sacrificed yourself?”

“I put myself in harm's way to protect you and the mammoth took me instead of turning on you. What if I hadn't done that?”

Dorso decided to let it go.

“Maybe he would have stomped on you,” Frank said, “that's what. I mean, this has escalated to where it's life threatening….” He trailed off, thinking.

“Two things,” Dorso reminded him. “You said there were two things. You always say that. What's the other one—something to do with naked ladies again?”

“No.” Frank pointed at Dorso. “We have to figure out why it's happening to you. Why not me, why not somebody else? What makes you the receiver?”

For a long time they sat in silence. Dorso tried to think of what might make him the target for these pranks, if that was what they were, and that made him think of himself, his life, who might hate him. He kept coming up blank. Born twelve years earlier; nice, ordinary parents who worked hard and were loving and fair; insane younger sister but insane in a good way, unless you were a cat she wanted to dress up. Got average grades; didn't do anything that would make anybody particularly upset with him; had only one emotional entanglement—Karen Bemis, who didn't know he was alive, or at least didn't show it.

There was just nothing about him that should draw this kind of attention. He shook his head, looking at the charts
on Frank's flex-screen. He was about to say they should chuck it all and go to the authorities when something popped into his brain.

A word, there was a word bothering him. Something he'd said—no, something Frank had said. Something about how he was the target. No. Something else.

“Receiver.” That was it. “What did you say about me being the receiver?”

“Just that—what makes you the receiver?”

“Yeah. That. The word made me think of something else.
I
can't really be a receiver, not in the technical sense. It would have to be a device. What if I'm not the target at all? What if it's something else and I just happen to be close to it?”

“But what…,” Frank started, then stared at his flex-screen. “Your laptop! You think it might be your laptop?”

Dorso rubbed his forehead, thinking. “Let's look at it. I never see the holograms unless my laptop is there, and every time one comes to my locker, it's been when I go to PE.”

“And you leave your laptop in your locker….”

“Exactly! There it is. My laptop is the target, not me. Somehow whoever is doing this is locking onto my laptop.” Dorso had been carrying his computer rolled up and he brought it out. The computer came on automatically.

“But you leave it turned off in your locker, right?” Frank pointed to his own computer. “I turn mine off when I store it.”

Dorso shook his head. “But with light and solar power they never really turn off. See, it's just the display and
working circuitry that shut down. The internal workings, all the memory chips stay on all the time, so it can retain its programs.

Frank whistled. “That's it—it makes sense. There's just one more question.”

“Always two questions?”

“Yeah—what does your laptop have against you? Or more to the point, since I'm the one who got flipped by the mammoth, what does it have against me?”

At precisely 7:47 the next morning, while Dorso's mother was back in the kitchen and Darling was dressing the cat as a G.I. Joe commando trooper who was having trouble keeping his helmet on straight and his weapons belt on correctly and who had no idea at all what he was supposed to do with his little plastic assault rifle, Dorso and Frank left to join a pirate ship and sail the Spanish main.

All unintentionally.

It happened in this way:

Frank had come to get Dorso to go to school. He had just knocked on the door and Dorso had opened it and taken a step outside, had turned to wave goodbye to his mother when there was a flash of white light and he tripped and stumbled against Frank. The two of them fell onto the deck of a sailing ship.

The sun was bright in a brilliant blue sky above a stunning blue ocean. In normal circumstances, the ship they fell on would have been beautiful, with its towering masts and gray-white sails. But what the boys fell into was war. Men who were almost unbelievably dirty, covered with clothing in rags and carrying axes and short swords, were screaming
and swearing as they ran back and forth, while a short distance away another ship, bigger and much neater-and cleaner-looking, disappeared in a cloud of gray smoke as it fired off a broadside.

“Duck!” Frank screamed. Dorso turned and fell as a man who barely qualified as human took a swing at his head with a boarding axe.

“Blast!” he yelled. He raised his axe for another swing just as a cannonball from the other ship took out his center in a splash of something Dorso hoped he would forget.

“They come! They're boarding us!” someone screamed over the noise, and Dorso took a quick look around and saw that this was not the first salvo the ship had taken. Wreckage was everywhere, hanging from the yards and masts; boards were splintered and there were blood and chunks of flesh all over everything.

He saw a black flag flying from the stern.

“It's a pirate ship!” he yelled to Frank. “We're on a pirate ship …”

Frank was pounded from the rear by a falling slab of wood, so that he slammed into Dorso and drove him back and down beneath a board just as the other ship careened into them. Its men threw lines with boarding hooks that caught the pirate ship. Men came screaming over the side and into the remaining pirates with boarding axes and cutlasses, hacking and slashing and continuing the killing even when the pirates tried to surrender, throwing them into the water, where the blood had drawn sharks that quickly finished off any pirates who still lived.

It was over in three minutes. The men from the attacking boat stood wiping their blades on the rags of sails.

“Here's two more!” A man with one eye and a scar down the side of his face found the boys. “They ain't but sprites, sir, and they be dressed all queer. What do we do with them?”

“Sprites make brutes, Williams,” a man in a blue uniform said. “Cut their throats and throw them over the side. Our orders were to kill them all.”

“No, wait!” Dorso yelled. Frank was still groggy from being hit by the falling yard, and Dorso pulled him up. “We're not pirates! We're visitors from … no, we're captives. They took us captive and were holding us for ransom.” Somewhere, Dorso thought, he'd read about pirates and ransom. Somewhere. Oh, yeah,
Huckleberry Finn.
“We're not pirates at all….”

“A good story.” The man in uniform must have been an officer in the English navy because he spoke very correct English. “Not very likely. Still, we should examine the situation before we go further. Why are you wearing such outlandish clothes? And those shoes. What are they made of?”

Dorso looked down at his sneakers and then at the bare feet of all the other men. “It's a kind of plastic.…”

“And what is plastic?”

“A kind of rubber.” Frank shook his head to clear it. He pushed Dorso's hand away and stood alone. “From the rubber tree.”

“Rubber.” The officer frowned. “I don't know this
substance. What of those packs on your backs? Take them off and let us examine the contents. There's much here that makes no sense.”

And that's when Dorso saw it, or rather him. On the other ship, but close, looking across at Dorso in complete shock. A young man, perhaps in his late teens or early twenties, was standing there, and he was staring at Dorso almost as if he recognized him, or at least knew that he was drastically out of place—or better yet, out of time. The young man looked down and seemed to jab at something Dorso just caught sight of before there was another blinding white flash and Dorso and Frank were back on the step of his house, waving goodbye to his mother as if only a hundredth of a second had gone by.