The Wikkeling (20 page)

“What's the DBA report?”

“Not a storage issue—it's in the Intelligence. Anyway, the system is adding only.”

“
Adding only?
” said Tom, speaking into his phone and looking blankly at Elton.

“Right—no subtraction.”

The elevator doors opened, and Tom and Elton strode into a high-ceilinged hallway with one full glass wall that looked out over the Addition. From here, above the surrounding buildings, one could see the haze of pollution that covered everything in a yellow-grey cloud, through which poked some of the
taller buildings, like this one.

Tom and Elton had no time to enjoy the view. They passed through a pair of automatic doors into a conference room containing a large table surrounded by twenty beige swivel-chairs.

On the wall hung a large screen, and on the screen was a face—the Virtual Operator of the System Manager. Tom had never liked the image, which had been designed before he worked at the company. The face had scarcely any nose or chin, and featured a pale haze of thin hair and light yellow eyes. The face flickered occasionally, a glitch that no one ever seemed to be able to fix. The Virtual Operator was the graphical interface for the System Manager, a program that interacted with the Intelligence Kernal, which directed all General Subsidiary Applications. Tom, though he could recite this, didn't fully understand what it meant, and this was one reason he never adequately explained his job to his daughter: he couldn't explain it to himself.

“GOOD MORNING TOM,” said the Operator. When it spoke, its mouth hung open and the words emerged scratchily from the speakers at the side of the screen.

“There's a glitch in the Intelligence,” said Tom. “Diagnose and repair.”

“DIAGNOSING.” The Operator's face flickered out of sight for a moment, and then returned. “THE GLITCH YOU REFER TO IS A GRADUATED ADJUSTMENT ALGORITHM, CURRENTLY ENGAGED TO COUNTER MALICIOUS SYSTEM CONTENT REMOVAL.”

“Malicious removal?” said Tom. “What's the nature of the attack?”

The Operator looked at Tom with an expression he'd never seen it make before. It appeared . . . confused.
“TOM,”
it said,
“WHERE DO HENRIETTA AND HER FRIENDS GO AFTER SCHOOL?”

W
hile Henrietta, at school, wrote compositions and figured math problems, and while Aline, at home, generated accounting statistics for her clients, and while Tom, at work, tried to repair the glitch in the Intelligence Kernal, developments continued on the empty street outside their house.

More yellow vehicles arrived, in various shapes and sizes. Some looked like crustaceans, others like giraffes. Some carried massive rollers, others massive lungs. They lined up one after another and revved their engines.

The spectacle that followed was as precise as a parade. Each machine moved over the street in succession, performing the task for which it was designed. First, a massive caterpillar with jackhammer legs hammered the street into shards, and then the shards were sucked up by an enormous vacuum cleaner. Underneath the shards, a narrow old road of red bricks was revealed, which shone in the yellow autumn light just as Henrietta, Gary, and Rose had often seen through the attic windows.

The next row of vehicles used gigantic knife attachments to slice away the edge of the present street and widen it by removing the sidewalks, as well as some of the front yard of every house.

What was the purpose of all of this? The city had recently concluded, through an extensive systemwide analysis, that busy roads operate at higher efficiency if sidewalks and lawns (which scarcely anyone ever used anyway) were turned into lanes. There was one problem with this plan, however: Henrietta's house.

Henrietta's house had no front lawn. Aside from two rows of flowers and the sidewalk, it already abutted the street. The machines did what they could, lapping up the sidewalk and the flowers and leaving Henrietta's front door opening right onto what would shortly be a lane of traffic.

Next, massive dump trucks spilled mounds of hot asphalt over the bricks, up and down the block. Then a paver built to the exact width of the new street lowered its enormous roller and squashed the mounds into a steaming black plain, and a sprinkler at the rear sprayed atomized chemicals that instantly set the new surface, releasing a tremendous flowery stench. Lastly, a paint truck rolled through, squirting streams of quick-drying yellow paint—some solid lines, some dotted, some double—that defined the lanes.

Once upon a time this block had been a sleepy brick boulevard bordered on both sides by maple trees. Then it grew to a busy four-lane road with sidewalks and no trees. Now it was a six-lane highway.

Workers ascended the utility poles along the street and added the appropriate traffic signals before reconnecting the electricity and turning everything back on. The crosswalk signs were all removed, as there were no more sidewalks. The entire street had become permanently D
ON'T
W
ALK
.

The construction vehicles retreated, and the street reopened. Traffic flooded into the new lanes, producing instantaneous gridlock.

If it weren't for Henrietta's house, the road could have been wider. If a map were made of the street now, it would show Henrietta's house protruding forward from the even line of identical houses until it nearly stumbled into the street. One might wonder, looking at it from that perspective, just how long it would be before Henrietta's house went the way of the sidewalks—the way of the maple trees—the way of anything that pinched the growth of the road.

T
he school day was largely uneventful. Ms. Span was mostly pleased with the results of the Competency Exam, and she indulged a relaxed morning, smiling, nodding and dispensing universal appreciations. Tomorrow, her attentions would anxiously redirect themselves toward the next Exam, but for now she was looking back from the safe side of the hurdle they'd jumped together. Even Henrietta, though reclassified, was ensconced within the glow of the class's success.

After school, while Henrietta and Gary stood in line at the turnaround waiting for the bus, Henrietta told him she was At Risk. Gary immediately suggested that they both get Finished on purpose and become a garbage-collecting team, a proposal that didn't seem too terrible—but the incalculable amount of grief Henrietta would endure from her parents kept her from seriously considering the idea. She had to pull up her grades.

“You could cheat,” said Gary.

“I can't,” said Henrietta, shaking her head.

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I'm just not that kind of person.”

“Well, I am,” said Gary. He puffed out his chest a little.

“That's one of the things I like about you, actually,” said Henrietta.

Gary punched her arm, and she punched his arm, and then he punched his own arm as Rose approached.

“Henrietta and I are going to become a garbage-collecting team,” said Gary.

“Can I be on it?” said Rose.

“Definitely,” said Gary.

“I have something else to tell you guys,” said Henrietta as the buses slowly approached the school from far up the clogged street. She launched into the story of Mister Lady's disappearance the previous evening, which she'd been wanting to tell them since it happened.

“You saw Mister Lady
reading
?” said Gary, shaking his head in disbelief. “We always joked.”

“She turned the page with a claw.”

“Do you think she was angry that you caught her?”

“I don't know. I was so upset already that I wasn't paying attention. Then, before I knew it, she was gone.”

“She wanted to go home,” said Rose. “Back to the old town.”

The buses arrived, and the children boarded together and strapped themselves in. The ride was noisy as always, what with other children talking and the constant eruption of ads from outside. They sat silently.

As the bus approached Henrietta's and Gary's stop, Henrietta noticed it wasn't slowing. She craned her neck and looked out the window.

“We're missing our stop,” she said. “We're—” She saw the massive new street. There were no sidewalks anymore. If the bus dropped them off, they'd be standing right in traffic.

“The road!” said Henrietta.

“What is it?” said Gary, straining to see.

The bus rolled up to Henrietta's house and opened its door at the entrance to Henrietta's driveway. From behind came the predictable litany:

“GOT FINISHED?
ATTEND THE GARBAGE ELIMINATION INSTITUTE.
WHEN SCHOOL ENDS, THIS BEGINS!”

“DINNER COOKIES ARE DINNER AND DESSERT!
TOTALLY EFFICIENT!”

“Let's go,” Henrietta shouted over the din. They unbuckled themselves and disembarked, and the bus computer logged them out, messaging their whereabouts to their parents' phones. They walked up the driveway to the carport.

“Look at my front door!” said Henrietta, pointing. The door now stood right at the edge of the freshly paved road, with a plank nailed across to keep it from opening.

“How will we get in?” said Gary.

“Over here,” said Henrietta, going to the side door near the rear of the house, next to the narrow strip of plastic grass that separated Henrietta's house from the neighbors behind.

Her mother opened the door and looked down at the three of them. Henrietta expected her to be unhappy. After all, their house was now inches from six roaring lanes of traffic, and Henrietta had just brought her friends over even though she was grounded. But, surprisingly, her mother looked cheerful.

“Come in!” she said to them, and they filed into the kitchen to find a paper plate on the table piled high with Dinner Cookies.

“I thought you might need some fuel for studying,” said Henrietta's mother.

“Thanks,” said Gary. He immediately crammed one cookie in his mouth and another in his pants pocket.

“Mom,” said Henrietta, a little uncertain how to proceed in light of her mother's unexpected good mood, “I know I'm grounded, but Gary said he'd help Rose and I study.”

“Study hard!” said her mother, smiling.

Henrietta hesitated a little, still perplexed.

“Go ahead, silly!” said her mother, shooing the three of them amiably toward Henrietta's room.

T
hey climbed directly into the attic and began searching for Mister Lady. Despite the considerable hours they'd spent up there during the past weeks, the network of paths through the antiques behind the bookshelves were still only partly explored, even by the intrepid Rose. Some places they just couldn't get to—spaces that had been completely boxed off by walls of old furniture.

After hunting for awhile to no avail, they regrouped glumly at the couch.

“I guess she decided she'd gotten better,” said Henrietta.

“That's good, right?” said Gary.

“It's just that I liked her. And I thought she liked us.”

“She did like us,” said Rose. “But she had things to do.”

“If I was lost and injured, I'd want to get back home,” said Gary.

“I wonder if she has a family,” Henrietta mused. “Do you suppose that other cat we saw is her mate?”

They went over to the windows, and looked down on the old town. The street was crowded, as it usually was at this time, with warmly dressed children returning home from school, laughing and talking, some of them even walking down the middle of the empty brick street. Mister Lady was nowhere to be seen, but Henrietta saw something else, quite unexpectedly, that caught her attention.

“Look,” she said. “By the stump.” The stump was currently crawling with children playing a game of tag, scurrying around the edges and across the top in pursuit and flight.

“What?” said Gary.

“That kid, there.” Henrietta pointed. There was one child standing at the base of the stump who didn't look quite right. Dressed in a yellow button-up shirt and yellow pants, its face was not a person's face.