The Rendering (15 page)

“Throw the keys between us, Bug,” Poppy said.

I saw where this was going. I tossed the keys and leapt backward.

Poppy and Cosmo moved lightning fast. She launched forward and he pivoted, and I heard the smack of blows falling without actually seeing the punches. Then she swept Cosmo’s ankles from under him and he twisted her arm while back-flipping.

After another flurry of blows, she somersaulted over him and landed in a combat crouch. With the keys in her hand.

She dangled them at Cosmo, teasing him. But you can’t out-tease Cosmo: during the fight, he’d slipped a pair of little devil horns—Jamie’s Halloween costume from the year before—onto Poppy’s head.

“Nice horns,” he said.

She cocked her head, confused. Then she felt them. She reached up, took the horns off, and stepped toward him threateningly. He backed off and raised his hands.

“Fine,” he said. “You drive. You’ll look great sitting behind the wheel of this beautiful luxury automobile.”

He patted the dusty minivan.

After they drove off, I went back to Jamie’s bedroom and watched her fool around with
CircuitBoard
on her laptop. The screen looked a little like … a circuit board. Except more colorful and animated.

“Where’s the Fire button?” I asked, sitting beside her.

“Bug.”
Jamie snorted. “You know there’s no Fire button.”

“Then how’re you supposed to shoot?”

“You’re not. You have to use your brain instead.”

“Well, that’s no fun,” I said. “Auntie M, you there?”

“Right here,” the laptop said.

“What’s our job, then?”

“To locate Roach,” my aunt said. “To find any trace of him.”

“What, you mean search for him online?” I asked.

“Not exactly. Larkspur synced Jamie’s laptop with the Protocol, and I’m finishing a little … custom coding right now. There.”

“All done?” Jamie asked.

“Give her a test-drive,” my aunt said.

Jamie pressed Go on the
CircuitBoard
menu and the dragonfly appeared on-screen.

“Looking good,” my aunt’s voice said. “Let me connect you to one of the central Reslocs.”

The screen fuzzed for a second, then refocused. We were
online. And let me try to express, in one word, what we saw: the most boring spreadsheet in the world.

That is seven words, Douglas
.

Don’t blame me. I was too bored to count.

We saw code directories and text flows and line after line of numbers. Looked like a math textbook from hell.

“I’ll direct you toward Roach’s point of origin,” my aunt said. “I suspect he’s routed through Resloc 87u23bi94-13.”

“Why don’t
you
search?” I asked.

“I’m overextended. I’m trying to deal with this new Awareness—”

“The corrupt data?”

“The corrupt data from my
brain,”
she said. “It seems to be trying to communicate with me. Besides, the dragonfly is a perfect observation and research tool.”

“Yeah, but it can’t actually
do
anything,” I said. “Like shoot.”

“You don’t need to shoot, Doug. You need to gather information. Good luck.”

“Wait!” I said. “How much time do you have?”

“Less than two hours.”

Then she was gone.

Jamie connected the joystick I’d given her a few months earlier in a failed attempt to teach her to play
Arsenal Five
, and in a second, the dragonfly started moving.

Jamie isn’t much for real video games, but I have to admit she was good at this. She followed the information flows toward the Resloc (which is some kind of Net address I don’t understand) my aunt had mentioned. She wormed her way in somehow—matching packets, she said—and we were there.

Everything changed.

From text screens and spreadsheet columns to streaming graphics, like an animated film. Incredible, with crisp glowing rivers of data and bulbous memory buffers and flowing software shapes.

Amazing. And this was only the outskirt of Roach’s domain.

Jamie buzzed around for a few minutes, getting the hang of the controls in the new environment.

“You want me to try?” I asked.

“The dragonfly’s coded to me,” she said. “Besides, you’d probably start chasing after a carapace gun.”

“Carapace
rifle.”
I watched her for another minute. “Actually, you’re good with that thing.”

A little smile curved at her mouth. “Thanks.”

“Weird, because you’re crap at
HARP.”

“HARP
is a lame—ooh, what’s that?” She darted the dragonfly toward a scrolling spiral of information. “That’s the Resloc. Now we start downloading.”

She buzzed through thousands of gigabytes of memory stacks, darting through directories and file structures,
drilling deeper and deeper into the information, chasing that Resloc … until she emerged on the other side.

We gasped.

“That’s—” she said, then stopped, staring as streaming video replaced the data files.

“The auditorium,” I finished. “At school.”

On her screen, we saw two things:

And inside the real auditorium?

Fear. Tears and whimpers. Dread.

Right now—watching live—we saw our entire neighborhood crammed inside the auditorium. Our neighbors and teachers and friends packed, sardine-tight, in a cramped line that snaked across the floor and disappeared through the double doors.

Little kids wept. Couples held hands tight. Everyone looked scared—the teachers, the firefighters. The people in business suits, the kids in fast-food uniforms. Letitia Harrod, the woman who worked at Tar-Mart.

Worse than scared.
Terrified
.

At each of the exits stood two heavily armed VIRUS soldiers, and a dozen more patrolled the line.

Keeping people quiet.

Keeping them frightened.

And Roach stood, with Hund by his side, at a glossy black booth on the stage. One of his scanning booths.

“Next!” Roach said.

The soldiers shoved the person in front—Mrs. Calloway, the school nurse—into the booth. The door shimmered closed and Roach pressed a button.

Nothing much happened in the auditorium, but back in Jamie’s bedroom?

The lights dimmed briefly, like that scanning booth sucked all the electricity from the town’s grid. Then the door shimmered open and Mrs. Calloway was gone.

Just … gone.

“She must’ve—” Jamie spoke in a horrified whisper. “They must’ve pulled her out the other side.”

“Except they didn’t,” I said. “What’s that?” I touched the monitor, where a row of faint oblong icons appeared.

Jamie buzzed the dragonfly over and tapped a few
CircuitBoard
commands. And when the next person—our mailman—was pushed into the machine, another oblong object appeared.

“That’s a biodigital data file,” Jamie gasped. “He’s already started.”

“You mean … 
that
’s Mrs. Calloway?”

“What’s left of her.”

“He’s scanning our entire neighborhood.”

“Not just their minds—their bodies, too. That’s why he’s using that booth.”

“This is what my aunt meant about him starting small?”

“Yeah, the people he scans today will slave away for him in cyberspace, building capacity for more and more workers until—” She suddenly looked sick. “Oh my God. Over there.”

On the screen, two people stood trembling near the end of the line, holding each other tight.

“My parents,” Jamie whispered.

The minivan pulled to a stop in front of the electric company substation.

I’d lived five minutes away my whole life and never noticed the place: a two-story square brick building behind a chain-link fence, like a miniature power station. Exactly the sort of bland utility building you walk past every day and never see.

The skunks filed onto the sidewalk, Cosmo from behind the wheel, because Poppy just couldn’t see herself driving a minivan.

“There.” Larkspur pointed to an array of satellite dishes on the substation roof. “A flux-phase transformer.”

“What’s a flux-phase transformer?” Cosmo asked.

“A doorway,” Larkspur said. “We’ll jack in there.”

“Jack in?” Cosmo asked, one eyebrow twitching.

“Yes,” Larkspur said. “Jack in to the Net, to travel to San Diego.”

“I know what you
mean,”
Cosmo said. “It just sounds funny when you say it.”

“Would you prefer ‘engage the biodigital transfer Protocol’?”

Poppy snorted. “Ignore him, big guy.” She bounded from the street to the top of the minivan, and from there to the roof of the substation and said, “Jack in!”

“See?” Cosmo told Larkspur.
“That
is how you say it.”

“Jack in!” Larkspur said in a monotone, then looked dubiously at Cosmo. “No?”

“Needs a little work,” Cosmo said, and commando-climbed the wall.

Larkspur jumped. With the power of his armored legs, he can leap three or four stories straight up without trouble.

Of course,
landing
is a different story. The concrete cracked under his feet when he hit the roof near a satellite dish. “Oops.”

“Which one’s the trans-plotz inducer?” Poppy asked.

“The flux-phrase transformer.” Larkspur pointed. “There.”

It was just a metal housing, didn’t look like much. But Larkspur put his hands out and stood there for a second. Then he shimmered. Flickered.

And was gone.

A moment later, Poppy followed.

Cosmo looked around. “Was it something I said?” Then he disappeared, too.

There’s a small gray building—a shed, really—on a naval base in San Diego with a sign outside that says
LANDSCAPING
. The most boring, unimportant building around.

And you know what’s inside?

Landscaping tools. Rakes, blowers, tarps.

The most boring, unimportant stuff around.

But if you look closely at the top left corner of the shed—focusing behind the cobwebs—a hidden camera scans your retinas. And if you curl your palm around the correct shovel handle, your handprint and heartbeat signature are measured and identified. And if you hold still for four seconds, you’re inspected inside and out—with X-ray, CAT scan, and feature recognition.

Then, if you pass all those tests, plus a voiceprint match
during which you say the correct password, the shed works like an elevator, dropping you fifteen stories underground.

Where the guards inspect you.

In other words, forget about the front door.

Which is why the skunks chose another entrance. One hundred and seventy feet below the landscaping shed, they whirred through transoptic cables, seeking output.

They couldn’t reanimate just anywhere. They needed digital devices of sufficient technological complexity. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but—

The data that composes the skunks’ “real world” forms requires a three-phase biogenic mapping conduit, which can be approximated through the radiant quantum excitation of—

Enough, enough!

All she’s saying is they can’t transform from digital information to superskunks with just an electric toothbrush and a lightbulb; they need heavy-duty technology.

Anyway, they were searching for output and found a bank of Cray workstations—out-of-date but powerful—running low-priority applications in a dark and empty room.

Perfect.

“Did anyone catch the football scores on the way through the Net?” Cosmo asked as he flickered into solidity.

Larkspur ignored him and checked his wrist display.

“The uplink’s down the hall. Room C-11.” He opened the door. “Shall we?”

Fifteen seconds later, the door to room C-11 smashed open.

Four technicians were inside, wearing white lab coats and sneakers. For a moment, they stared blankly at the broken door, like they couldn’t comprehend what had happened. Then they got a closer look at Poppy—and screamed and huddled in the corner.

“You need to work on your people skills,” Cosmo said, entering behind her.

Poppy ignored him and they fanned out, searched the room, and found the uplink, which looked like a cross between a fire hydrant and a high-tech bubble gum machine. Easy as that. Except in the corner, one of the technicians slowly moved her hand toward an alarm switch. None of the skunks noticed.

“Easy as stealing hair from a wig shop,” Cosmo said.

Poppy looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s like ‘easy as taking candy from a baby.’ ”

“Then just say, ‘easy as taking candy from a baby.’ ”

“That’s just
mean,”
Cosmo said. “Taking candy from babies.”

“Larkspur?” Poppy said. “Would you tell him?”

Larkspur tucked the uplink under his arm, and the technician in the corner flicked the switch.

A siren shrieked.

The skunks looked at one another.

Poppy smiled. “This may not be a waste of time after all,” she said.

She pulled her crowbar and bounded into the hall.