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  For my childhood friends

  Tom Swift, Pippi Longstocking, Danny Dunn, and Encyclopedia Brown. We had some fun.

  Episode One

  The Brazen Bull

  1

  Bonked

  Most days, Flinkwater, Iowa, is a pretty boring place.

  So boring that one boring June afternoon the most non-boring thing I could think of was to stop by Theo Winkleman’s to check out his new UltraTab, which was how I discovered the very first person to be bonked by a computer.

  Theo’s mother greeted me at the door.

  “Go right on back, Ginger. Theo hasn’t lifted his eyes from that tablet all day. Please tell him that his mother, a flesh-and-blood human being, will be expecting him for supper in half an hour.”

  I am not a girl who normally makes a habit of visiting boys in their bedrooms. If only because of the boy smell. But as I mentioned, I was bored, and I really did want to see Theo’s new ultra-high-rez sixty-centimeter D-Monix tablet.

  Josh Stevens, the founder and CEO of D-Monix, Inc., claimed that the UltraTab image space was so big and so real you could dive right into it. At least that was what he said in the ads. Josh Stevens had been TechTitan’s Official #1 Hottie for five years running, so nobody minded much when he exaggerated.

  I was thinking of getting one for myself. An UltraTab, not a Josh Stevens.

  Theo was propped up on his bed with the UltraTab resting on his belly. His hands were locked on its paper-thin edges, and he was staring deep into the screen, totally entranced. This was perfectly normal for Theo, who had recently turned fourteen—just a few months older than me. He had spent thirteen of those years gazing into one sort of display or another. Mostly playing war games.

  I, of course, began to talk. I don’t remember what I was saying. I do not always pay close attention to the sound units emerging from my mouth. I figure if I keep talking, eventually I will say something amazing. Possibly something sufficiently amazing to extract Theo from whatever virtual violence he was enjoying at the moment.

  I don’t know how long I went on, but I finally noticed that Theo had not moved a muscle since I entered the room. Also, there was a string of drool running from the corner of his mouth onto his Godzilla T-shirt. And the pupils of his eyes had constricted to the size of pinpricks. And he had wet his pants.

  That was not normal.

  Not even for Theo.

  You are probably wondering what Theo was staring at.

  I was too, so while Theo’s mom was calling 911, I took a peek at his tab. An animated bronze-colored bull was charging back and forth across the display, ramming its horns into the edges of the deep blue image space.

  You probably think that’s odd, if you don’t live in Flinkwater. The Brazen Bulls are our football team. Everybody supports the Bulls, although they almost always lose. Even the pathetic Halibut Haulers kicked our Brazen butts last year.

  The animation is the Official Brazen Bull Screenie. Go, Bulls! You can download it free at flinkwaterbrazenbulls.edu.

  But I wouldn’t, if I were you. As I watched the bull bouncing across the screen, I got a creepy feeling behind my eyeballs, like that feeling you get when you see something really disgusting but for some reason you want to keep looking.

  I jerked my eyes away.

  I never liked that Brazen Bull.

  The first thing the paramedics asked after checking Theo’s vitals was, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When I got here he was bonked.”

  “Bonked?”

  “I don’t know what else to call it.” I pointed at Theo. “What would you call it?”

  The paramedic looked at the very bonked-looking Theo and shrugged her shoulders.

  “Bonked works for me.”

  Allow me to introduce myself properly. My full name is Guinevere Marie Crump and yes, thank you very much, I know it’s a stupid name, which is why everybody except my grandmother Guinevere calls me Ginger, or Gin if you want, even though I do not drink. I am, according to my mother, thirteen going on thirty. Or going on three, if she’s in a bad mood.

  You might think that thirteen is young for a high school student, but at Flinkwater High the average graduation age is sixteen, so there is really nothing odd about it.

  You should also know that I am five feet nine inches tall, I have incredibly lush and glossy reddish­-gold hair that hangs halfway down my back, my eyes are bright green, my lips are straight out of a lipstick ad, my complexion is utterly zit free, and I have a body like a swimsuit model.

  Okay, I made all that up. You have to watch out for me.

  The truth is, except for the excessive curliness of my almost-but-not-quite-red hair, I am mostly invisible. Maybe you think it would be cool to be invisible, and it would be, sometimes. But that’s not the kind of invisible I’m talking about. Which is probably why I’m always doing things to get myself in trouble. Because I would rather not be. Invisible, that is.

  I don’t know why I’m going on about this. If you want to know what I really look like, go to the school website. You will find a truly hideous photo of a scrawny curly-headed mop-top receiving second place in the regional spelling bee. That’s me: Ms. Second Place. I missed on the word “floccinaucinihilipilification,” if you can believe it. I mean, who doesn’t know how to spell floccinaucinihilipilification? I got a red ribbon and a ten-dollar gift certificate for Burger Barn. Definitely not worth the trouble of reading the entire stupid dictionary from “aardvark” to “zyzzyra.”

  Back to Theo Winkleman. I mentioned that he was the first person to be bonked, which of course implies that there was a second. But before I get into that, maybe I should say more about Flinkwater. We are somewhat notorious. Flinkwater, Iowa, is the home of ACPOD, the largest manufacturer of Articulated Computerized Peripheral Devices in the world. If you own a robot, it probably came from Flinkwater.

  What’s that? You have no robots? Not even a DustBot? Do you do your own vacuuming? Do you mow your lawn yourself? Are you insane? What do you do if you have to defuse a bomb?

  Okay, so maybe not everybody has a robot. Yet. But just you wait. And while you’re sitting in your robot-free household waiting, you might want to consider getting indoor plumbing. And electricity.

  Oops. I am being sarcastic again.

  The reason I mention ACPOD is because living in Flinkwater means living around large numbers of Very Smart, Very Geeky people. In other words, ACPOD engineers. Flinkwater has engineers the way Addy Gumm’s cats have fleas. In fact, ACPOD employs half of Flinkwater’s adult population—including Royce and Amanda Crump, my parents.

  Do I need to tell you that Very Smart, Very Geeky parents produce Very Smart, Very Geeky kids?

  2

  J.G.

  The second kid to get bonked was Johnston George. That’s not backward—it’s his real name. Everybody calls him J.G., and he is—or rather was—a psychotic monster. At least that’s how I thought of him. Instead of spending his free time playing hyperviolent video games like most boys, J.G. went out and performed actual acts of physical violence, like tying a string of firecrackers to Barney’s tail. Barney is my cat. I will never forgive
J.G. for that and neither will Barney. Also, J.G. once put a live rat snake in Myke Duchakis’s locker.

  You may wonder why J.G. was not in jail. Others have pondered that same question. According to my mother, it’s because his father is the president of ACPOD. That’s right—J.G. was the son of George G. George. If you are wondering what George G. George’s middle initial stands for, I will give you one guess.

  According to the browsing history on his tablet, J.G. had recently been perusing a site specializing in X-rated manga. I do not wish to know more. But by the time J.G.’s mom found him drooling over his tablet, the screen displayed only the bouncing Brazen Bull.

  This happened just a few hours after I had discovered the comatose Theo Winkleman. By midnight, thirteen more Flinkwater High students, one teacher, and five ACPOD engineers had bonked.

  The doctors at the Gilbert Bates Medical Center quickly realized they had an epidemic on their hands. They attributed it to illegal drugs, food poisoning, mass hysteria, or allergies, until one of the paramedics pointed out that every single coma patient had been staring into his or her computer screen.

  The doctors dubbed the affliction Spontaneous Computer-Induced Catatonia. SCIC for short.

  I have noticed that people like to know the names of things. It gives them the illusion that they have some control over it. Whatever “it” is. I have observed this phenomenon in old Addy Gumm, who is passionate about cats, birds, and little else. One day while I was visiting her, she spotted a small russet-colored bird at her feeder and became extremely agitated. This was a bird she did not know! She paged frantically through her bird books until she found a picture of a fox sparrow. As soon as she was able to attach a name to the bird, she relaxed. The bird was hers.

  Similarly, once the doctors came up with the name SCIC, everybody sort of relaxed. Now they had a name for it, and they could set about discovering a cure.

  They failed.

  3

  My Father

  The next morning, George G. George, father of the infamous J.G., called. My dad took the call on the kitchen screen. George George’s big square face looked out over our breakfast table.

  “Crump! I’ve got seventeen comatose engineers, Crump! My son is a vegetable! I want you to find out what’s going on! I want answers and I want them now! Do your job, Crump!”

  My father, the Director of Cyber-Security Services for ACPOD, objected, saying, “George, this would seem to be a medical issue, not a cyber-security matter.”

  “The doctors think it might be a virus!” George G. George said. “You do viruses!”

  “I do computer viruses,” said my father.

  “A virus is a virus!” said George G. George. “My son was on his computer when he was afflicted. Find it! Fix it!” George G. George was an executive, not an engineer. In his own way, he was just as much a bully as his son J.G.

  Of course one of the first things my dad did was find out exactly what the victims had been doing on their computers when they bonked. I found him in the backyard staring into his phone while riding around in circles on his WheelBot—a self-propelled, gyroscopically-controlled unicycle manufactured, naturally, by ACPOD. This was my father’s version of “exercise.” Barney was sitting on the patio, twitching his tail, watching.

  “What’s he looking at?” I asked Barney.

  My dad overheard that. “A list of sites the SCIC victims were visiting,” he said without stopping or looking up. “The only thing they all have in common is that ridiculous screen saver.”

  “Are you talking about the Brazen Bull?” I asked as he rolled away from me.

  “Precisely.”

  “It’s not a screen saver, Dad. It’s a screenie!”

  Modern displays, as I’m sure you are aware, have not been subject to “burn-in” since the last millennium. Calling a screenie a “screen saver” is like calling your refrigerator an “ice box.”

  “Screenie, screen saver, whatever—it’s still ridiculous,” said my father.

  He had rolled all the way to the other side of the backyard, so I raised my voice. “If it’s ridiculous, how come everybody uses it?” Actually, I agreed with him about the bull—I had disabled it on my own tab—but I like to argue.

  The WheelBot brought him back around. “Ridiculous or not, I don’t see how that bull animation could cause SCIC. But we’re taking a closer look at it just the same.” He rolled off for another lap as Barney and I went back into the house to check out the contents of the ice box.

  I mean, refrigerator.

  I figured my dad and the ACPOD engineers could handle a plague of comas. This was Flinkwater after all. Half of them were certified geniuses, and the other half were even smarter. There had to be enough wide-awake geniuses left to solve a little thing like this. I wasn’t really too worried.

  But I should have been. Worried, that is.

  4

  My Mother

  Josh Stevens was once again featured on the splash page of the TechTitan site. I was eating a peanut butter and pickle sandwich while admiring his chiseled features on my tablet when my mom got home from work. She looked at Josh’s image and said, with a disdainful sniff, “You can do better.”

  I don’t know if it’s ironic or what, but my mother, the formidable Amanda Crump, is the Human Resources Director of ACPOD. That means she’s in charge of dealing with people, which is like putting a pit bull in charge of a cat show. I should also mention that she is six feet two inches tall in her spike heels, which is five inches taller than my elegantly compact and slightly rotund father. She is fashion-model thin, with points and edges and projections that give her a forbidding and occasionally alarming presence. Her dye-bottle-black hair is spiky and short, and she has laser beams instead of eyes.

  Okay, I exaggerate about the eyes, but she is one scary mom. I am actually quite proud of her.

  “Better than what?” I asked.

  “Him.” She stabbed a red-nailed finger at the image of Josh Stevens.

  “Better looking?” I asked.

  “He has a pretty face, but looks aren’t everything. And he’s more than three times your age.”

  “He’s also got about a hundred bazillion dollars,” I pointed out. “Besides, you don’t know him.”

  “Don’t I?” She gazed at me for a moment with slitted eyes, then seemed to come to a decision. “You’re old enough to know this, I suppose. The fact is, I dated Josh a few times.”

  Nothing she could have said would have shocked me more. I knew that Mom had gone to college at Stanford University at the same time as Josh Stevens and my dad. Even Gilbert Bates, the man who had founded ACPOD, had gone to Stanford. It was a big school.

  “Dated?” I squeaked.

  “I was young and foolish,” she said, “a condition with which you should be intimately familiar.”

  That’s an example of Mom’s dry sense of humor. It gets drier.

  “Why did he break up with you?” I asked.

  She cocked her left eyebrow and fixed her laser-beam eyes on me. I could have sworn I heard a click.

  “I,” she said, “broke up with him.”

  “You broke up with Josh Stevens?”

  “Of course,” she said, as if breaking up with the Sexiest Man Alive was part of everyone’s résumé. “That was before I met your father. Speaking of whom, is he home?”

  “I think he’s in his study.”

  She left the kitchen while I munched my sandwich and continued gazing at Josh Stevens. True, he was as old as my parents, and maybe my mom didn’t like him, but she didn’t like hardly anybody, and Josh had a great smile.

  Five seconds later I heard my mother scream.

  That was alarming because my mother was not a screamer. A mouse? A mouse would find itself instantly impaled on one of her spike heels. A grizzly bear? My mother would emerge from suc
h an encounter wearing a necklace fashioned from its claws.

  I dropped my sandwich and ran down the hall to my father’s study. Dad was sitting at his desk in front of his computer, his eyes unfocused, his mouth hanging open, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

  “He’s bonked,” I said.

  Mom looked at me, her eyes wide with fear. That scared me even worse than Dad being bonked—I had never seen my mother afraid. She must have seen how much her being scared was scaring me, because one second later she was all business, checking his pulse with one hand while grabbing for her phone with the other. I looked at the screen, and was not at all surprised to see the Brazen Bull bouncing off the sides of Dad’s state-of-the-art eighteen-hundred-centimeter D-Monix infinity screen.

  My mother can be magnificently unreasonable when she gets disturbed, and I had never seen her so disturbed as this. I almost felt sorry for the person who answered the phone at the Gilbert Bates Medical Center.

  “Three hours?” she screeched. “Not acceptable! Send an ambulance here right now!”

  Never mind that hundreds of similar calls were coming in, and that there were only so many paramedics to go around.

  “Don’t you dare tell me to be reasonable,” my mother said, her red-nailed hand gripping the phone so hard I was sure the plastic casing would shatter. “I am a taxpayer, an ACPOD employee, and a board member of your pathetic excuse for a hospi­tal. Get somebody out here NOW!”

  She listened for a moment, breathing hard through her nose.

  “Let me speak to your supervisor,” she said. “NOW!” Her favorite word: “Now!”

  I kept looking at my dad. He looked just like Theo Winkleman had, scarily blank and slack faced, except he hadn’t wet his pants.