The Flinkwater Factor Read online

My mother, shooting laser beams out of her eyes and tapping the razor-sharp toe of her needle-heeled shoes on the floor, continued to cut whoever was on the other end of the phone into ribbons with her voice.

  Ten minutes later the paramedics arrived.

  Mom does have a way of getting things done.

  5

  The Problem with Engineers

  It was a long night. The hospital was crazy, with new SCIC victims showing up one after another. All they could do was line them up in the ER because it was so crowded. My mother and I were asked to leave, but Mom refused to budge from Dad’s side. Finally, sometime after midnight, a doctor with dark rings under his bloodshot eyes examined my father and pronounced him bonked. As if we didn’t know.

  “His vitals are strong,” the doctor assured us. “There is no cause for worry.”

  “No cause for worry?” my mother said. “Look at him!”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” the doctor said.

  “Fine? He’s a vegetable! I want you to wake him up! NOW!”

  The doctor shook his head wearily, turned his back, and walked over to the next patient. I thought Mom was going to tackle him, but before she could act, two burly orderlies grabbed her arms and led us out of the hospital, smiling grimly at her demands and threats. They left us out on the sidewalk and stood in the doorway with their arms crossed, making it clear that we would not be allowed back inside.

  There was nothing we could do. I thought Mom was about to explode. I mean, literally.

  The weird thing was that seeing Mom that way helped me keep it together. I was scared to my bones—who wouldn’t be? My dad was gone. But Mom was freaked out enough for both of us, so instead of freaking out along with her, I got calm.

  “Mom,” I said, “if Dad were here he’d tell us to go home and get some rest. He’d tell us to let the doctors do their job.”

  She whirled on me, and for a second I thought I was a goner, but then her face went slack, from rage to despair in the blink of an eye.

  “You’re right, honey,” she said.

  We went home.

  It took forever to get to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw that Brazen Bull charging back and forth, ramming its golden horns into the boundaries of an imaginary space. Dad had suspected that the bull might have something to do with SCIC, so why would he risk playing the animation? It didn’t make sense.

  Or did it? Before my father became ACPOD’s security chief he was an engineer, and there are two things to know about engineers.

  1) Engineers are incredibly smart.

  2) Engineers are incredibly stupid.

  If you tell an engineer that a building is about to collapse, the first thing he will do is walk straight into the building to figure out why. So naturally, when the ACPOD engineers heard about SCIC, they all got on their computers to check it out.

  I fell asleep and dreamed of Brazen Bulls.

  The next morning I found a note on the kitchen counter. Mom had gone back to the hospital to terrorize the doctors. No surprise there. I made myself a bowl of cereal and activated my tab. What I saw—or rather what I didn’t see—was the worst thing I could possibly imagine.

  The nets were down.

  6

  WWGBD?

  A plague of mysterious comas is one thing. And having my dad bonked was even scarier. But losing net access was like taking away the air. I tried every way I knew to get online—­checking out every potential cell signal and satellite I could find. Everything was blocked or disabled. I couldn’t even send a text.

  I ticked off every possibility I could think of. Electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear attack? No, because my tab still worked—I just couldn’t get a signal. Alien invasion? I looked out the window, but saw no mother ship hovering in the sky. The apocalypse? Probably not.

  I watched as several of our neighbors, deprived of net access, emerged from their doorways, blinking molelike in the bright morning sun. A black SUV with tinted windows and a microwave disk mounted on its roof rolled slowly past our house. A minute later a second black SUV drove by.

  Or it might have been the same one.

  I said to myself, “WWGBD?”

  What Would Gilbert Bates Do?

  Gilbert Bates, the legendary founder of ACPOD, was possibly the Smartest Person in the Universe. He had successfully hacked the CIA, Google, and the Swiss Financial Authority while still in high school. He got caught, of course, but while serving his three-year prison sentence, he invented the first functional AI-neurological interface, perfected the graphene logic chip, and founded ACPOD.

  His only competition for the Smartest Person in the Universe title was the equally amazing Josh Stevens. But Josh was so good-looking I figured Gilbert Bates had to be the smarter of the two. Okay, maybe I was prejudiced, because without Gilbert Bates the town of Flinkwater would be just another sleepy little dot on the Iowa map. We would hardly exist without him.

  Although lately we had been. Without him, I mean.

  Gilbert Bates had not been seen for a decade. He had disappeared mysteriously after one of the most tragic events in Flinkwater history.

  I don’t actually remember this—I was just a toddler at the time—but every kid in Flinkwater had been told the story of Gilbert Bates’s three-year-old son, Nigel, who had wandered off alone into the woods behind the Bates property. The woods were part of Flinkwater Park, a three-thousand-acre wildlife refuge between the town and the Raccoona River. Hundreds of volunteers joined the hunt for young Nigel. After days of searching, one of the boy’s shoes was discovered washed up along the west bank of the river. No other trace of Nigel was ever found.

  The boy was assumed to have drowned, and after a week the search was called off. Gilbert Bates’s wife Jenny, consumed by guilt and loss, continued to spend her days wandering alone through the park until one cold November day she threw herself into the gray waters of the Raccoona to join her lost son Nigel.

  Gilbert Bates, bereft over the loss of his family, sank into a deep depression.

  A few weeks later his secretary found a note on his desktop:

  Offline until further notice. —GB

  No one had seen him since. Occasionally someone claiming to be Gilbert Bates would communicate with the ACPOD board through an attorney. No one knew for sure if it was really him. Some said he was relaxing on a tropical beach. Others claimed he was dead. But every day, when confronted with a difficult problem, ACPOD engineers asked themselves, “What would Gilbert Bates do?” or WWGBD for short.

  WWGBD?

  What would Gilbert Bates do if he were suddenly and inexplicably deprived of net access?

  He would get back online no matter what. I thought extra hard for several seconds, then went to the pantry and grabbed a can of mackerel. Barney abandoned the DustBot he had been pursuing and bounded over to me.

  “Sorry, Barn,” I said. “No fish for you.” I offered him a scoop of kibble to keep him happy. He sniffed the dry food, gave me a scathing look, and went back to stalking the DustBot.

  7

  Addy Gumm

  Mackerel in hand, I grabbed my dad’s WheelBot and rode it up Bates Avenue to Addy Gumm’s ­bungalow—one of the twenty or thirty aging houses in the old, pre-ACPOD part of town. Addy’s house stood out. It hadn’t been painted in thirty years, and the aroma of cat urine wafted from every crevice. I parked the WheelBot next to her mailbox and followed the broken concrete path up to her house.

  The door opened the moment I stepped onto the porch. Addy doesn’t get many visitors. She had probably been watching out the window. I was rewarded by her dazzling yellow smile and an appalling cloud of cat stink.

  “Ginger Crump! This is a surprise!”

  “Hey, Addy,” I said, holding out the can of mackerel. “I found this in the parking lot at the Save-a-Lot. It must have fallen out of someb
ody’s cart when they were loading groceries into their car.”

  Addy frowned at the can in my hand. “That’s awful!” she said. “I wonder if we could find the rightful owner?”

  “’Fraid not,” I said. “I asked everywhere. There’s just no way we could ever track them down. I thought your kitties might enjoy it.”

  “Oh dear. Well, I suppose, if you’re sure. But if you find out who lost it, please let me know. I would insist on paying for it!”

  Addy Gumm would never accept charity from anyone.

  I looked past her into the living room. “Speaking of kitties, where are they?”

  “Oh, I herded them all out back. They do get to be a bit much sometimes.”

  “How many do you have now?”

  “Twenty-seven. I think.”

  Addy Gumm is considered by most Flinkwater residents to be a local embarrassment. Crazy Addy the Cat Lady, they call her. Several times a year she is visited by Animal Control, seeking an excuse to euthanize her pets and put her away in an institution. So far Addy has outsmarted them by obeying every local ordinance to the letter. There are no laws against owning twenty-seven cats, so long as they remain on the property and are well cared for.

  Her place does reek a bit, I admit.

  But here’s what I don’t like. Whenever anybody finds themselves with a cat they don’t want because they’re allergic, or they and the cat don’t see eye to eye on feeding times, door openings, et cetera, or they just can’t stand it . . . they dump the cat at Addy’s.

  I love Flinkwater, and, with a handful of exceptions, I love the people who live here. Unfortunately, some of them can be quite hypocritical.

  While Addy went out back to feed the mackerel to her cats, I went to work.

  Back in the Dark Ages people used copper-wire “telephone lines” for audio communication. It was as inefficient as traveling to China by rowboat, but it worked. Of course, these days everything is fiber optic or wireless, but there are still a few oldsters from the previous millennium who have phones attached to the wall by wires.

  One such person was Addy Gumm.

  I sat down next to her ancient telephone and picked up the handset. It was about the size of my forearm and attached to the base by a long, curly cord. I put it to my ear. At first I heard nothing, then I figured out I was holding it upside down. Once I got it switched around so the cord came out of the bottom of the handset, I heard a buzzing sound. It was working! I next tried to figure out how to place a call.

  Instead of buttons Addy’s phone had a clear plastic disk with holes cut in it. I tried poking my fingers into the holes. That didn’t work. I swiped my hand across the dial. It moved a little. I grabbed it around the edge and twisted it, like opening a jar. It wouldn’t go to the left, only to the right. I turned it all the way, then let go. After a few clicks, I heard a ring. A second later, a woman’s voice said, “Operator.”

  “Operator?” I said.

  “Operator,” the voice repeated.

  This is one of the reasons I do not like making voice calls. I prefer a menu that gives me specific choices, not a disembodied voice that offers a single, cryptic word to which there is no logical response. I was about to disconnect in frustration when the voice said, “Can I help you?”

  “Yes!” I said, then waited for the next prompt. It took a few seconds. I could hear the cats yowling as Addy distributed the mackerel.

  “How can I help you?” the voice inquired.

  “Can you connect me?”

  “What number, please?”

  I gave her the number of the smartest person I know outside of Flinkwater.

  Uncle Ashton lives in Florida, way back in the Everglades. Ashton used to work for the CIA. He claims he was just a “pencil-pushing bureaucrat.” But I think he was a spy. These days he never leaves the swamp—just hangs out with the alligators and cottonmouths and his collection of guns and his computers. “Keeping an eye on things,” he likes to say. Mom says he’s paranoid, but he knows everything about everything. That’s why I called him.

  He answered on the first ring with a booming “Hello!”

  “Uncle Ashton? It’s Ginger.”

  “Ginger!” His voice made the handset vibrate. “Y’all got out!”

  “Out?” I said, holding the phone away from my ear. “Out of where?”

  “Flinkwater! Y’all know they bubbled y’all, right?”

  “Huh?” I said. “They? Who? They did what?”

  “The gummint, baby! Department of Homeland Security. Ain’t nobody or nothin’ allowed in or out of Flinkwater, not even a text. They got the place tied up tighter ’n a possum stuck in a squirrel hole.”

  Uncle Ashton talks like a backwoods redneck, but Mom says it’s just his shtick. Ashton grew up in Chicago.

  “Did your folks get out too?” he asked.

  “Actually, we’re all still here. I’m calling from Addy Gumm’s landline.”

  I thought the handset would shatter from his laughter.

  “Landline! Bunch a morons! Shut down all the high-tech communication and forgot about axing the landlines!”

  “Why did they bubble us, Uncle Ashton?”

  “They’re saying it’s some sort of security issue. No details. Y’all okay?”

  I told him about all the bonking. He asked me a few questions, then said, “This is bad, baby. ACPOD is one of the government’s most important contractors. They provide all the AI interfaces and most of the smart chips for everything from IRS auditors to peacekeeper drones. Not to mention the hundred thousand SpyBots the DHS goes through every year. If somebody’s attacking ACPOD, ain’t no wonder Homeland Security’s barkin’ like a blue­tick hound up a tree full of wildcats. Maybe this’ll scare Gilbert Bates out from whatever badger hole he’s been hiding in for the past ten years.”

  “Unless he got bonked too.”

  “Far as I can tell, it’s happening only in Flinkwater, baby. The rest of the world is bonk free. Even so, I bet Josh Stevens is having a big fat Holstein cow right about now.”

  “Josh Stevens? Why?”

  “Because D-Monix makes three quarters of the tabs and desktops sold in this country. If people are being attacked by their computers, it could kick his business in the you know what.”

  “I don’t think it’s the computers doing the bonking, Uncle Ashton. I think it’s the Brazen Bull.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Tell me about this bull, punkin.”

  “Everybody who got bonked had the same thing on their screen.” I told him about the Brazen Bull and how I’d discovered the very first bonk victim.

  “Hmmm. But if everybody’s using the same screenie, that don’t prove nothin’. That ol’ bull pops up automatic-like a minute or so after you stop punchin’ buttons, right?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t bonk, and I have my screenie disabled. And everybody who got bonked had the bull playing.”

  “Yes, but you told me you looked at the bull when it was playing on your friend’s computer, and you seem to be okay. Does your mom have this Brazen Bull on her computer?”

  “Um, yeah, I think so.”

  “And she didn’t bonk, right?”

  “Maybe some people are more bonkable.”

  “Or maybe it’s not just the bull doing the bonking.”

  “What should I do, Uncle Ashton?”

  “First, just to be on the safe side, stay away from that dang bull. Second—”

  Click.

  That was it. The phone had gone dead. Apparently there was at least one nonmoron working for Homeland Security.

  8

  Bubbled

  After leaving Addy’s, I took a ride around town. Uncle Ashton was right. We were bubbled. Not an actual bubble of course, but the roads were blocked, and a bunch of men and women wearing dark gr
ay uniforms were erecting a twelve-foot-tall razor-wire fence all around the edge of town. It looked like a war zone. And if Uncle Ashton was right, maybe we were under attack.

  I talked to a few dazed-looking citizens and learned some things.

  First, the SCIC plague had bonked half the ACPOD engineering staff. The hospital was getting full, so they were putting new patients on cots in the high school gymnasium. Second, all computer use in Flinkwater had been banned, and Homeland Security was going door-to-door confiscating tabs and desktops. Third, no one was allowed to leave Flinkwater until a cause and cure for SCIC were discovered.

  What would Gilbert Bates do?

  I got home just as the Homeland Security teams were starting on our block. I put my tab in a plastic bag and hid it at the bottom of Barney’s cat box. Barney observed this procedure with that disdainful aloofness that only a purebred Siamese can pull off, then climbed into the box and delicately deposited an extremely fragrant gift atop the freshly disturbed cat litter. He examined his work and pronounced it satisfactory with a little merp.

  “Good job,” I told him.

  My brilliant cat-box ploy turned out to be unnecessary. The DHS guys were tired and cranky and didn’t look very hard at all. They took our phones, my dad’s desktop, and an old tab that I hardly used anymore. I thought they might take our DustBots as well, but they didn’t. I suppose it would have been impractical, what with just about everybody in Flinkwater having a dozen of the little things crawling around the house.

  As soon as they left, I dug my tab out of Barney’s cat box, sanitized it with multiple applications of disinfectant, and got to work. Uncle Ashton had told me to stay away from the Brazen Bull, but I do not always listen.

  Naturally, I took precautions.

  I was sitting at my desk wearing mirrored, polarized, Vaseline-smeared sunglasses and listening to some painfully loud static over my headset while watching the Brazen Bull bounce off the sides of my tab when Barney leaped into my lap without warning. Barney will jump on anybody’s lap, anywhere, anytime, and more often than not scare the heck out of them. I was used to it. Barney liked to watch videos.