Lost in Cyberspace

Table of Contents

 

 

“Amiable characters, fleet pacing and witty, in-the-know narration will keep even the non-bookish interested.”

—
Publishers Weekly

PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 STZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Dial Books for Young Readers,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1995

Published in Puffin Books, 1997

 

Copyright © Richard Peck, 1995

All rights reserved

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Peck, Richard.
Lost in cyberspace / by Richard Peck. p. cm.
Summary: While dealing with changes at home, sixth-grader Josh and his friend
Aaron use the computers at their New York City prep school to travel through time,
learning some secrets from the school's past and improving Josh's home situation.

eISBN : 978-1-101-17434-0

[1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Schoots—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.]

I. Title.

PZ7.P338Lo 1995 [Fic]—dc20 94-48330 CIP AC

 

 

 

After the separation, Dad moved to Chicago, and Mom decided to go back to work, so she was practicing getting up early. She'd bought some new outfits. Heather and I were dressed for school. I go to the Huckley School for Boys, so I was in dress code:

Heather goes to the Pence School for Girls:

Heather's shoe statement was lace-up black blobs with stainless steel eyelets and tire-tread soles. Each of her shoes weighed an easy six pounds.

“There are children with tragic foot deformities who have to wear corrective shoes much better looking than those,” Mom often said to Heather. “And cheaper.”

This morning Mom had some news for us. It was about somebody named Fenella, who was coming from England to live with us. Mom had found Fenella on an Internet link-up called “Au Pair Exchange.”

“And what's an O Pear supposed to be?” Heather was tearing open a Pop-Tart and examining its insides, which is a thing she does. “It sounds like a baby-sitter who never leaves. Who needs her? I'm virtually thirteen and emotionally fourteen. I missed the Gifted and Talented Program by
this much.
I can sit myself. I'll O Pear Josh.”

She jerked a thumb at me. And I'm only one grade behind her. “I'll be the 0 Pear who never leaves,” Heather said.

I slid out of my chair and checked out the window for the school bus. We live twelve floors above Fifth Avenue. The trees over in Central Park were bare branches with wrinkled balloons left over from summer. The Huckley bus was held up at the light on the corner. It's a Chrysler minivan with a blue-and-white paint job. Heather's Pence bus was in the distance behind a tie-up.

“Buses,” I said.

“Don't think of Fenella as a baby-sitter,” Mom said.

“I'm not thinking about her at all,” Heather said. “She's the farthest thing from my mind. And where are we going to put her? We use the maid's room for storage.”

“And don't think of her as a maid,” Mom said. “Au pairs are not baby-sitters. And they aren't servants. They're English girls from very nice backgrounds. They come over here to help out with families and to see American life. They're here to expand their horizons, and ours.”

Heather said, “My horizons are already—”

But Mom said, “Whoa,” because I was heading for the door. She had new glasses with giant lenses for her upcoming career. She looked me over. Standing, I'm as tall as she is sitting. “How did you learn to tie a tie that well?” She peered at me. “It even has a little dimple under the knot. That's professional work.”

“Practice,” I said.

“Is the day coming when you won't need your old ma for anything?”

“Not right away,” I said.

“I have the final interview today,” Mom said, “at Barnes Ogleby.”

“B.O.,” Heather said.

“I'll be home before you two are unless they let school out early again. Why can't schools run the full day anymore?”

“Because we're pressured enough.” Heather clutched her forehead. “We need a lot more time off than we get.”

“All the more reason for Fenella. I don't want you turning into a couple of latchkey kids,” Mom said. “Wet or dry?” she said to me.

“Dry as possible.”

She planted a careful kiss on my cheek. It was hardly damp, and she didn't have her lipgloss on yet.

 

I didn't give Fenella any more thought. I mainly think about what's happening now. When I left the apartment for school, Heather was still popping her tart. We try not to take the same elevator.

Aaron Zimmer was on it, coming down from the penthouse. He's in my year at Huckley, but shorter. We call him the A-to-Z man because of his name and because he knows everything from A to Z. Some of what he knows is actual fact. Some of it is just stuff he says.

“Yo,” we said. I stick my homework into whatever book. Everybody but Aaron carries gear to school in a backpack. He carries a briefcase-style laptop computer with a certain amount of software. Even without storing it electronically, he has a lot of signal compression in his biological memory bank. He's what they used to call a smart kid.

“Six hundred and sixty-five more class periods till summer,” he said. “I estimate that at seven classes a day, five days a week, allowing for holidays, spring break, and field trips.”

“What about—”

“I've factored in fire drills. The field trip today is dinosaurs.”

The Huckley School catalogue tells parents that all its students are to be interactively computer literate for the challenges of twenty-first century corporate competition.

This means they've walled off one end of the media center and have a couple of terminals in there. I'm not that much into it. Also, I spell better in real life than on the keyboard. Aaron has named the computer room the Black Hole. That's his personal name for it, possibly because it doesn't have natural light. He's in there most of the day. You can sign out of classes and go there if you can get a teacher to cover for you.

They tell us that in the future we won't have to leave our screens for global video-conferencing across the information superhighway. All we'll need is a mouse and a modem and we'll never need to go outdoors.

But we get out quite a bit for field trips. So we were looking at another day at the Natural History Museum. You can get all this edutainment on CD-ROM. But in the winter we have two field trips a week to keep the restlessness down.

At the museum, they threw our class in with the fourth and fifth grades. The fourth graders aren't even in middle school yet, but we integrate with them for field trips to get them ready for us. Even the fourth graders have been coming to see the dinosaurs for years.

“All they do is stand around like dorks,” said a fifth grader, meaning the dinosaurs. “What this place needs is some electronic manipulation. They could use some digital film techniques.”

“Kids,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

We passed up the headphones. Aaron had the whole dinosaur evolution stored and was happy to display his own personal version of it.

“The jury is still hung about whether dinosaurs were hot-blooded or cold like your contemporary reptiles,” he remarked. “The speed of their movements argues for hot blood.”

We moved into the Hall of Mongolian Vertebrates.

“In Asian deserts fossilized nestlings have been uncovered along with clutches of eggs. This means dinosaurs conducted family life. To defend against the meat-eaters, the larger herbivores developed a herd mentality.”

A herd of fourth graders were hanging around us by now. Aaron talked them right through to the extinction of dinosaurs, touching lightly on the giant asteroid theory.

They listened, but some of them were still confused by “fossilized nestlings.”

“Say hello to the baluchitheres,” he said in passing, “ancient cousins of your modern rhino.”

Then he summed up by saying, “The only certain fact about dinosaurs is that no species was ever purple and named Barney.”

The fourth graders stared.

Now the museum cafeteria was in sight. A huge, long-necked, small-headed shadow fell over us.

It was Mr. Headbloom, the teacher in charge. He has us for homeroom, and he's our reading teacher. He calls the reading class Linear Decoding. You'd think teachers would be impressed by Aaron. He has all this knowledge he doesn't even have to call up on a screen. But with teachers he's not that popular. Mr. Headbloom is glad to sign him out of class to go to the Black Hole anytime Aaron wants.

“Zimmer,” Mr. Headbloom said, “knock off the voice-over and let the fourth graders interface with the exhibits as units.”

As the old Huckley teachers like Mr. L. T. Thaw die off, they're replaced by mouse potatoes like Mr. Headbloom who talk like this. We went in and did lunch.