Lost in Cyberspace (2 page)

Aaron had goat cheese on seven-grain bread, being a vegetarian—herbivore. I had the beef burrito.

“I don't know,” I said. “Dinosaurs just don't do it for me anymore. I mean, they're all dead and gone, right? Who'd want them around anyway? Hitting a deer on the highway is bad enough.”

Aaron had his laptop on the lunch table. He was idly punching up something on it with his left hand, then squinting at his screen.

“Look, the past is over,” I said. “It's okay for museums, but we've got enough problems without digging up the old days. Am I right or what?”

Aaron dug a grain out from between his teeth. “I have a theory.” He has a lot of them. “And I think modern cybernetics will bear me out sooner or later. As we know, science is slow.”

His left hand was still playing his laptop like a piano. He can think out of at least two compartments of his brain at the same time.

“As I see it, there are a couple of ways to approach the past. You can dig it up, like dinosaurs, which is basically pre-electronic.”

“There's cloning too,” I said. “DNA and like that.”

“Forget cloning. That's not experiencing the past. That's reproducing it.”

“There's virtual reality,” I said.

“That's show business,” Aaron said.

“Or you can get into your time machine,” which was my last idea.

Aaron sighed. “Josh, I can read your mind. Time machine to you means this thing made out of sheet metal with ten-speed gears, flashing lights, and little puffs of smoke coming out of a tailpipe. A contraption.”

“With seat belts,” I said.

“Forget it,” he said. “Grow up.” Sometimes he can look at you just like a teacher.

“You can dig up the past. Or you can really test the electronic limits and actually be there. It's a question of dialing into the cosmic internet. The past isn't necessarily over. It's just piping in on a parallel plane.” Aaron ran a finger around his collar, which is a thing he does. I think his mom still ties his tie. “Do you follow me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“No, you don't. You're like this in class. You're breathing steady. Your eyes are open. But nobody's home. Your modem's unplugged. Let me try it another way.” He tapped the table with a finger covered in goat-cheese crumbs.

“We're looking ahead to maybe five hundred TV channels available to the general viewing public.”

“So?”

“So how about five hundred and one?”

“You mean the five hundred and first channel is the real past if you could just find a way of calling it up?”

“You're scanning in the right direction,” Aaron said, “but I know how you think. You picture yourself sitting in front of a screen viewing the past like an old movie, with a bottle of Snapple in your hand.”

“But big screen,” I said, “and better than VHS quality.”

Aaron rolled his eyes, so I said, “What you're saying is that the past is still happening if you know where to look?”

“Cyberspatially,” said the A-to-Z man. “Or in layman's terms, yes.”

“Just how many people are going to be able to channel-surf into another time?” I try not to swallow all Aaron's theories. I try to be skeptical.

He shrugged. “Who can say? Maybe we're already doing it and don't notice. We sleep a third of the time. Teenagers sleep more than that. Who knows where you are when you're asleep? Not all your circuitry is shut down. Think about dreams.”

“I dream a lot about falling.”

“Who doesn't? That's the first fear babies have. We haven't been babies for ten years. Dreams are strange, and the whole world's strange to a baby, right? And scary. Maybe dreams aren't memories. Maybe they're happening.”

“Then you wake up and you're back to real time?” I said.

“Both times are real,” Aaron said. “The forward-movement idea of time is a pretech human way of explaining the unknown. It's a primitive invention, like the rotary-dial phone.”

“And I have this dream where we're taking a test at school, except it isn't exactly Huckley. And if I fail this test, I'm in deep—”

“Perfect example,” Aaron said. “That could be something from a hundred years ago when flunking a test was serious. You could be living the experience of a kid in a really strict school, in England or somewhere. I mean it's not about now, right? Buster Brewster has flunked every test since preschool. And does Huckley throw him out or keep him back a year or beat him with paddles? No such luck. Not as long as his parents keep paying tuition.”

Aaron shouldn't even have mentioned Buster Brewster, because Buster himself appeared at our table. We don't have bullies at Huckley. We call them hyperactive. Buster was the main one in our grade.

He whacked the back of Aaron's head and reached across him for our salt shaker. Buster was going from table to table, loosening the tops of the salt shakers like he does in the school cafeteria. There's nothing too original about his thinking. He wrenched ours loose with his mighty fist. Salt rained all over the table.

“Don't even think about tightening that,” he said. Buster's voice hasn't changed yet, but it's lower than ours. “Make my day, wusses.” Then he lumbered on to the next table.

“Be nice if Buster Brewster entered another time frame and forgot to come back,” I said, but quietly. “Seriously, though, do you think it's possible to make contact with other times, outside of dreams?”

“Josh,” Aaron said, making shapes in the salt, “we've already got video beamed over phone wire. We've got phone calls digitized over TV cable. We've got data-based interactivity going in every direction. We're talking information explosion. We're talking new windows of opportunity. Or in layman's terms, anything's possible.”

I'd polished off my burrito. Aaron was picking up scattered grains on his plastic plate with a wet, salty finger. Somehow this annoyed me.

“Like you're fine-tuning yourself, right?” I said to him. “Like you could be time-warped into another age, right?”

“I'm in early stages with it,” Aaron said. “And remember, generally speaking, technology is way behind concept.

“And remember this too, Josh.” He stared across the table at me like a red-headed owl. “Artificial intelligence is the buzzword of the age and the wave of the future. But the human brain is the ultimate computer.”

All this talk about time and distance reminded me of Fenella for some reason.

“We're getting an 0 Pear.”

Aaron pushed back his tray and ran a hand through his hair. Being carrot-red, it suits a vegetarian.

“Tell me about it, Josh.” Sometimes he sounds like a guidance counselor.

I hadn't meant to tell him a thing. I hadn't even mentioned that my mom and dad were separated. Dad had only been gone three months and a week, and usually called Sunday nights. I hadn't gotten around to mentioning it to anybody. I didn't even like mentioning it to myself.

“Your mom's getting some help around the house now your dad's left and she's going back to work at Barnes Ogleby?”

I stared. “Aaron, how do you know my dad's—not around? How do you have access to all this personal data about my family?”

“Vince. The doorman. Day shift. Doormen know it all. Who's there. Who's not. What we eat, because they see the grocery deliveries. Your mom's not having the groceries delivered anymore. She's cutting down expenses by carrying them home. Doormen read our mail.”

“They read our mail?”

“The envelopes. How else could they sort them? Your dad's writing from a 60611 zip code. Chicago, right? You people ought to get E-mail.”

“It's just a trial separation,” I said, though I wasn't too sure about that. Maybe I should ask Vince.

“Is it a French au pair or a German one?” Aaron asked. “Because they'll try to teach you the language.
Bonjour, mes enfants; Guten Tag,Kinder
—that kind of thing.”

“English,” I said, “but our apartment is filling up with women.”

I didn't have to say I wanted Dad back. Aaron could figure that out. His dad and mom are together. But his mom is his dad's third wife, so you never know.

 

The field trip shot the day. We only went back to Huckley to catch our buses home. Mom was already there when I came in.

“I got the job,” she said. She was in jeans and a sweatshirt, clearing everything out of Dad's old den. He hadn't taken much but his computer and fax. I thought that was a good sign. But now Mom was sweeping clean. She was dusting Dad's empty shelves.

“What a long face,” she said, fingering my chin. “It's just for now, Josh. Really. I'm tidying things away so we can put Fenella in here. We've always used it as a guest room anyway. Think of Fenella as a—helpful guest. She'll be good for Heather. Heather needs a ... role model.”

So Fenella was nearer than I knew.

 

I dreamed that night, big-time and nonstop. It was about Aaron and me at the Natural History Museum. It was us, but it wasn't exactly the museum. It was actual Mesozoic times. We weren't wearing anything except blue-and-white Huckley ties, which is typical of my dreams. As we trudged along through the swamp, mud and twigs seeped between our toes.

“Primeval ooze,” the dream Aaron said.

Volcanoes were erupting in the distance. Some really scary things were flying around on webbed wings. All my dreams are colorized. Aaron was eating a carrot. When he clutched my dream arm, we took cover under a plant with giant leaves.

A huge, long-necked, small-headed shadow fell over us. It blotted out the sky. Aaron and I grabbed each other. The leaf we were hiding under turned transparent. And this dinosaur spotted us. Its head wasn't so small anymore. A snaky neck coiled, and it was coming down at us, and it was all teeth.

“Tyrannosaurus Regina,” Aaron whispered. “Cretaceous period. Meat-eater.”

Now its eyes were zeroing in on me. And its face was changing. Now it was half-human with big brown eyes.

“My name is Fenella,” it said. “Think of me as a helpful guest.” Then its jaws opened wide.

That was enough to knock me out of bed. I fought my way up toward being awake. It's a long way from the Mesozoic Era. But I was nearly there. I could feel the sheet twisted under me. And I had on my pajamas, which is more than I was wearing in the dream.

I wasn't alone, though. Somehow Heather had horned in on my dream. But I was moving faster than she was. Her shoes were slowing her down.

“Let's put our best feet forward,” Mom said. She'd rounded up Heather and me to meet Fenella at the airport. She even hinted we might wear our school clothes.

“No way,” Heather said. “We're only inmates during the day.” She wanted to stay home because she said Camilla Van Allen might call. Heather says Camilla Van Allen is her best friend. But we hadn't seen anything of her.

“She'll leave a message for you on the machine,” Mom told Heather. “If she calls.”

Heather looked sulky in her parachute silk puffy jacket, jeans, and her biggest shoes. I wore the Bulls warm-up jacket Dad sent me from Chicago after one of the Sunday nights when he didn't call. We cabbed out to JFK Airport in the middle of the evening rush. Then Fenella's flight was two hours late because snow was blowing. Only one runway was open.

That gave Mom time to run over the Au Pair Exchange printout. Fenella was seventeen, a recent “school leaver,” whose interests included

Her career aspirations were in the areas of

Halfway through the printout Heather wandered off to browse the airport arcade shops.

There was a fuzzy Xerox picture of Fenella in a school uniform and straw hat. It didn't look too recent and could have been anybody.

The contract said Fenella could be expected to “assist with light household work, food preparation, and child care, no more than twenty hours a week, with opportunities for extended travel experience in the United States.” She had a right to her own room.

“Do we pay her, or does she pay us?”

“We pay her,” Mom said.

Heather came back and said, “Let's eat.” We went to the Skyteria until they announced that the London plane was on the ground.

Passengers came pouring out through the Customs doors, pushing their luggage on carts. Mom kept the picture handy and was watching everybody. “Let's be very careful about our speech patterns,” she said. “English people speak so beautifully.”

I lost count after a hundred and eighty people. Aaron would have had his calculator with him. “Maybe she's not coming,” Heather said, perking up. The waiting crowd was pretty much just us by now. Most of the people coming out were flight attendants. “When we see the pilot,” Heather said, “let's leave.”

Then the door banged open, and this girl appeared, dragging a giant laundry bag with tags. She was fairly giant herself, dressed in total, recycled black. Several layers over a black body stocking and big elf boots below.

But what you really noticed was her face. It was a large pale moon with black lips, three nose rings, and a small spider tattooed on her right cheekbone. The hat on top was hard to miss too. It had a big floppy brim pinned back by a bunch of black plastic flowers.