Mike Stellar (12 page)

“Fine,” I grumbled. “Let’s go study at your place.” “Great!” she said, matching my stride. “We’re almost there.”

She was right. In about two minutes we were outside her apartment door and she swiped her flash key to unlock it.

“Why don’t you use the eyeball scanner?” I asked. “I thought the flash keys were only for power emergencies. I didn’t even get one.”

“The scanner is broken,” Larc said over her shoulder. “Come on in.”

I followed her into the apartment. It was a lot like mine, but it was in shades of blue. There was an extra door on the far wall, but really, it was practically a replica of my place.

“The computer is over here,” Larc said as she crossed the room. She hit a button on the wall and a desk slid up from the floor. It was in the place that the viserator was in my apartment. “I can enlarge the monitor if you’d like to sit on the sofa and study.”

“Sure,” I said, not really caring. My mind was going in about a hundred directions. Whether to sit on the sofa was not one of them.

I plopped down and Larc sat next to me. She had a remote mouse to navigate the screen.

“Hey, a remote,” I said. “What, your executive assistant doesn’t change all your channels and run your computer programs for you?”

Larc stared at me like my hair was on fire. “What are you talking about?”

“Just joking.” I gave a halfhearted chuckle. “That stupid Sugar Bear is always around. I’m surprised he’s not here right now, begging to write down notes we dictate.”

“Mike Stellar, sometimes I think you’re speaking a foreign language. Except that I can speak all of the other languages and I
still
don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You speak all of the other languages….” I took my handheld out of my bag.

“Good idea. Let’s get down to business.” Larc started clicking the remote and a zillion pages popped up on the monitor. I turned on my handheld and got ready to sync it up. Something, though, grabbed my attention.

The remote reminded me of something. Remote. Remote. Was it the word that reminded me? The thing? What was it? I racked my brain to figure it out, but I got nothing.

“Do you already have a lot of this information?” Larc asked. “I know you’ve been working on your paper for a while now.”

“Weeeeell,” I said, scanning the zillion pages on the monitor, “I have pretty much all of this stuff. But I could add something on the long-term effects of terra-forming. My stupid report needs to be a lot longer or your darling aunt Beebo is totally gonna flunk me.”

“I researched the long-term effects of terraforming for fun a while back. Would you like to see my old notes?”

“You research for fun?”

“Sure,” she said with a devious smirk. “Don’t you?”

I sighed and shook my head. Obviously, this girl was nuts.

It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t figure out what the remote was tickling in my memory. A person? A place? A thing? Argh.

“Anyway,” she continued, oblivious to the fact that I wasn’t really listening, “we’re going to need more stuff than that to satisfy Aunt Beebo…. She’s going to want a thorough blah blah blah …”

I could see Larc’s mouth moving, but I’d stopped paying attention eight words before.

Finally I interrupted. “I guess we could talk about the Factory Approach. It’s supposed to work pretty well. At least theoretically.”

Larc raised her eyebrows. “‘Theoretically.’ Woohoo. You
are
smart! So the Factory Approach sets up carbon dioxide–producing facilities on the planet’s surface,” she said. “The carbon dioxide warms up the atmosphere, melts any water that’s there, and, voilà, you have an atmosphere that can support life.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t the theory posit that the factories might work too well and overpollute the environment?
Won’t superfast terraforming methods be more likely to kill a planet?”

‘Posit’?” Larc grinned. “That’s an old-man word.” She clicked the remote a couple of times and the screen filled with pictures of old dudes.

I readied myself to ignore her silly remote clicking and launch into a speech about rapid overpollution as the major reason why the Factory Approach was a terrible idea when I paused. The clicking of the remote …

Nita!

That was it!

That was what the remote reminded me of!

Nita’s com-bracelet. It was this stupid, cheap thing that Hubble had bought her years before. It was
remotely
linked to the matching com-bracelet that he wore. She still wore hers, even though it didn’t work. Well, it probably would have still worked with Hubble’s matching com-bracelet, but … Anyway, that was it!

I jumped up from the sofa. Larc looked at me, startled.

“What?” she asked. “Are there bugs in your pants?”

“No,” I said, feeling silly for jumping up like that. “No. I’m cool.” I sat back down, my mind racing.

Larc started talking and every now and then I nodded or grunted so that she would think I was paying attention. As she babbled I began scrolling crazily through my handheld. Stored somewhere on one of the hard drives was a hack I’d written ages ago when Stinky
and I were trying to listen in on all the smoochy love talk between Nita and Hubble. It was a freakin’ crazy awesome hack, because it had actually worked. Stinky and I just about died from alternately laughing and puking when we heard some of those love chats. If I could find the hack, I might be able to bust into Nita’s com-bracelet again and hear what was going on around her.

My heart was beating at a totally unhealthy pace as I tapped the handheld screen furiously. The hack wasn’t going to take very long, if I could just …

“Then all the planets will be dead,” Larc was saying. “Right, Mike?”

“Wha? Dead planets? Uh, right,” I answered, snapping to attention.

“Yes…. Well, that’s the theory, anyway,” Larc said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Dead planets. Floating out in space.”

“Hmmm?” I said.

“Are you paying attention to me, Michael Stellar? Your grade depends on this,” Larc said, waving her hand in front of my eyes. I noticed a scary ugly scar on the palm of her hand. It was in a kind of star shape and had a big throbbing vein down the middle of it. It was the nastiest thing I’d seen in my entire life. But it was sort of cool, too.

“Ew, what’s
that?”
I asked, grabbing for her hand.

“Mi-ike.” Larc yanked her hand away and snapped
at me. “Focus. Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”

“Right,” I said. “Dead planets. Because the terra-forming can mess with the magnetism of the poles or something like that. I have it here.” I motioned to my handheld.

“Cool. Can you shoot it to the monitor?”

“Oh, well, I’m kinda …”

Larc pounced at me, her icy eyes blazing, and tried to swipe my handheld. “I
knew
it, Michael Stellar! You’re not studying at all, are you? You’re playing some flight sim or something!”

“Whoa!” I hollered, hopping off the couch just in time to avoid her quick grab. Man, she was lightning fast. “I’m not playing games!” I shouted, dodging furniture as Larc chased me around the apartment. “I’m just … I’m working on a little side project right now….”

“Side project?” Larc shrieked. “You’re supposed to be studying.
We’re
supposed to be studying. If my aunt Beebo knew that you were just fooling around—”

“I am most certainly
not
fooling around!” I shot back, jumping over the arm of the couch to get away from her. “I just remembered something about Nita, and I was trying to see if I could …” I realized I was shouting. And sweating. And standing on the couch. I took a deep breath and slid down, sinking into the cushion.

I quieted my voice. “I was trying to see if I could
contact her.” I shook my head. “Well, not contact her, really, but listen in on her, wherever she is. I thought maybe I could—”

“Oh, Mike,” Larc said, sitting next to me, her expression softening like someone had flipped a switch. “I know this has to be agonizing for you. I’m sorry I went crazy. Studying must be the last thing on your mind right now.”

I scanned Larc’s face with uncertainty. She was always so hard to read.

She leaned back into the sofa. “I don’t know what I would do if my dad or my aunt Beebo ever went missing.”

“You’d feel like a big pile of poo.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s how you’d feel. Like a big pile of poo.”

Larc laughed and punched my shoulder. I pretended I was going to go schizoid and attack her, and she flinched.

“So are you writing a program or something? To find Nita?”

I told Larc what I was trying to do and she actually had a couple of helpful suggestions for things I could add to the hack—like a voice activator and a program that would allow me to sync my handheld’s microphone up with Nita’s com-bracelet.

For the rest of the afternoon, we worked on the
hack together and forgot about terraforming. It was kind of fun.

After a while I said, “Okay, let’s test it out. I haven’t calculated the distance from the ship to Nita yet, so we’re gonna need to test on something within the ship, but at least that’ll let us know if the core hack is working.”

“Of course,” Larc said. “What do you want to try it on?”

I looked around the room. “Let’s see if we can use it to project our voices through the computer monitor. That’ll be a good start.”

I tapped a few commands into the handheld and we waited while everything calibrated. I held the microphone end up to Larc’s face and said, “Say something.”

“Something,” she said, then smiled and stuck her tongue out at me. A few seconds later we heard her voice come through the TV loud and clear. We jumped up and I gave a happy hoot.

Then … something very weird happened.

The monitor talked back.

It said, “Did someone just … hoot?”

We glanced around the apartment, but no one was with us. The talking had definitely come from the monitor.

Larc pointed at it slowly.

The pages Larc had called up on the monitor were gone. In their place, the screen was divided into six
sections. Each one looked like the living room of an apartment on the ship. In the bottom right-hand corner we could see two people sitting on a sofa. Larc and I got up off our sofa and peered more closely at the monitor. We were astonished to see ourselves staring at … ourselves.

“What the …,” I said, walking closer to the monitor. I saw my image in the bottom square walk toward the screen, too. My eyes widened and I carefully covered the microphone on my handheld with my palm. “It’s like we’re watching video surveillance,” I whispered. “Our hack could never have done this. It wasn’t sophisticated enough to—” I kept my hand over the microphone and with the other hand I tapped on my handheld’s screen. Suddenly the images disappeared from the monitor and a map of the ship appeared. There were a handful of blinking dots moving down hallways and in and out of rooms.

“What is
that?”
Larc asked. I had no idea. I tapped my handheld screen and the surveillance-type video showed up again on the big monitor. I grabbed Larc’s hand and dragged her behind the sofa. We crouched down, hiding, and peeked over the back of the sofa at the monitor.

“Is that your
dad?”
Larc asked.

Sure enough, in the top right square I saw Dad walk into a room and sit in a chair.

“Hey!” I said. “That’s my apartment!”

Then Larc’s dad walked into the room and sat down across from my dad on the sofa. Then I saw Mom appear, standing in the corner. There were figures appearing in all the boxes now.

“What are they doing?” Larc asked, her voice filled with wonder.

“I have no idea.” My voice was not filled with wonder. It was starting to go hoarse with dread.

“Can they see us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And then I added hopefully, “I don’t think so.”

Suddenly we could hear a lot of commotion. Someone said, “Hey There it was again. Did you just hear a kid talk?” Larc and I looked at each other in horror and simultaneously looked at my handheld. My palm had slipped off the microphone and was now not-so-helpfully covering the On/Off button. Someone else said, “How could that be? This is a secure transmission.” Then my mom said, “What the—Jim? Jim? Are you looking at the monitor? Why is the interface to your system turned on?”

“Uh, Larc,” I said, turning to look at her.

“Yeah?”

“Looks like the hack works.”

As Larc and
I grabbed our stuff, we heard her dad say, “That’s really strange. I thought I disabled my interface this morning when I knew I wouldn’t be home for the meeting.”

As we ran out of the apartment, I said, “Should we hide somewhere? Are they going to come after us?”

“You think they’ll come looking for us?” Larc asked, not even out of breath.

I shrugged. “Why not? Two kids suddenly appear on some kind of weird closed-circuit camera thing? Not in school? Alone in an apartment in the middle of the day?” I flushed and dropped my eyes. “If you were a parent, what would you do?”

Larc ran her tongue over her glowing braces. “Were
you going to try to kiss me in there, Mike Stellar?” She didn’t act scared or worried about being caught. She seemed to be enjoying herself immensely.