The Flinkwater Factor (5 page)

10

Poopnet

“Remember the last time the nets crashed?” Billy said.

I knew
exactly
what he was talking about. A local pig farmer named Elwin Hogg—I'm not ­kidding—was excavating a new hog-waste lagoon. You know what goes in a hog-waste lagoon, right? Right. Anyway, Elwin got a little overenthusiastic with his backhoe and sliced right through ACPOD's main cable bundle. That wouldn't have been so bad, except for some unusual sunspot activity that was happening at the same time, which had messed up the satellite reception. For nearly twelve hours the residents of Flinkwater had no Internet.

For a plugged-in kid like Billy George, it was like being dead.

“After that,” he said, “I decided to run a wire into Halibut.”

Halibut is the closest town to Flinkwater. And before you ask why a town in the middle of landlocked Iowa would be named after an ocean-dwelling flatfish, allow me to share this useless and possibly untrue factoid: Halibut was named after Arnold Halibutt, with two
t
's, who moved his family to Iowa and founded the town in 1853, then died three years later from something called the bloody flux. Halibutt's grandchildren, tired of having their name and the name of their town misspelled, dropped the extra
t
from both. And by the way, if you do not know what the bloody flux is, consider yourself fortunate. Look it up if you have to, but don't say I didn't warn you.

“You ran a wire into Halibut?” I said.

“I ran a wire into Halibut,” Billy said.

“I know. You just said that.”

“Then why did you say it like a question?”

“Out of astonishment and disbelief,” I said. “Halibut is sixteen miles away!”

“Sixteen point six, actually.”

“That's a lot of wire,” I said.

Billy rolled his eyes. “I didn't wire it
literally
! I wired it
virtually
.”

“I see,” I said, as if I had the faintest idea what he was talking about.

“It was simple. Flinkwater and Halibut use the same wastewater treatment facility, so I
tapped into the sewer system. I call it Poopnet. It's a little slow, but I'm loading in the sixty-gig range.”

“If that's slow, what do you consider
fast
?” I asked. Sixty gigabytes per second is
blazing
fast.

“Well, usually I tap in through the ACPOD servers, and they can go double that.”

I was speechless, and that is something that
never
happens. The ACPOD server network is one of the most secure nets on the planet, and Billy had just told me he used it for playing Ghast Wars.

“I wondered why I haven't been able to get access through ACPOD lately,” he said.

I found my tongue and put it back to work. “Do you ever emerge from this crypt?”

“Sometimes I go upstairs to eat,” he said, and went back to staring into his display. The witch with the big bazooms was back.

Thanks to the Poopnet.

I realized that I was getting off track—after all, I wasn't there to explore Billy's illegal use of the ACPOD network, or his probably even more illegal Poopnet. I was there to solve the mystery of the Brazen Bull and, I hoped, to figure out how to debonk my dad.

Billy had sunk back into his Ghast Wars game. The witch and the warrior were morphing back
and forth, casting spells and firing lightning bolts in an effort to break through a mob of slavering zombies. I could see that extreme measures would be required to get his attention, so I knuckle-punched him.

“Ow!” He jerked away from me and clapped a hand to his shoulder. “What was that?”

“Zombie bite,” I said. “You're undead now.”

He checked his shoulder for signs of broken skin, but I hadn't hit him that hard.

I said, “Billy, we've got a serious problem here, and since it looks like you're the one who caused it, how about you help me figure out how to hit the undo button.”

“Okay,” he said. “What's the problem?”

Any intelligence test would put Billy George in the top one tenth of 1 percent of geniuses, which I sometimes think is another way of saying “dumb as a stump.”

I ticked off several items on my fingers. “One, at last count there were one hundred sixty-two comatose Flinkwater residents in the hospital, which is a hundred sixty-two more than there were two days ago, and the person who caused it is sitting right in front of me. Two, one of the coma victims is my dad. Three, the nets are down. And four, if you don't help me get this whole mess straightened out, I'm going to kick your butt.”

Billy thought for a moment, then said, “Is that all?”

“That's not enough?”

“Just checking. I have an idea.” He got out of his chair and started digging around in an overflowing box full of cables and other electronic equipment. It took a while. Finally he came up with a small, squarish object that looked like an old-style cell phone.

“What's that?” I asked.

He pointed it at me, and I recognized it. I snatched up the first thing at hand and threw it at him as hard as I could.

11

Projac

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your point of view—the thing I'd grabbed was a Smart-O-Rang. The Rang sailed straight at Billy's head, rolled right at the last instant, and missed him by several inches before returning to land at its precise original position next to my hand.

Rangs were huge a few years back, when every parent in the country bought one for their kid. The idea was that you could throw them as hard as you wanted at anything and anybody—and the Rang would miss. A safety-conscious parent's dream. Like I said, they sold a bazillion of them, but the fad didn't last on account of it wasn't much fun to throw something that never hit anything—although it was excellent for startling someone who was about to blast you with a ray gun.

“Hey!” Billy said, jumping back.

“Don't
point
that thing at me!” I yelled back at him.

Billy looked at the object in his hand as if he'd forgotten it was there.

“Sorry,” he said.

Somehow Billy George had gotten hold of a Projac prototype. I recognized it because my dad had been involved in testing the new weapon.

Sometimes I snoop a little.

A Projac works like an old-fashioned Taser, only instead of shooting out darts attached to wires, it's wireless. You can fire it at somebody up to twenty feet away, and it sends out an electronic pulse, delivering an eighty-thousand-volt shock. Sort of the opposite of a Rang.

“Where'd you get that thing?” I asked.

“Um  . . . I found it?”

“Right.”

“Seriously. In J.G.'s room. I confiscated it, actually.”

“How did J.G. get a top secret weapon prototype?”

“J.G. is very resourceful. Come on, let's go see him.”

“Wait! What do you need the Projac for?”

“I'll explain on the way to the hospital.” Billy started up the stairs.

I said, “If you're going to carry that thing
around with you, you'd better put it in your pocket.”

“Oh. Okay.” Billy jammed the Projac into the front pocket of his jeans. “Let's go.”

The streets of Flinkwater were all but deserted. Not that they were ever very busy. Flinkwater residents have always been indoor types. In fact, more than half of ACPOD employees work from home. But as Billy and I walked the ten blocks to the hospi­tal, we saw only two other ­pedestrians, one squirrel, and four vehicles. Three of those ­vehicles were black SUVs, the official transport of Homeland Security. I wondered what the penalty would be for possessing a top secret weapon prototype. Fortunately, they ignored us.

Billy had sunk into another one of his zones. Probably replaying his latest Ghast War moves. I punched him on the shoulder again.

“Ow!”

“You were going to tell me what we're doing.”

“Oh. Okay. Um  . . . you know how you remember exactly where you were the first time you broke a trillion points in IA?”

I never got anywhere
near
a trillion points playing Interzone Apocalypse, but I nodded. I didn't want to interrupt his flow.

“See, there are certain forms of input that go into your head and get stuck. It's not usually good stuff like breaking a trillion. Mostly it's stuff with
a high horror factor. Like, I will never be able to forget the first time my primary server crashed. It was one fifty-three a.m. on September seventeenth, twenty—”

“Billy! Focus!”

“Sorry.”

“You're saying that sometimes stuff happens that you just can't forget?”

“That's what I just said.”

“Well, you didn't say that
exactly
.”

“I didn't?”

“Never mind. So what's that got to do with all those people bonking?”

“Well  . . . I think it has to do with the WDK Factor . . . . ”

“Oh. Great. The WDK Factor.”

12

The WDK Factor

If you don't live in Flinkwater, you might not know about the WDK Factor.

Allow me to explain.

Long before computers, people used a primitive adding machine called an abacus—basically a rack of beads strung on wires. If you wanted to subtract the price of three melons from the value of a goat and add 10 percent due to the goat being pregnant, an abacus was all you needed. But abacuses were not so good for, say, projecting the trajectory of an artillery shell or modeling the turbulence created by a hydroelectric dam. That's why computers were invented.

Computers are, of course, binary. They only know two things: on and off. In a way they are simpler than an abacus, but one heck of a lot faster. Instead of performing a few dozen operations
per minute, they can crank out several gigamegaquadrazillion. Give or take.

But it wasn't as if some genius one day said, “Hey! I know! Let's attach a cord to this abacus and plug it in!” There were several centuries of intermediate steps. In the last few decades those steps were mostly performed by computers designed by computers to design better and faster computers. Skynet here we come! Break out the Terminator repellent!

Seriously, we won't have to worry about artificial intelligences taking over the planet for at
least
another fifteen or twenty years.

Give or take.

My point is, we now have several generations of hardware and software designed by
other
hardware and software—and nobody really knows how they work. They've gotten way too complicated. For example, you might ask a supercomputer for the secret of life, the universe, and everything, and after a few months of light-speed processing you might get an answer like  . . .

√1.96 x (30 ÷ 10
0
)

 . . . and you would have no idea what that
means
.

But there is no way any mere human could
follow that logic all the way back to its binary origins. There are things that happen during the computing process that not even Gilbert Bates himself could understand. And every so often a computer will generate a piece of information that makes no sense whatsoever.

But to the machines it is all perfectly binary. 101010. On/off. Yes/no. Black/white. They are utterly, maddeningly logical.

Computers do not make mistakes.

So when you ask a computer “What is two plus two?” and the computer tells you the answer is five, you can count on two things being true: 1) There is no way, and 2)
Way
.

A few years ago a Crawdad Super 3785 owned by the FBI predicted that a small group of Jamaican terrorists would kidnap a US ambassador during a gamers convention in Baraboo, Wisconsin. No one believed the computer's warning. For one thing, so far as anyone at the FBI knew, there
was no such thing as a Jamaican terrorist. And no ambassador was supposed to be anywhere
near
Baraboo. The warning was ignored  . . . until a group calling itself the Jamaican Yahmon Liberation Army snatched a US ambassador.

At a gamers convention.

In Baraboo.

The FBI was all over Crawdad Computing,
demanding to know how their computer had predicted the event. Crawdad's response?
We don't know.

Here in Flinkwater we call that the WDK Factor or, in severe cases, the WD
F
K Factor, which stands for We Don't
Flinking
Know. More or less.