The Rendering (14 page)

“Boys!” Jamie hissed under her breath.

Great. I was shaking with fear, and Jamie was insulted that a skunk—a skunk!—thought she was a boy.

“Smooth move, big guy,” said Cosmo, twirling a handful of darts. Why darts? Because some bored technician had loaded his favorite game—
SimToys
—into the VR combat simulator. “That one’s a girl.”

“Pardon me,” Larkspur said to Jamie.

Poppy didn’t say anything. She just stood there, smiling at the soldiers and lazily swinging her motorcycle chain, her eyes eager and alert.

“Throw down your weapons,” a soldier said.

“That is not possible,” Larkspur told him.

“Down! Now!
Down!”
the soldiers yelled.

“I’m afraid we cannot comply with your request,” Larkspur said. “We are—”

“Open fire!”

I must’ve blinked, because Poppy had been standing thirty feet from the soldiers—then she was among them. Her chain lashed the rifles from two soldiers’ hands, and she dropped low and swept two other guys from their feet with a flashing kick, then leapt and spun, all in one movement, tossing a soldier halfway across the field.

The soldiers started firing.

Jamie and I hugged the ground.

And Larkspur moved.

He’s big and talks slow and steady, so you might think he can’t move that fast. And maybe he’s not as quick as
Poppy—when she gets going, she’s just a blur—but Larkspur is faster than anything human. Not even close.

The soldiers fired, and I don’t know if they hit him. Doesn’t really matter. Regular bullets bounce right off him. He knocked a few heads, pausing only to bend a rifle into a U with his bare hands.

Show-off.

And Cosmo? He stood in back and threw the darts. Not
at
the soldiers, though; he tossed them away from all the fighting, in the opposite direction. I had no idea why.

Still, a minute later the skunks were the only ones left standing. The soldiers lay in moaning heaps around the field.

“Time to leave,” Larkspur said. “Reinforcements incoming, with heavy armaments.”

“Good,” Poppy said with a predatory grin. “I need the workout.”

“We have a deadline.” Larkspur checked one of the dials on his wrist monitor. “And we don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Cosmo,” he said. “Remove the handcuffs.”

“Who died and made you king, Tin Man?” Cosmo said. But he came over and snapped our cuffs.

As I write this now, the skunks look normal to me—well,
almost
normal—but at the time, they blew my mind. Walking, talking skunk-people.

“Y-You were there last night,” I stammered. “At the Center. Outside the shuttle.”

“Saved your little pink butt,” Poppy told me.

“He saved ours, as well,” Larkspur said.

“My butt,” Poppy said, “is not pink.”

“Are we standing here talking about butts?” Cosmo asked. “Because I’m pretty sure we’re standing here talking about butts.”

Poppy looked at Jamie. “Who’s the girl?”

“I’m Jamie,” she said. “Who are—what are—who—”

“What is this? Interspecies social hour?” Cosmo said.

“I see you’ve secured the laptop,” Larkspur told Jamie. “Good. Back to the root canal.”

“Um,” Jamie said, staring at his looming armor-and-fur form.

“Yes?”

“Um,” Jamie said, still staring.

He knelt beside her, his deep voice a gentle rumble. “We should go, before they return.”

“The battery’s dead,” Jamie told him. “We were heading to my house to recharge.”

He cocked his huge head. “Then shall we join you?”

Jamie and I looked at each other, unable to believe we were chatting with a bunch of life-size, combat-ready, steroid-abusing Muppets.

“Dr. Solomon stressed the need for urgency,” Larkspur murmured.

“You know my aunt?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And her time is running out.”

That got through to me. I said I’d crawl over broken glass to help my aunt: skunk-people were nothing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Join us.”

After a moment, Jamie nodded and said, “This way,” and led the skunks toward her house.

We walked past the darts Cosmo had thrown to the side of the field. They were stuck in the ground in this shape:

That was what he’d been doing: making a dart smiley.

When we left the school grounds, Larkspur stayed with us while Cosmo disappeared into the shadow of one house and Poppy bounded onto the roof of another.

“Police patrols,” Larkspur explained. “They’ll divert them, then meet us at Jamie’s house.”

“Divert them how?” Jamie asked. “I mean …”

“Various methods. None of which, I hope, will flatten the entire neighborhood.”

She looked at him like she couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “Oh.”

“They are sometimes a little too … enthusiastic,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m getting that.” Then she said, “Digitized skunks?”

“Indeed.”

“Generated through damaged output paths?” she asked. “BattleArmor and combat sims and biker ninjas?”

Larkspur nodded his armored head. “And 9,692,000 iterations.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You know there are 525,600 minutes in a year?”

Jamie nodded. “Everyone knows that, but—”

“Everyone does
not
know that,” I interrupted.

“But who cares?” she continued.

“Imagine that each iteration is one minute,” Larkspur said. “Nine million, six hundred and ninety-two thousand iterations.”

“You mean you … you lived through all those iterations?” Jamie asked, her eyes glittering with excitement. “You
experienced
them? Inside the Center’s data banks?”

He nodded. “We learned. We evolved. We were born yesterday, but—”

“You’re eighteen.” She turned to me with the same
expression she gets when she finishes a science experiment. “They’re eighteen years old.”

“So they can drive and vote,” I said.
“After we save my aunt.”

We walked the rest of the way to her house in silence.

“I’ve died and gone to girly heaven,” Poppy said sarcastically, prowling into Jamie’s bedroom.

Jamie’s room isn’t actually that girly. More a weird mixture of pink frilly things from when she was a kid, expensive furniture and designer clothes, and science-geek stuff.

“The garage is downstairs,” Jamie replied. “If you want to pour a can of engine oil over your head.”

Poppy gave Jamie a dirty look and tossed five of her stuffed animals into the air. She spun and flipped and kicked them all around the room, and one bounced off Larkspur’s shoulder, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy at Jamie’s laptop, logging on to the Net. Meanwhile, Cosmo was in the corner, fiddling with a few toys he’d grabbed at the big-box store, a heap of circuits he’d ripped from the camcorder downstairs, and some cleaning products from under the kitchen sink.

And I was sitting there staring. I still couldn’t believe it. Skunk-people.

“I’m on,” Larkspur said.

In a moment, my aunt’s voice came over Jamie’s speakers. “Poppy!” she said. “Stop that and pay attention. You too, Cosmo.”

To my surprise, Poppy and Cosmo listened to her and gathered around the computer.

“This is the situation. We have approximately two hours to get an uplink. If we fail, I’ll die—and the skunks will revert to pure information.”

“Pure information?” Larkspur asked.

Poppy grunted. “Sounds nasty.”

“Your new state is highly volatile,” my aunt explained. “If you don’t stabilize with an uplink, say good-bye to your opposable thumbs. You’ll dissolve into a bundle of digital information.”

“I
like
my thumbs,” Cosmo said.

“You’ve located the uplinks?” Larkspur asked my aunt.

“There are three,” she said. “Roach has two and the third is in a military installation in San Diego.”

“Give us Roach’s address.” Cosmo cracked his knuckles. “I’d like to break down his front door.”

“And both his legs,” Poppy added.

“Roach’s encryption is too strong,” my aunt said. “I’m still working on locating him.”

Larkspur nodded. “San Diego, then.”

“We don’t have time to go all that way,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” I said. “And unless the uplink’s at the San Diego Zoo, aren’t the skunks gonna attract a little attention, driving down the road?”

“For the skunks,” my aunt said, “the ‘information superhighway’ really is a highway. They can travel thousands of miles in a second. If there’s a sufficient concentration of technology at their destination, they’ll be able to reanimate inside the military installation.”

“Out of
nothing
?” Jamie asked.

“Of course not,” my aunt said. “You know better than that. Think it through.”

Jamie bit her lip. “They’ll reanimate from … from whatever atoms are in the area? The background radiation from any electronics will reshape the particles into their forms!”

“Very good,” my aunt said. “They’re the only digital life-forms that don’t need an uplink or those ‘steaks’ Doug used. At least, once they get stabilized. They’ll jack into the Net here, reanimate in San Diego to grab the uplink, and—”

“Hold on,” I said. “Wait one second.”

“Yes?”

“First, there are talking skunks in the room.”

“Yes, Doug, I’m aware that you in particular have seen some odd things—”

“This whole thing is insane. The Muppets here—”

Poppy growled at me.

“No offense,” I quickly added. “The skunks are gonna zap across the country in streams of … of … of—”

“Electrons?” Jamie guessed.

“Muons and hadrons—” my aunt started.

“In streams of
whatever,”
I said. “They’ll break into a military installation and steal an uplink? Yes? Good. They’ll reanimate you. Which is great, that’s the entire point—”

“Also,” Cosmo muttered, “I want to keep my thumbs.”

“Yeah, and the skunks get stabilized. I guess that’s good, too. But then what? The whole U.S. government is after me. Roach and Hund are still out there and—”

“VIRUS,” my aunt said.

“Huh?”

“They call themselves VIRUS.”

“At least they’re honest,” Jamie said.

“Not at all,” my aunt said. “They’re posing as a political movement. VIRUS. The Virtual Republic for Upgrading Society.”

“Virus,” Jamie said. “Cute.”

“They’re getting some press, too. They claim they’ll end poverty and war, hunger and sickness—all the problems in the world—by scanning people into the Net.”

“All the problems,” Poppy said. “Like freedom, independence—”

“Humor,” Cosmo added. “Creativity—”

“Roach plans,” my aunt interrupted, “to digitize everything, to reproduce reality as virtual reality. Then he’ll destroy the real world—with nukes or biological weapons—leaving him programmer king of the digital world he’s created, running on automated servers in underground bunkers.”

“And he’ll have his trigger finger on the Delete key,” Larkspur said.

“Exactly.”

“No way,” I said. “That’s just … No way.”

“Bug,” Jamie said. “You’re arguing with your aunt … who’s
inside a computer.”

“Jamie’s right, Doug. My body died last night. I’m already a virtual life-form.”

“Fine,” I said. “We need the uplink. Then what?”

“Roach must have a central data bank,” Larkspur said, thinking out loud. “Something like a … a virtual city he uses as a base.”

“That’s right,” my aunt said. “Without the HostLink, he’ll need to start smaller, to build his domain from a central location. Digitize a few minds at a time—and bodies, too, if he’s using his scanning booths. First a handful of victims, then a hundred. Then thousands and millions …”

When my aunt’s voice trailed off, Larkspur nodded. “How long until he starts?”

“I’m not sure,” my aunt said from inside the computer.
“But I aim to find out. While you’re getting the uplink, we’ll be doing some research.”

“We?” Jamie said. I could tell she liked the sound of that.

“Fasten your dragonfly,” my aunt said. “We’re going for a ride.”

A few minutes later, I showed the skunks to the three-car garage. I opened the door and Poppy snarled when she saw the only car there: Jamie’s parents’ minivan.

“No way,” Poppy said. “I am not riding in
that.”

“It’s only a half mile to the electric company substation where we can jack in,” Larkspur said. “At least you fit.”

He had a point. If he didn’t curl on his side in the back, his head would pop through the roof.

“I need a Harley,” she said. “Okay? I
need
a Harley.”

“I’m thinking a skateboard,” Cosmo said.

“That nonlethal setting is one thing,” she grumbled, “but what is
with
you?”

“A few too many iterations in
SimToys
,” Larkspur said.

“Or roller skates,” Cosmo continued.

“Roller—” Poppy spun around. “Okay, Cosmo. Right here. Let’s go.”

“Which one of you wants to drive?” Larkspur asked as he squeezed into the back.

Poppy and Cosmo looked at each other; then they looked at me.