The Rendering Page 10

  This was our neighborhood, and we knew every inch, better than anyone: they weren’t gonna catch us here.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To school.”

  “You just said you weren’t going to school.”

  “You’ll be harder to spot there; we’ll blend.”

  “That’s your plan? We’ll blend?”

  “Well, Doug”—she grinned over her shoulder—“nobody’s better than you at disappearing into a crowd at school.”

  I snorted. “True enough.”

  My dad had been a professor, and my mom an engineer, so I guess the teachers had pretty high expectations of me—at least, at first. That was probably why I’d developed my ability to avoid attention, learning how to hide in plain sight to keep them from calling on me all the time. And the truth is … Well, Auntie M said I wasn’t afraid of attention; I just didn’t like people wanting me to live up to their memory of my parents. Like I was afraid I’d disappoint them or something.

  I dunno, maybe she was right. Still, knowing how to disappear into a crowd was a good skill to have right then.

  We slipped behind the mini-mart, then hopped the fence onto the school’s upper field.

  “First stop, the computer lab,” Jamie said. “We’ll get in touch with your aunt. Ask her what to do next.”

  “If we’re separated, let’s meet at …” I thought for a second while we cut across the baseball diamond. “The drainage pipe in that ditch across the street.”

  Jamie shuddered. “What’s with you and repulsive pits today?”

  “It’s the perfect place. Nobody’ll look there.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Outside the drainage pipe.”

  “Sure, that’s what I meant.”

  When we got to the pitcher’s mound, Jamie cocked her head. “What’s that?”

  “What?” Then I heard it: whapwhapwhapwhap. “Oh.”

  “Look.” Jamie pointed into the sky, at a distant tiny speck, no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.

  Except getting bigger

  Fast.

  And louder: WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP.

  A helicopter.

  No. A helicopter gunship. Swooping directly at us.

  Jamie gasped. “Ohmigod.”

  “Um,” I said. “Run!”

  I grabbed her hand and yanked her toward school. We needed to get off the field, we needed cover—we needed something between us and that gunship.

  But when we turned, guess what we saw?

  Another helicopter, swooping down. We were trapped in the middle, sitting ducks between two, um, things that hunted ducks.

  Well, long story short: the helicopters landed at each end of the field, trapping us between.

  “Great,” I said. “We’ll blend.”

  SURRENDER

  Soldiers poured from the helicopters, fanning into semicircles and pointing assault rifles at us.

  “Lie facedown,” one of the soldiers bellowed. “Hands behind your head.”

  I looked at Jamie. She looked at me.

  We both looked at the soldiers.

  Then we lay down and put our hands behind our heads.

  AT LEAST THEY’RE NOT LITTLE YAPPY DOGS

  We were surrounded. The soldiers prowled forward, rifles raised.

  “They’re just kids,” one soldier muttered.

  “That kid detonated a nuke at the research site,” said another. “If they move, you are cleared to fire.”

  “I didn’t detona—” I started.

  “No talking!” a soldier yelled.

  “He didn’t do anything,” Jamie said.

  “If they talk, you’re cleared to fire,” the same guy said.

  Then one of them knelt on my back. Which hurt pretty bad. He yanked at my arms and handcuffed me.

  “Oww,” Jamie said, lying next to me.

  “Suspects secure, Captain,” one of the soldiers said. “And ready for transport.”

  A huge crash sounded at the far end of the field.

  I scrunched around to see what had happened, and for a second couldn’t understand what I was looking at. Lying on my stomach handcuffed, I didn’t have the best vantage point. Then I realized that one of the helicopters was upside-down.

  And burning.

  And … crumpled.

  Around me, the soldiers reacted. Some of them shouted orders, and others fell to the ground, taking aim. Because in front of the burning helicopter, three … figures stepped from a cloud of black smoke.

  For a second, I thought they were wearing gorilla suits. But those weren’t suits. And they weren’t gorillas.

  “Are those … skunks?” Jamie murmured.

  Yeah, they were skunks. I’d seen them before, outside the blue shuttle the previous night.

  Skunk-people. Your basic skunk-people.

  And you know what? I could accept a talking snake fridge and a centipedal medic. They’d done crazy cutting-edge stuff at the Center, patching together technology and biology. Heck, I’d even learned to live with a monkeybeast.

  But skunks?

  Yeah, skunks. With short black fur and white stripes that rose to Mohawks atop their heads. Big bushy black-and-white tails and kinda skunky-looking faces. And humanoid, human-size bodies, heavy on the weight lifting.

  Well, mostly humanoid. The big one—Larkspur—looked a little android, too, given he was mostly encased in BattleArmor.

  The female—Poppy—wore a leather jacket and biker boots and swung a chain in one hand and wielded a crowbar in the other. She’d been output through the Street Gang video game while it was running the Hog Stompers versus the Fists of Kung Fu.

  And the last one—Cosmo—looked like a fuzzy Punisher, in combat gear with a bandoleer full of gadgets I didn’t recognize. He’d emerged from the VR combat simulator, with knowledge of a million combat scenarios.

  One squad of soldiers advanced warily, yelling at the skunks to raise their hands and lie facedown and drop their weapons—all at once.

  “I am Larkspur,” Larkspur told the soldiers, his voice a deep rumble. The morning sun glinted off his armor-encased body. But he wasn’t just wearing the Quantuum 19 BattleArmor prototype, he was the Quantuum 19 BattleArmor. “The boys come with us.”

  “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.

  Sh
ow-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.

  SUBURBAN RECON

  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.

  A CASE OF VIRAL INFECTION

  “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.”