The Great Interactive Dream Machine (2 page)

He has very baggy eyes for a kid, and they were really staring. He was holding a soldering iron in one hand. The fingers on the other hand were working away, punching up something in the air. He does that a lot, like he's working on a keyboard even when no keyboard's there.

“Aaron,” I said, “if I touch you, will I fry?”

“You kidding?” he said. “The electricity's off.”

I sighed. “And how did that happen? How did you manage to off the power in a sixteen-story building this time?”

“I'm thinking power surge.” He began easing up the wall.

“Power surge? Does that soldering iron in your hand have anything to do with it?”

He looked surprised to find a soldering iron in his hand. But then he'd just been blasted out of his chair and across the room. Too bad it hadn't knocked some sense into him. “Oh well,” he said, “back to the drawing board.” Another one of his sayings.

“Tell me how it happened, Aaron. Talk me through it.”

“You couldn't follow it.”

“Try me.”

We were standing in front of his technopolis. It was quiet, cooling. It was like some dead civilization. Aaron stroked his chin. “I was trying to go next generation with my equipment. Do you realize that the sixteen-bit Sega and Nintendo technology is already obsolescent now that game systems like 3DO and Atari have started processing data thirty-two or sixty-four bits at a time?”

“Hadn't heard,” I said. “You about blacked out the Eastern Seaboard so you could play computer games?”

“I knew you wouldn't understand. Why try? That was just an example. You've got to keep upgrading. You've got to stay on the cutting edge.” He stared up at me, and his eyes were little pink pinwheels. “Nothing is future-proof, Josh.”

“Let's start farther back,” I said. “You got up this morning. You went straight to your keyboards without combing your hair or brushing your teeth. You booted up your computers or whatever.”

“I logged in. I had e-mail,” Aaron said. “And that's another example. World Wide Web is to e-mail what television is to radio. We keep moving on. Today's technology is tomorrow's archaeology. Today you're happening. Tomorrow you're history.”

“Fine,” I said. “You had e-mail.”

He nodded. “I join channels with a kid out in Hays, Kansas. Met him through a chat room.”

“What's his name?”

“His user I.D. is Hayseed. His real name's Floyd.”

Floyd?

“He was pretty excited today,” Aaron said. “He'd just won his county's Jersey Cattle Club essay contest: ‘Why I Would Like to Own a Jersey Calf.' He's heavy into 4-H.”

I stared. “You're talking halfway across the country to a kid named Floyd who calls himself Hayseed and wants a cow? Aaron, that hurts. I live in your building. I'm right here.”

He blinked up at me. “You don't have e-mail.”

“Okay, forget Floyd. By the way, what's your user I.D.?”

“A2Z,” Aaron said. At school we call him the A-to-Z man because he's named Aaron Zimmer and because he knows everything from A to Z. Thinks he does.

“What did you do next?”

His eyes got shifty. “I'm working on a new formula.” The haze was lifting, and he glanced around the room. “I don't want to say too much about it. I don't want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Don't worry about my hands,” I said. “Just talk.”

The only time we can talk these days is when his computers are down.

“Here's just an example,” he mumbled. “In the next-generation stage we're looking at a holographic projector instead of a printer. Right? Transmission of three-D imagery, okay?”

“Hold it, Aaron. This is beginning to sound familiar.” Because I remembered how he once got carried away with something he called “cellular reorganization.” And I mean carried away. It meant being sent by your computer to other times. It meant that all the cells in your body reorganized and shipped out. I'm not saying it didn't work, but he never got the bugs out of the formula. I was hoping he was over it by now.

“It's not about cellular reorg—”

“That was an early stage.”

“Where are we now?”

“Is it going to do me any good to recap fiber-optic potential for you?”

“Probably not.” I looked at him. And I happened to notice his eyes were practically shifting off his face.

“F.L.I.R.,” he said, almost whispering.

“F.L.I.R.?”

He threw out a small hand. “Shut up about it. We're talking a top-secret military device:
forward-looking infrared
system.”

“I'll hate myself for asking, but if it's top-secret government stuff, how did you get it? E-mail?”

“Keep your voice down. I was hacking around at random and found myself in the Big P.”

“Big P
^?
”

“Pentagon,” he breathed.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Aaron, give me a break. You're a troll, but you're no mole.”

But did he hear me? Forget about it. “What I needed was optimum programming for enough high-intensity three-dimensional image shifting that I could store here at home and digitize for any computer I happened to have access to. The Big P thinks F.L.I.R. is just a kind of post-radar for spotting triple A.”

“Triple A?”

He sighed. “Anti-aircraft artillery.”

“One of these days you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, Aaron. Just bottom-line me.”

“I put together a formula, and the government helped. We're taxpayers, am I right? So then I found I could download imagery from the server at the rate of sixty pictures a second, enhanced by F.L.I.R.” He patted a set-top box in his technopolis. “When I get this baby wired and running, I've got ten times the computing power of a top-of-the-line PC, with the added capacity for night fighting if we're interested. When you're downloading imagery from the server at the rate of sixty pictures a second, it can reorganize your total body and move it out. We could probably even bomb some other country if we had warheads. Theoretically.”

“That's creepy, Aaron. So are you.”

He shrugged.

“So to get enough computing power or whatever for your new formula to work, you started soldering live wires with the power on?” I said. “Is this what I'm hearing?”

“I'm under a lot of pressure,” he said. “I'm looking at a deadline.”

“What deadline? You mean like final exams?”

“Please,” Aaron said. He doesn't set aside much time for schoolwork. “I'm working up a formula as a project for computer camp.”

Computer camp?

“You're going to computer camp? This summer?”

“If I can get in,” he said. “They don't want you in the advanced-digit-head division till you're twelve. I won't turn twelve till August, and I don't even look eleven. At our age we're not old enough for anything. But a really high-concept project might get me in. I need a project that will knock their socks off.”

“And what's going to happen to me while you're knocking their socks off, Mr. High-I.Q. A-to-Z man? I can't go to computer camp. There's no way I could get in the gate.”

“That's true.” Aaron shook his head sadly. “You wouldn't know a modem from a mouse. You wouldn't know a megabyte from a microdisk. You wouldn't—”

“Okay, okay. So you know where I'll end up all summer.”

Aaron nodded. “I'll end up there too if I don't take steps.”

“Did your parents get the letter from the coach?”

He nodded again. “Can you believe he's still using U.S. post office snail mail in the age of the fax and e-mail?”

The parents of every kid at Huckley School got the same letter. It was from the middle-school coach, Trip Renwick. He was setting up a soccer camp in Connecticut, and he wanted everybody to sign on.

Soccer all summer? Fifty miles from the nearest bagel, bouncing balls off our heads? Vertically challenged Aaron and spindly me being pounded into a weedy field for two months? Living in bunks and listening to frogs? Please.

“It will look good to parents,” Aaron said. “When summer comes, they've got to do something with us. They're sitting ducks for a letter like that.”

“Aaron, I'm depressed. Let's get some air.”

“But as soon as the power comes on again, I can get back to—”

“Aaron. Think. You've blown the master fuse in a Fifth Avenue building. What about your parents? Where are they?”

“My dad goes into the office on Saturdays. My mom's at her aromatherapy class.”

“Aaron, do you want to be around if they come home before the power's back on?”

“Not really,” he said in a mouselike voice.

“Then let's go. It's called outdoors. You'd like it. We'll go across the park.”

“We'll have to take Ophelia,” he said. “The professional dog walker doesn't come on weekends. Weekends are for spending quality time with your pet.”

“Aaron, let's not take Ophelia. Picture it. Two undersize private-school guys with preppy written all over us walking a white poodle with a rhinestone collar in Central Park? That's asking for trouble.”

But at least he was willing to go. He reached for his small windbreaker. “Aaron, it's springtime. The sun's out. Forget the windbreaker.”

As we were walking out of his room, a voice behind us spoke suddenly:

So the power was back on, but I got him out of there anyway.

Ophelia was in a fairly good mood when she saw her imported Italian-leather leash. She showed me her teeth in the elevator, and she showed them to Vince down at the front door. But she didn't lunge. She was wearing her rhinestone collar. She'd been to the dog hairdresser. She was looking good and knew it.

We entered the park at Seventy-second past the T-shirt salespeople. The benches were full of oldsters holding up sun reflectors to their faces. There were runners, walkers, people on stilts. There were bikers in and out of the bike lane. The puppet-show people were performing. The gangsta-rap people were out, and the moon-walkers. You name it. There was enough of a crowd so nobody paid any attention to two preppies and a poodle.

We stayed away from the soccer field. Practically every sunny school-day afternoon Coach Renwick marches us over to the park, dragging along the net goals with us. We pray for rain.

On our way to Bethesda Fountain, Aaron was nearly sliced and diced by a black-spandex flying wedge of Rollerbladers: big muscle monsters in Walkmans and earrings, with flying ponytails.

“Aaron, for Pete's sake, watch where you're going,” I said. “They'll flatten you like Wile E. Coyote.”

But you know Aaron. He was wandering along with Ophelia's leash in one hand and his other hand keyboarding like crazy.

People were sitting all around the fountain, eating frozen yogurt. The lake was full of boaters. Overhead the Fuji Film blimp was bobbing and weaving in a blue sky. One of the great New York views. Was Aaron seeing this? Was he enjoying a perfect spring Saturday?

“Look at it this way,” he said. “You've got your basic NCSA Mosaic to point and click while you're browsing the Web, am I right?”

“Who knows?” I said. “Who cares?”

“Let's take that another interactive step.”

“Let's not.”

“The Internet as we know it—”

“Aaron, what are you saying? That you're about to come up with one of your cockamamie formulas again—that'll black out our building and send you to computer camp and leave me in droopy shorts up in Connecticut, running my legs off after a soccer ball? Is that what we're talking about?”

But Ophelia kept dragging at her leash, so we strolled on. She did her business off the curb on Central Park West. Across the street was this big old building with towers and turrets. I like towers and turrets.

“Hey, Aaron, look. It's the Dakota apartment building.”

Aaron snapped on a plastic glove and took a Baggie out of his jeans pocket. If you're going to walk a dog in New York, you're going to have to clean up after it. It's the law.

“So?” he said.

“The Dakota. It's where the novel Time and Again takes place.”

“What novel?”

I sighed. “The novel Headbloom assigned us. The novel we're having a quiz on Tuesday.”

“Ah,” Aaron said. He signs himself out of a lot of classes to work on the computers in the media center. “You want to fill me in on that?”

“It's not a bad book for an assignment. It even has pictures,” I said. “This guy named Si Morley goes back in time. It's a top-secret government project.”

Aaron showed a little interest. He dropped the Baggie in a trash container. “How'd he do his time travel?”

“He did a lot of homework on the year 1882. He researched it.”

Aaron nodded. “You can access that information on WAIS—Wide Area Information Servers. You can search information libraries stored on the Net.”

“He didn't use that,” I said. “He read books. Then he came over here to the Dakota, which was from the time he wanted to go to. He moved in. He wore old-fashioned clothes. He psyched himself back. It was like self-hypnosis.”

“Fiction.” Aaron sneered slightly.

“Of course it's fiction,” I said. “But do you remember when you were first trying to cellular-reorganize yourself, you got into John D. Rockefeller's bed at the Museum of the City of New York? You thought that might send you back.”