Popular Clone, page 9
A fist bump.
Fisher turned the sound knob down as dozens of conversations, laughter, and shouts drummed in his ears. His substitute kept right on going, hellos left and right and calling out names as if he had them all written on the inside of his eyelids.
Then a massive whud sound, like an oak tree falling onto a whale, made Fisher’s teeth rattle, and he flung the headset off his ear. The world in the computer monitor whirled around, spinning crazily until it stopped short at a mouse’s-eye view. The hat had been knocked off. Fisher heard one voice pierce through the others.
“Sorry about that, Fisher! Didn’t see you in the crowd.” The hat was lifted from the ground, and Fisher regained his clone’s-eye view.
Staring him in the face was Chance Barrows—football player, basketball player, sunglass-wearing, slick-blond-haired, Veronica-talking Chance Barrows, who had a swarm of admirers buzzing all around him like an electron cloud.
Fisher gaped at his computer monitor. Not only did he know who Fisher was, he was apologizing!
The way the camera angle shifted slightly suggested that Two was shrugging in response.
“No big deal, Chance,” Two said. “Say hi to the guys on the team for me, will ya?” Chance nodded and smiled, walking off.
The bell for first period rang, and as Two turned a corner, Fisher reflexively recoiled.
Vikings.
They were on the prowl, and they had Two in their sights. This wasn’t their normal hunting routine, either. Normally, they looked like they were having fun, laughing, shoving each other, their grins like sickle blades. Today, they looked completely serious. They stepped together like soldiers, fanned out in formation to minimize the possibility of escape.
And they made straight for Two.
Fisher fought the urge to hide, an urge that almost overpowered his knowledge that he was merely watching a transmitted image.
“Vikings dead ahead!” he whispered frantically into the microphone. “They’re after you. Get out of there while you can!”
“I see them,” came the half-whispered answer. “I’m not running from anyone.”
“You what?” Fisher said. The Vikings kept lumbering forward. Brody was in the center, his jutting forehead leading the way. Leroy on his left, legs rolling forward like he’d learned to walk by watching truck pistons. And Willard on the right, his sneakers slapping the ground rhythmically like a sword banging the side of a shield.
Two looked around, and Fisher saw through his camera that the hall was empty. No witnesses. The three stopped a foot from Two, and glowered down at him. Run, Fisher thought. Run run run run run run run run run.
“Looks like our friend Fisher has been making a new name for himself!” sneered Brody, clapping a hand on Two’s shoulder so hard it made the camera jump.
“Y-Yeah, he’s, he’s getting around, isn’t he?” answered Willard.
“He’s really flipped over a new flower,” finished Leroy, a satisfied, smug grin on his face.
Brody closed his eyes in frustration and turned to him. “Turned over a new leaf, Leroy. He’s … whatever. Just grab him!”
The camera was suddenly a whirl of images, like the shaken-up pictures of a kaleidoscope: first the floor, then the ceiling, then Brody’s face, then a series of rapid side-ways jerks.
In the middle of it all, though, Fisher saw something that made his jaw drop. He saw a familiar-looking elbow shoot out and catch Brody in the stomach. He saw one of his own sneakers kick Leroy right in the nose, as Leroy let out a yelp of pain.
Two was fighting back. And he was fighting hard.
“Ack! Hold him steady, guys!”
“My nose, Brody! He broke my nose!! What do I do?”
“You don’t have to smell him, idiot, just hold on! We’re almost there!” The three were using all their strength to hustle him into the bathroom. As Two struggled, he looked down, and Fisher saw a freshly bleached toilet bowl, flecks of blue cleaner still clinging to its sides.
More shouts of pain from the Vikings as they finally managed to wrestle his head into the toilet, and the camera was submerged. Fisher closed his eyes and turned away from his desk, feeling like he might throw up.
The torrential roar of the flush nearly overwhelmed the microphone. On the one hand, it was fortunate that the equipment on the hat was waterproof. On the other hand … Fisher wouldn’t exactly have been upset to be spared the view it was giving him.
“I can’t feel my nose, Brody,” came Leroy’s voice in the background over the slow exiting footsteps of the Vikings.
“I-I think he broke my toe,” said Willard, who was grunting in pain with each step.
“Come on, you two,” Brody’s fading voice responded. “Don’t be wimps. Let’s just get out of … aagh, I think a tooth is loose… .”
The bathroom door opened, and closed.
“Are … Are you okay?” Fisher asked into the microphone. He felt a newfound respect for his clone. Two might be reckless, but he was also brave. Where had he gotten the courage? That desire to fight? Fisher, the original, had never once stood up to the Vikings.
Water dripped off the camera lens as Two picked himself up, and the view wobbled a bit as he walked a little unsteadily to the mirror. Fisher watched drips of water fall from the fedora’s brim. Then Two turned to face the mirror, and Fisher was overcome with the weirdness of it. He was looking at a mirror image of himself looking at a mirror image of himself.
Two reached up and adjusted the tilt of his fedora. He reached up and brushed a spot of the blue cleaning fluid from his cheek and another from the tip of his nose. His expression was blank. “Fine,” he said shortly. “I’m fine.”
“I told you, you should have run,” Fisher said quietly. “You should listen to me next time.”
Two just scowled into the mirror, then turned around and stalked out of the bathroom.
Mid-morning, the bobbing camera turned down the familiar—and dreaded—dull red-painted cement hallway of the gym, and Fisher was glad he hadn’t built any kind of smell-transmitter to go with the camera and microphone.
Two walked to Fisher’s locker, spun the lock to Fisher’s combination, which was the first five digits of pi—3, 14, 15—and tossed the hat in, turning it around so Fisher was staring into his own face. Two wasn’t looking as smug as usual, but considering his recent encounter with the toilet bowl, he didn’t look too bad, either.
“I’ll see you after gym,” said the mirror image, and then the locker door slammed shut.
Fisher breathed a sigh of relief. Things were looking up for the long-term success of his experiment. The incident with the Vikings was unfortunate, but hopefully it had shown Two exactly where he belonged in the scheme of things at Wompalog. He turned from the computer and walked over to what had been his father’s platypusegg cold-storage unit, which Fisher had inherited after an especially adventurous brood had hatched early and sought warmth in his parents’ bed.
Fisher opened it up and withdrew turkey, some sour-dough bread, and honey mustard. He’d converted the storage unit into a makeshift refrigerator to avoid going into the kitchen when he was supposed to be at school. As he made the sandwich he felt himself jostled at ankle level, and looked down to see FP bumping his forehead against his shins.
“Didn’t I already feed you today?” Bump, bump bump.
“You know this is my food, not yours, right, boy?” Bump, bump bump.
“You’re not going to stop until I feed you more, are you?” FP looked up into Fisher’s eyes, his expression seeming cheerful. “All right, all right.” Fisher reached into the fridge again and took out a little bowl of corn, which he set at his feet. “Happy?” He took the crunching, snuffling noises for a yes.
Fisher returned to his work as he ate, fetching from a rack over his worktable a device that looked like a weapon. It had a long, cylindrical barrel, a handle with a trigger, and a rifle-like stock at the back. In fact, the device looked almost like an actual rifle, except that the chamber the barrel was attached to was bulky and oddly shaped.
Fisher pulled a small bag out of a drawer and, as FP watched eagerly, he poured a large number of tiny, brown pellets into it. Popcorn kernels.
If his calculations were right, the main chamber should heat up at specific intervals. That would allow him to fire individual kernels of popcorn up to one hundred fifty meters. As he powered it on, he thought of all of its uses: long-range popcorn mouth-catching. Popcorn marksmanship events. Two teams, both armed with popcorn guns: the winning team would get to eat all the ammunition at the end.
Fisher’s popcorn fantasies distracted him from realizing just how hot the main chamber was getting. When his fingers started to burn, he reached down to adjust its settings, and kaboom.
Not so much a single kaboom, as hundreds of very, very small kabooms all happening at the same time.
Poppopopopopopopop!
The whole mess of kernels erupted out of the barrel at once. Popcorn flew everywhere, splattering against his wall and lodging into the keyboard of his computer.
“Get down, FP! Get down!”
FP squealed and dove under the bed to escape. Fisher dropped under his desk and covered his head with his hands, which he’d read was the correct procedure for an earthquake, a bombing, or an invasion of flying popcorn.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
When the barrage of popping had at last slowed, Fisher uncovered his head. His floor was coated an inch deep in popcorn kernels. They were on his bed, his desk, his equipment. Fisher got up and started crunching through the mess, trying to find his way to the automated cleanup-bot in the corner.
FP was happily running around the room and vacuuming up the popcorn with his mouth. By the time the cleanup-bot warmed up and got going, FP had taken care of an impressively large amount of the mess. The cleanup-bot whirred and buzzed and beeped, sweeping up the kernels into its built-in trash receptacle. Fisher put the defective popcorn gun back in its place, pulling a kernel out of his left ear and vowing to reexamine the blueprints.
After the robot had finished cleaning, Fisher looked at his computer screen. Still the dark inside of a locker. He looked at the time. Funny, gym should have ended ten minutes ago. He wondered what was …
Oh, no.
Fisher’s train of thought came to a crashing halt like … well, like a train crash. It was Friday. Gym was on Mondays and Thursdays.
Two had tricked him.
CHAPTER 11
People will always do what they want to do, no matter what you ask of them. That is why, while most people have children, I have robots.
—Dr. X, Notes on Human Weakness
Fisher’s desk chair was left spinning on its swivel, pieces of paper blown into the air, and a jar of pencils and pens making a clanking waterfall over the desk’s side. There was almost a dust trail leading out of his room, down the stairs, across the front hallway, and out the door.
After Fisher disabled the alarm, he eased open the front door very slowly and tiptoed across the yard. The movable paving stones matched his tempo, gliding sneakily along the grass to arrive silently under his feet. He was almost to the front gate when he heard a faint clopping sound behind him. He froze, almost afraid to turn around, wondering if his parents had invented a new yard inhabitant he didn’t know about.
Then he turned and saw FP doing his best to move stealthily across the yard. FP delicately placed one hoof in front of another, looking left and right with narrow eyes. He kept sneaking forward until he bumped into Fisher’s leg.
Fisher crossed his arms. “Where do you think you’re going?” Fisher promptly scooped up his pig, marched back to the front door, and tossed him inside. He closed the door behind him as FP squeaked and glided to a haphazard landing on the kitchen floor, narrowly missing the recycling bin.
Two minutes later, Fisher was halfway down the sidewalk when he heard a familiar squeal. He turned around just in time for FP, having leapt from an open window and over the wall, to crash headlong into his face.
“W—!” was all Fisher had time to get out, before the force of FP’s landing carried him backward and off his feet, and pet and master were rolling, entangled, on the sidewalk. Fisher ended up on his back, with FP bouncing excitedly on his chest.
“FP, I don’t have time to …”
Fisher trailed off as FP nuzzled his face. He sighed. “You really have a taste for stupid adventures, don’t you?” He stood up, dusting off his jeans. “Come on, then. Just try to keep up.”
Fisher kept his head down as he walked to school, trying to keep cars or buildings in between himself and anyone he saw on the street. He wanted to avoid being seen walking around in the afternoon on a school day if at all possible. People would ask questions, and he didn’t want to make up any more new answers. This lie was getting big and complicated enough as it was. To give himself courage, he reminded himself of great heroes of legend creeping into the lair of the enemy. Odysseus smuggling himself into Troy. Robin Hood climbing silently up the walls of Nottingham Castle. Vic Daring flying a stolen Venusian patrol craft to land on the Forbidden Satellite.
Two was extremely smart, and if he had deliberately given Fisher the slip, it had to be because he was up to no good. He could be getting into all kinds of trouble. He could be flooding the basement with chicken broth. He could be sticking unremovable clown noses to every teacher’s face. Fisher might get to the school and find it burned to the ground, or covered in twenty acres of aluminum foil, or relocated to the dark side of the moon.
As Fisher got closer to school, he picked up his pace, until he was practically running. His lungs were burning, and his legs felt like a thousand rats wearing golf shoes were scampering across them. FP was moving as fast as his stubby legs would allow, his hooves clanging against the pavement, in between brief spurts of gliding. A gust of wind from a passing bus threw him off course once, and he veered left and right in front of Fisher, squeaking as he tried to regain his course. Fisher reached up and pushed, and FP nose-dived into a soft hedge. Fisher plucked him out as he ran past, and the pig resumed his half-running, half-flying routine.
The school was still standing when it came into view, and Fisher breathed a small sigh of relief. So far, it didn’t look like any massive explosions had occurred. There weren’t any strange glows coming from the windows or multicolored smoke plumes rising out of the roof. Fisher mentally crossed off a few worst-case scenarios.
He knew he couldn’t just charge in the front doors. There already was a Fisher in school, even if he didn’t act at all like the original. Luckily, Fisher had plenty of practice getting around school without being noticed. He’d been making it his business to be as unnoticeable as possible for the past few years.
He made straight for a little-used maintenance door whose lock had broken years ago. FP ran along behind him, whipping his head from left to right. Pig and boy slipped inside, and found themselves in a storage room that probably hadn’t been used since color TV was invented. Fisher started to pick his way through decades of discarded stuff to reach the door into the basement.
“Squeeeee!”
FP squealed in terror and dove behind a box when he came face-to-face with what seemed to be a huge, fanged beast. Fisher whipped around, heart hammering, and then laughed.
“It’s okay, boy,” he said, holding out his hand and beckoning FP back over. “It’s just an old-school mascot. Let’s Go, Furious Badgers!” he said sarcastically, twirling a finger in the air.
Wompalog’s basement was a place Fisher had unfortunately gotten to know before—but not of his own choosing. In sixth grade, the Vikings had once tossed him into the boiler room and locked the door behind him. When a teacher had walked by and asked why they were standing against the door and what the banging sounds were, they’d said that the radiator was on the fritz again and they were keeping people out, for their safety.
Fisher remembered that he had found an escape route that day: an old dumbwaiter that used to carry supplies up to the cafeteria. The door was still loose. Fisher took off the cap and sunglasses, lowered his hood, and crawled into the little compartment, reaching down to pull FP up after him. He reached behind him for the rope and hoisted the contraption up, hand over hand, until he reached the main floor.
Fisher and FP slipped out of the dumbwaiter and found themselves in the very back of the cafeteria kitchen. Weak lights flickered off grease-stained oven doors and floor tiles. Strange creaks and odd hisses echoed around the room. Fisher tensed, looking left and right, but didn’t see anyone. Even the cafeteria workers avoided coming this far back into the kitchen when they could help it.
Fisher could hear the commotion from the busier part of the kitchen as the cooks prepped the school lunch. He looked back at FP, who squinted his beady eyes and waggled his tail a little in a show of excitement.
“All right, boy,” Fisher said, petting his pig on the forehead. “Let’s get out of here.”
Fisher and FP crawled their way to the main kitchen, where the lunch servers were bustling around, ladling what looked like slop into large metal dishes.
A row of counters ran the width of the room, and on the other side was a door, hidden in a small alcove. Fisher didn’t know where it led, but he knew he needed to escape the kitchen before somebody saw him. He turned to FP.
“Stay behind me, boy,” he said, and lurched forward as fast as his hands and knees could carry him. A third of the way, halfway, two-thirds …
Then he saw one of the cooks—massive, lumbering— heading straight for him. As soon as the man rounded the corner, Fisher would be caught dead in his tracks. He glanced wildly right and left, looked for a cabinet or something to conceal him, but found nothing. He froze. Any moment now …
Then a shower of pots and pans from a high shelf made both Fisher and the cook jump. Fisher saw a pot of soup cascading to the floor. And he caught just a glimpse of a curled, pink tail darting along the shelf.
FP!
The cook pivoted and hurried over to clean up, giving Fisher just enough time to slip over to the door. Trusting FP to find his way, Fisher turned and tried the knob. It was locked! He snatched up a pair of forks from a sink and went to work trying to pick the lock.
