Tiger Rock, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Tiger Rock
The Monty Within
Bleeding Heart
About the Authors
Teaser
Copyright
HEY!” KAI PROTESTED, “ARE YOU TRYING TO PULL MY ARM OFF?”
Stepping through the grand quadruple-door glass and gleaming chrome entrance to the Freddy Fazbear Mega Pizzaplex, Kai inhaled the aromas of spicy pizza sauce and sweet cotton candy as he shook off his overeager, amped-up friend. Todd, as usual, didn’t think Kai was moving fast enough.
Asher, the last of the “Timeless Trio,” as Kai and his two best buddies called themselves, laughed as he followed Kai and Todd inside. “Face it,” Asher said, “you’re just too slow, Kai.”
Kai laughed, too. It was an old joke. Kai had been born on Oahu, and he’d spent his first seven years on the island with his native Hawaiian mother and his “cowboy” dad (born and raised on a ranch in Wyoming). Between the “Hawaiian Time” attitude of his mom and the “What’s your hurry, pawdna?” mindset of his dad, Kai was known for being “chill.” Todd regularly accused Kai of being so laid-back that he was practically horizontal.
“Come on, you guys!” Todd urged. He waved his arms around and barely missed whacking a pretty teen girl in the face.
She shot Todd a dirty look. He was oblivious to it, as usual—too busy looking around.
Kai couldn’t blame him. The Pizzaplex was seriously cool, maybe the only fun place in their small town.
They’d been thrilled when it was built, but it was no longer new to Kai, Todd, and Asher. They’d seen the blacklight play area for the little kids—climbing toys, slides, and foam building blocks set up around a glitter-ball pit. They’d gazed up at the stained-glass cupola that capped the center of the Pizzaplex’s dome, and they’d been inside the castle-like two-story theater rotunda that sat under the kaleidoscopic spray of light that came through the stained glass. They’d investigated every single one of the game venues and shops and restaurants. They’d eaten at least a dozen pizzas in the flashy neon-lit, mirrored-ceilinged main dining room, and they’d bought more than their fair share of Freddy’s-themed clothing and souvenirs. They’d driven the go-carts on the tracks that crisscrossed over and under the walkways connected to all the various parts of the Pizzaplex, and they’d ridden, several times, the roller coaster that swooped throughout the Pizzaplex, its tracks entwining with a seemingly endless maze of colorful climbing tubes. They’d watched the animatronic performances, and they knew by heart all the rock and pop songs the animatronics played and all the themed music pounding from the various game areas. They also knew the sounds of the games—the pings and beeps, the buzzes and vrooms, the hums and dings.
By now, Kai and his friends knew the bedazzled chaos of the Pizzaplex as well as they knew one another’s homes. In fact, before Kai went to sleep at night, he often closed his eyes and lost himself in the endlessly constant motion of the Pizzaplex’s brilliant lights, cheery music, and buoyant crowds. The otherworldly, over-the-top magnificence of the Pizzaplex cloaked the everyday-life stuff that sometimes got him down.
But despite this familiarity, Todd was always wide-eyed, almost starstruck, when they were here. He acted as if each of their visits to the magical fun dome was their first. But that was Todd. He was all about “being present.”
“You have to make every moment count,” Todd liked to say.
Todd had been the first to call them the Timeless Trio, a name he’d picked because they didn’t fit in with the rest of their sixth-grade class. “Time is a construct. It doesn’t exist. The only real thing is now,” he’d declared. Kai and Asher didn’t really get Todd’s endless babblings about the “illusory nature of time,” but they thought the name was cool.
“Come on,” Todd repeated for at least the third time. He tried to grab Kai’s arm again. Kai sidestepped his friend and shook his head. He wondered, not for the first time, why someone who lived in the present was always in such a hurry.
“The Storyteller’s Tree isn’t going anywhere,” Kai said.
As Kai followed Todd through the boisterous Pizzaplex crowd, he had to admit that he, too, was excited about seeing the tree. They hadn’t been to the Pizzaplex in a couple weeks, and in that time, they’d overheard several kids at school talking about the tree that housed The Storyteller, a cutting-edge program that was supposed to feed story lines to the entertaining animatronics.
“Can you imagine the code that went into programming The Storyteller?” Asher had asked after they’d heard about it. Asher had gone online to read up on the new Pizzaplex feature, and he’d talked endlessly about it, using programming jargon that neither Kai nor Todd understood.
Even though Kai, Todd, and Asher were close friends, they couldn’t have been more different. Kai, who knew his name meant “sea,” was pretty relaxed about life in general. Yeah, things sometimes got to him, but most of the time, he could “go with the flow,” something his mom always encouraged him to do. That was her nature. Kai’s mom was an ER nurse but somehow, she never let the stress get to her. She didn’t get rattled, no matter how many long hours she had to work or what she had to deal with.
“You have to ride the waves of life, Kai,” she often told him.
In Hawaii, his mom had literally ridden the waves. She’d just started teaching Kai to surf when his dad had moved to the mainland to run a start-up real estate development company, and they’d moved here, to a town a thousand miles from the nearest waves. Kai missed the ocean, but he was okay with where they lived now. He liked how the place had seasons, how the tree leaves turned orange and yellow in the fall and how snow fell in the winter. It was an okay trade-off for ocean waves.
Kai hadn’t left the island behind him, though. Looking more like his black-haired, brown-eyed, and dark-skinned mom than his blond, blue-eyed dad (his sister was the opposite—she and Kai barely looked related), Kai also had his mother’s short, slight shape. This squat appearance combined with the Hawaiian shirts and baggy cotton pants he preferred to the solid-color T-shirts and jeans of his classmates made him stand out. So did his tendency to zone out and daydream. Because Kai’s mind wandered so much, he didn’t do so well in school. He didn’t care much about what he was being taught. He was more interested in nature and art and the spirit world.
In contrast to Kai, Todd was tall, skinny, and frenetic. With long, usually messy hair nearly as orange as the average carrot and a pale face painted almost brown by freckles, Todd stood out in school as much, or more, than Kai did. Todd, however, had no trouble with his schoolwork. He was a straight-A student who loved to learn. When he wasn’t hanging out with Kai and Asher, Todd was always sprawled on his bed reading a book, his foot jittering the whole time. His room was so stuffed with books that there was barely enough room for his furniture—or for Asher and Kai when they visited him.
And then there was Asher. If he hadn’t been a total tech geek, Asher might have fit in at school. With brown hair and eyes and a height that was average for an eleven-year-old, he looked pretty normal. Kai had even overheard some girls talking about how cute Asher was. “Too bad he’s so weird,” one of the girls had said.
And yeah, Asher was a little weird. He was totally obsessed with computers and robotics and science fiction, so much so that he and his little brother, Alex, who could have been a slightly younger Asher clone, often spoke to each other in binary code. More than once, Kai had heard Alex say to Asher, “01100100 01101111 01101111 01100110 01110101 01110011.” Asher told Kai that it meant “doofus.”
“Wouldn’t it be faster to just say ‘doofus’?” Kai had asked.
“Sure,” Asher had said. “But Alex and I get in trouble when we call each other names.”
Asher’s parents hadn’t learned binary.
“Oh man!” Todd cried out.
Kai blinked and realized that while his mind had been wandering, they’d reached the center of the Pizzaplex. They were standing in front of The Storyteller’s Tree.
And it was enveloped in plastic, with a rope barrier around its base.
“What happened?” Asher asked aloud to no one in particular.
A middle-aged man wearing the Pizzaplex “uniform” of a red shirt and black pants looked up from sweeping confetti near the bulging fiber-optic “roots” of the tree. “There was some kind of glitch,” the man said. He rubbed the rough stubble on his square chin and shook his head. “It’s only been up three weeks, and I hear they’re going to take it down.”
“What? Already?” Asher frowned up at the tree.
Kai followed the direction of Asher’s gaze. What he saw gave him the willies, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because the clear plastic wrapped around the tree’s bloated, mottled-yellow trunk and its outstretched rainbow-colored limbs made the tree look like some kind of robed, phantom monster. Kai could easily picture the gigantic tree suddenly uprooting itself to stomp through the Pizzaplex. In Kai’s mind, the tree reached out with its long skeletal branches to pluck children from the—
“Kai!” Todd was tugging on his arm again.
“… picked a baobab tree because those trees have such big trunks,” Asher was saying. “I think it was a great choice because the trees are the stuff of legend.”
“A redwood tree would have been better,” Todd said.
“No way,” Asher said. “A redwood would have been too tall.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been a real redwood,” Todd said. “But redwoods have big trunks, too, and at least they’re A merican trees.”
“Why does it have to be American?” Asher asked. “Your shoes are made in China.”
“So what? My shoes aren’t a tree,” Todd said.
Kai shook his head. He’d learned that the best thing to do when Todd and Asher fought was to just let them bicker. Todd and Asher had been friends since they were old enough to talk, and that was just the way they were with each other.
Asher turned away from Todd, ending the debate. He pressed up against the rope barrier that had been strung around the tree’s base. “I wish I could see in there,” Asher said. “I wonder what went wrong with the program. I thought the basis of the program’s algorithm was sound, and the idea of having one program generate all the stories for the animatronic characters was off-the-charts genius. Why pay a bunch of writers when you could just build one story-creation program?”
Todd snorted. “No way. A computer program can’t take the place of a writer. There’s no way a program could be advanced enough to replace people’s imaginations.”
Asher shook his head. “Mark Twain said it a long time ago: ‘There’s no such thing as a new idea.’ Humans may like thinking their imaginations are all that, but really, nothing’s original anymore. It’s all just retelling old stories in a slightly different way. That’s why having a computer program do it is so brill.”
“Well, it must not have been that brill,” Todd said, “if they shut it down so fast.”
Todd reached for a cuff of Asher’s long-sleeved orange-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt. The flannel shirt was another one of the things that set Asher apart: he always wore bright plaid flannel shirts, year-round—he even had summer flannel shirts with cut-off sleeves. It was different, but it was Asher.
“Come on, Ash,” Todd said. “It’s closed. Let’s go do something else.”
Asher sighed dramatically. He let Todd drag him away from The Storyteller’s Tree.
“I want to check out the VR booth,” Kai said.
“You would,” Asher said. But he gave Kai one of his lopsided grins.
“I’m up for that,” Todd said. He bounced on the balls of his feet. “Let’s go for it.”
The Pizzaplex, laid out like a big pizza, was easy to navigate. You just had to remember the order of the venues and where they landed on the edges of the “pie.” The VR booth, Kai knew, was on the far side of The Storyteller’s Tree. Because the tree, the big theater, and the kids’ play area filled the center of the Pizzaplex, Kai and his friends would have to go around half the pizza to get to the VR booth.
“Wanna get a pizza on the way?” Todd asked as he started trotting away from The Storyteller’s Tree, motioning for Asher and Kai to keep up with him.
“We just ate breakfast,” Asher said as he jogged to catch up to Todd.
“There’s always room for pizza,” Todd singsonged, glancing over his shoulder.
“Not at ten in the morning,” Asher said. “And slow down. The VR booth isn’t going anywhere.”
“That’s what Kai said about The Storyteller’s Tree,” Todd said. But he reduced his speed to a fast walk.
“That tree looks like something you’d see in a strange dream,” Kai said. Glancing to his right, he looked up at a purple branch that stretched out over them as they passed the Role Play area.
“Yeah,” Todd agreed. “Or like something you’d see in a fantasy flick. They’d have trees like that in a place called Rainbow World.”
Kai laughed. “Yeah. And little multicolored creatures living in the branches.”
“Hey, right,” Todd said, getting into it. “And they eat rainbow-colored food. Green pizza and yellow cookies.”
“Ew,” Asher said. He made a face. “Green pizza?”
Todd twisted his mouth. “Okay, maybe not green pizza. That’s like the moss that grows on the big tree in my backyard. Yuck. I had a dream the other night that moss was growing really fast all over my room. It was trying to grow on me and eat me.”
Todd stopped walking so abruptly that Asher ran into him. A young mom holding hands with two toddlers had to stutter-step to avoid the Todd–Asher collision. One of the toddlers dropped a sippy cup and let out a wail. As she retrieved the plastic cup, the mom gave Todd a dirty look. He didn’t notice.
Todd looked at Kai. “I read that dream interpretation book your mom recommended. Apparently, my dream means there’s something I’m afraid of that I’m not facing. If I don’t get ahold of my fears, they’ll eat me alive.” Todd shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Like, duh. I don’t need a dream to tell me I’m afraid of pretty much everything.”
“Yeah, well, you do okay for a scaredy-cat,” Asher said, giving Todd a playful light slap to the back of his head.
Todd grinned and started walking again, as quickly as before. Asher fell in step beside him.
Kai forced his short legs to move fast enough to stay with his friends. “I’ve been working on lucid dreaming,” Kai said as he walked. “You know, being aware that you’re dreaming when you’re dreaming. I’ve been playing around with it. And I’ve trained myself to wake up just by saying to myself, in the dream, ‘Wake myself.’ I just have to say it a couple times, and I can get myself out of any dream, like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You could try it, Todd, if you have a scary dream.”
Todd and Asher exchanged a glance. They both grinned, and Todd slowed so he could punch Kai in the arm. “You’re weird.”
Kai shrugged. He knew Asher and Todd didn’t get his interest in the spirit world. Whatever.
“Hey, look!” Todd pointed. “The AR booth has a special thing today.”
Kai looked up, past the heads of the kids and adults scattered in front of them. He saw an LED marquis that read, TODAY ONLY! SEE THE PIZZAPLEX TEN YEARS FROM NOW! TAKE A PEEK INTO THE FUTURE!
“That sounds fun,” Kai said. “You guys mind if I go first?”
Asher shook his head. Todd said, “Go for it.”
Kai and his friends reached the line for the AR booth. He was glad to see it wasn’t busy yet. Only two girls were in line. They stood near the VR booth attendant, a twentysomething, long-haired guy who was sitting on a stool, looking like he was bored out of his mind. Both girls, who looked to be maybe thirteen or fourteen, were dark-haired. When they turned to look at Kai, Todd, and Asher, Kai decided they must be sisters. Even though they didn’t look exactly alike, they both had unusually big green eyes.
“Hey,” the tallest of the two girls said. She smiled.
“Hi,” Todd said. “Have you done the VR before?”
For a guy who claimed to be afraid of everything, Kai thought, Todd was astoundingly outgoing. He’d talk to anyone.
“Twice,” the girl said. “And I’ve had enough. My sister wants to see the future, though.”
The second girl grinned. “I’m just curious.”
“Him, too,” Todd said, jabbing a thumb toward Kai.
Todd and the girls started chatting about the future and what it might be like in general. Kai zoned out and gazed past them at the Virtual Reality booth.
The AR unit reminded Kai of the glass-domed display case that held his mom’s terrarium of Hawaiian plants— a little bit of home, she called it. His mom’s terrarium had a wooden base, but the AR base was bright red. And instead of encasing plants, the AR unit’s glass dome held one large gold chair that looked like a plush gilded throne. The AR user sat in the chair (a boy Kai recognized as being a year ahead of him at school was in the chair now) and wore a netlike headband that was covered with a woven mass of sensory nodes. The headband was what made the Pizzaplex’s AR so awesome—it worked with the user’s own senses so that the AR experience felt totally real in every way.
Kai couldn’t wait to find out what he’d see when he used the VR headband to get a glimpse of the Pizzaplex’s future. If Todd and Asher didn’t mind waiting, he decided, he’d go for the ten-minute session so he could really get into it.
Kai’s eyes widened as he looked out at an even brighter and shinier version of the Pizzaplex than he was used to. Sleeker, flashier, and noisier, this Pizzaplex was even higher tech than the current one.
It was also packed with hundreds of adults and kids dressed in mind-blowing clothes. The future Pizzaplex’s patrons were wearing screaming hot colors at least three times brighter than any Kai had seen before. The colors were so electric that they almost looked alive.
