“Are you Spencer de La Peña?” a voice asked now from beyond his laptop screen. Standing before him was one of the most awkward kids he had ever seen—chubby, short, with purple pants and a clashing shirt. Spencer knew something about awkward kids. He had a huge audience of young readers, all of whom were nervous, ill-adjusted, and destined for a lifetime of bullying.
Spencer frowned. “Sorry, kid, I’m busy writing. I don’t have time for autographs.”
“I’m not interested in getting one. Are you the guy who writes Ultraforce?” the boy said. He held out a copy of the comic.
“Yes, and—”
“Did you write this one?”
The writer eyed the cover. It was an issue he had written featuring a character he had created himself—the Machine Master.
“Yeah.”
The boy pointed to the villain’s weapon—a space-age ray gun that made machines bend to the villain’s every whim. “How does this work?”
Spencer rolled his eyes. He scooped up his computer and snatched his jacket. “Kid, I know all this stuff is very interesting, and I admit to being a bit of a fanboy myself, but nothing in those pages is real. That ray gun doesn’t exist, and if you built it it wouldn’t work. I made it up. It’s imagination. So, I’ve got to get going. It was nice to meet you, but I have a deadline.”
“But—”
“I’m sure there’s some online community about this comic. Perhaps if you all put your heads together, you can figure it out for yourselves.” He walked out of the shop. Unfortunately, his path was blocked by four more equally geeky kids.
“I don’t think you answered my friend’s question,” a jittery Mexican kid said.
“What is this? Are you kids part of some fan club?”
“Something like that,” the boy from inside the coffee shop said as he joined them. “And we need your help.”
Suddenly, Spencer felt a little sting on his hand. When he looked down, he noticed that a boy with huge braces had given him an injection. Before he could complain, he felt a tremendous wave of sleepiness and then everything went black.
When he woke up, Spencer had no idea how long he had been asleep. He also had no idea how he had strapped himself into a leather chair on what looked like a very fancy airplane. He also had no idea who the beautiful woman was who was standing over him, but she made the first two mysteries seem like a lot less of a problem.
“Good evening, Mr. La Peña,” the woman said. “My name is Ms. Holiday, and you’re on board the School Bus.”
“It’s been a while since I was in school, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been long enough for them to swap out buses for planes.”
Ms. Holiday smiled. “Actually, you’re not on a plane, Spencer.” She pointed out the tiny window to his right. He glanced over, then did a double take. Outside he could see the planet Earth. It was very far away and getting smaller by the second. Still, he would bet that people heard him screaming all the way from space.
“What is going on? Why have you shot me into space?” he said after he finally calmed down.
“Because what we have to tell you is unbelievable,” a voice said from behind him. Spencer swiveled his chair around. Behind him were the dorky kids from the coffee shop. The chubby black kid was speaking. “And we really don’t have time to explain it. Let’s just say we’re secret agents, we work for the government, this is our space jet, and we need your help.”
“You’re a bunch of—”
“Kids?” the little Korean girl with the unibrow asked. “Yeah, we get that a lot. But, again, we’re spies. The rest of it is classified, Spencer, so let us get to the point.”
The girl with the glasses and puffy hair was next. “There’s a very bad man who has invented a machine inspired by your comic book.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Don’t interrupt or I will have my friend toss you out the door,” the puffy-haired girl said, gesturing to the jittery Mexican kid, who did a strongman pose. “Now, this very bad man has already used this device to rob a bank and to damage some very powerful . . . weapons. We believe he is working for an even badder man than himself.”
“What has that got to do with me?” Spencer said. He thought he might hyperventilate at the weirdness of it all. The lady offered him a drink of water.
“You think I helped him?” he asked when he had calmed down a bit.
“No,” the little Korean girl said. “We think he got the idea from you.”
“I can’t be responsible for—”
“Mr. La Peña,” the chubby kid interrupted. “We are not accusing you of being a bad guy. We are just trying to find out how this ray gun you imagined works. The guy who built the real-life version intends to build a much bigger version, which could lead to a very big problem. If he succeeds, he and his employer could easily upset the balance of power in every corner of the world. So, again, I know this is confusing—”
“And freaky,” the Mexican kid said with a laugh.
“You kids are nuts,” Spencer cried, trying to break his restraints. “You can’t pull some silly gadget out of a comic book and make it real.”
The woman pointed at a bank of computer screens. “Benjamin, can you show our guest the footage of Albert’s robbery?”
A moment later the screens showed pictures of an obese man in a costume. His ray gun was pointed directly at the bank manager, who cowered beneath her desk.
“It’s . . . it’s real,” Spencer stammered.
“How does it work?” the girl with the puffy hair asked impatiently.
“If that guy got his ideas from my comics, I want you to be clear that I just made it all up. I’m no scientist. It’s just, well, I was reading this article about nanobyte technology in a science magazine. You know nanobytes? Those tiny microscopic robots?”
The children shared a knowing look. “We’ve heard of them,” the chubby kid said.
“There was a theory that they could use the robots for a variety of different tasks, everything from faster computers to brain surgery. I started wondering if these robots might be susceptible to computer viruses, so I thought that a cool villain might be a guy who manipulates machines by making them sick.”
“How does he do that?” the Korean girl asked.
“Again, I’m not an expert, but I did do a little research. When a computer gets a virus, it’s because it downloaded something designed to make it sick, but you can’t just download things into microwaves and cars and stuff. So how do you get the virus into the machine without the download? You send it through the air. Machine Master’s gun is really just a portable wireless connection that beams viruses into machines. The ray gun turns the virus into a radio wave and fires it. The target machine is bombarded with a virus, new information—whatever. Most machines aren’t designed to fight back. You could use this ray gun to completely reprogram anything with a processor.”
“Like hypnotizing it,” the puffy-haired girl said.
Spencer nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“What kind of materials would you need to build one that could take over all the world’s machines at once?” the chubby kid said.
“That would be impossible,” Spencer said.
“Imagine it’s not,” the Mexican kid said. “Imagine you had all the money in the world, all the workers you needed, and a giant brain that could put it all together.”
“One, you would need an infrared crystal to transmit the signal.”
“Can we bring the language down to those who are still in elementary school?” the kid with braces complained from the cockpit.
“What I’m saying is that if you have ever seen a remote control, the part where the beam comes out is usually a piece of glass or plastic that directs the signal. A tiny diamond works even better. If you were going to build a huge machine, you’d probably need a big diamond to keep it stable—actually, a really big diamond. Secondly, you would need an incredible number of computer chips and processors . . . and, lastly, to affect every machine on Earth, you would have to get your ray gun high enough into orbit to hit the whole planet at once.”