Johnny Jacobs and the Cyberspace Machine

"Boy," thought Johnny Jacobs as he finished Chapter Six of Tom Swift and his WebTV, "I wish I could travel through cyberspace like Tom Swift! Tom Swift has a WebTV AND an Amphibious Atomicar. I just get to go to Saturn with antigravity and get zapped by Professor Chickadee's Amazing Donut Ray! It's no fair!"

"Mister Jacobs," said Mrs. Croaker as she pointed menacingly with her yardstick, "is that another Tom Swift book I see hidden in your history textbook? Shame on you! For punishment, by tomorrow you must write ten thousand times: 'WebTV is a thousand years in the future.' And no using the Vertical Method like you did on the way to Saturn."

"Aw, Mrs. Croaker--" Johnny began to whine, but she cut him off with a searing glare.

"If only I could go to cyberspace," thought Johnny as Mrs. Croaker lectured about the French and Indian War. "If only..."

"Johnny!" said stately, plump Professor Chickadee, looking up from the odd assembly of wires and blinking lights on his workbench. "Your mother called me up today and said that you shouldn't be here. You're supposed to be working on writing 'WebTV is a thousand years in the future' for your inattentive behavior at school! School is very important, you know. You may not realize it now, but it is."

"But, Professor Chickadee, it's no fair! That thing you're working on right now... that's for cyberspace, isn't it?"

"Now, Johnny, don't worry your head about this. When you grow up, maybe you'll be able to work on something like this. Besides, it's secret, for the time being. Run along and finish your homework." A mysterious pinpoint of green light played across Prof. Chickadee's cornea; suddenly Johnny noticed the electrodes wired to his head.

"Aw, Professor, I'm gonna miss the good part," Johnny said, "but... O.K., I'll go home." But just as he turned toward the door of Professor Chickadee's workshop, tall, dour Professor Cumulus came running in and nearly knocked him over.

"Chickadee," said Prof. Cumulus, "stop that ridiculous tinkering at once! I have something more important to show you-- edible snowshoes!" But Prof. Cumulus tripped over a hose labeled HYDROGEN-HIGHLY COMBUSTIBLE that ran across the laboratory at ankle level, and he sent the three of them sprawling, right into the mass of wires and circuits! Johnny felt an electric shock, heard a buzzing noise, and saw a great flash of light; and then the three of them were falling through a vast, dim space!

"Where are we?" said Johnny, with more than a little fear in his voice.

"Heavens to Betsy!" said Professor Chickadee. "It's worked even better than I thought! Gentlemen, we are in some sort of virtual reality."

"Wow, no kidding! Just like in all the comic books! Zap, pow, blam! Danger, black ICE! Jack me in, Buck! Where's Princess Ardala and Cyber-Kane?"

"Now, Johnny, I'm sure that it's not quite as melodramatic as all that."

"Virtual what? How could this possibly match edible snowshoes?" said Prof. Cumulus, his brow deeply furrowed. He squinted uncertainly at the cubes, cones and grids of spheres, lit up in primary colors, that towered around them. They were not falling quite so rapidly any more; they drifted as on a light breeze.

Prof. Chickadee said, "Virtual reality. A sort of... er... consensual hallucination. That, over there, represents the East Coast Fission Authority. And that is, unless I misremeber, the Black Sun Bar and Grill. And the construct hovering above us is the six-dimensional TVC polyhedron of Elysium. But I don't think that we have time for any of that at the moment. We have to get back out of cyberspace so that I can write this up for the big MetaSensorium Convention of Science and All-Night Rave, and so that Johnny can finish his homework!"

"And so I can finally find out how my snowshoes taste," said Prof. Cumulus, with a tear in his eye.

"There's no hurry," said Johnny.

By a pool of glowing water, which was not quite rectangular and not quite trapezoidal, they found a glowing man dressed entirely in what looked like glowing circuit boards. He carried a glowing Frisbee.

"Hey, it's Bruce Boxleitner!" Johnny said.

"Who's he?" said the man. "I am the first truly automatic man. On a scale of 1 to 10, think of me as an 11. I am a Male Kibologist."

"And whatever precisely is it that you do, Mr. Kibologist?" said Prof. Chickadee.

"I troll, in this pool of water." He motioned toward a glowing fishing rod that lay by the side of the pool, with hook, line, and sinker attached.

"I don't suppose that you ever catch anything in this stagnant pond," said Prof. Cumulus, scowling at the eerie Cerenkov radiation coming from the water. Something was moving around down there, but it was impossible to make out just what it was.

"I do indeed. Just the other day, I caught a case of Mentos that was floating by, and riding on the case of Mentos was an HO scale model of Vincent Price, the ghost of Bob Hope, casting porosity, and my lovely wife, Barbara Bain!"

"Really? Hmmm... I suppose that the casting porosity would contribute sufficiently to the buoyancy of the Mentos to lift Barbara Bain and the mini-Price! But isn't Bob Hope still alive?"

"You see?" said the Kibologist, laughing. "I do catch things. Today... I have caught you!"

Johnny, Prof. Chickadee, and the Male Kibologist had a good laugh at the expense of Prof. Cumulus, who was beginning to glow cherry-red himself. But just as they were about to enjoy glowing marshmallows by the Kibologist's glowing campfire, they heard a strange sound. It was loud and terribly profane, and there was some phrase like "tiny golem wife" in there as well.

The Male Kibologist jumped up and shouted with joy: "It's a Female Kibologist! Um... I like food. Bye!" He ran off at the speed of thought, leaving a glowing blue contrail behind him.

Johnny listened to the distant shouting. "Professor Chickadee, how do you eat a bowl of--"

"When you're older, Johnny," Prof. Chickadee said.

Suddenly, there was a rumble and a terrible splash, and something horrible emerged from the water!

"Wh-what is it?" whispered Johnny to Prof. Chickadee.

"Don't move. I believe," said Prof. Chickadee quietly, "that it is a Full-Bore Kook. If we don't provoke it, it may go away sooner."

"MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW HA*VA*D MEOW!" rumbled the Kook from somewhere beneath its still-dripping, matted hair. "PEDOPHILE!"

"What do we do?" said Prof. Cumulus.

"Stay here, until--" Prof. Chickadee started to say, but then the Kook opened its mouth, and a horrific torrent of processed pork product issued forth!

"He's spamming us!" shouted Johnny. "I read this in a comic mmmphmmph!" He was covered in spam, all at once-- and he couldn't breathe!

"Mmph mph!" Prof. Cumulus tried to say. Then--

--there was a rent in the fabric of cyberspace, and in jumped Rebecca Barking Wolf, Johnny's friend from math class!

"Don't worry," said Rebecca Barking Wolf. "I'll take care of this Kook. With my scientific wizardry and the help of my spirit guide, I constructed the RBW Cyberdeck 4096, which blows the doors off of the Professor's primitive machine. The Kook has lost touch with the forces of Earth, Air, Wind, Fire, Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Heart! I'll get rid of him in no time!" She activated the Cyberdeck 4096 strapped to her right wrist, and a rainbow-colored stream of light drove the Kook back into the depths of the Bit Bucket, dissipating the spam to the corners of the Cyber-Abyss!

"Curse, you, Rebecca Barking Wolf, for once again foiling my plan to destroy Earth's baby seals with genetically engineered radioactive pollution!" screamed the Kook. "I'll get you yet!" it said as it sank into the black tarn.

"My job is done. I'm off to track practice. But don't forget, Johnny, if you need help studying for your next math quiz, just call Rebecca Barking Wolf!" As suddenly as she had arrived, she was gone.

"Gee, thanks, Professor Chickadee," said Johnny. "I guess I was right to follow instructions from my elders after all!"

"Now," said Prof. Chickadee with a glint in his eye, "we'll see what we can do about that homework of yours."

In this corner of cyberspace floated many glowing dodecahedra. Prof. Cumulus didn't pay them much notice, being too occupied with trying to keep his coattails from floating up over his head. But Prof. Chickadee gestured toward one of them and took a penny from his pocket.

"That's a repeater," he said. "Watch this." He threw the penny at a dodecahedron in the distance. It sank into one face of the solid and was absorbed-- but, a moment later, twelve pennies emerged from the faces of the dodecahedron and flew off in all directions! Prof. Chickadee caught one of them.

"You see the possibilities. Suppose we throw something into that repeater and bounce the resulting output back to the repeater."

"We'd get an awful lot of... output, wouldn't we, Professor?"

"That's right. I whimsically call it 'barf.' So all we have to do is make that repeater barf your homework all over the place!" Johnny couldn't stop laughing, but Prof. Chickadee assured him that it was very serious.

"Johnny, all you have to do is write 'WebTV is a thousand years in the future' once. Here's a pencil and some paper."

Johnny obliged, still chuckling uncontrollably. The paper seemed to be made of rubber. Prof. Chickadee took the note and tossed it at the nearest repeater, with his back to a conveniently located brick wall. It sank into the repeater, which obligingly created twelve copies. The nearest one flew toward the brick wall and bounced back, producing twelve more copies. And more and more copies flew out of the repeater...

Suddenly Professor Cumulus said, "Chickadee, this is the most harebrained scheme you've hatched yet. How are you going to get it to stop?"

Professor Chickadee looked worried. "You know, I haven't the slightest idea."

The little slips of paper were beginning to hit other repeaters. Soon there were slips of paper as far as the eye could see-- and more of them kept coming... Johnny had a fleeting memory of somebody he knew from math class, but he couldn't quite remember who it was. All he could remember was some dumb educational film with some guy in a room full of mousetraps... They were getting tangled up in the repetitions of "WebTV is a thousand years in the future" now, and the repeaters showed no signs of slowing down...

Johnny woke up with a start. He was safe, at home, in his bed! Had it all been a dream?

"Get up, Johnny, or you'll be late for school!" said Johnny's mother from downstairs.

The Kibologists, the Kook, the East Coast Fission Authority... So none of it had been real? Well, of course it wasn't real, it was virtually real. But had it just been virtually virtual? And-- gulp-- he didn't remember finishing his homework. Boy, would Mrs. Croaker be mad today! She'd read him the riot act, that was a sure thing!

Then Johnny saw the sheets of paper carefully stacked on the night table next to his bed. They had the words

WebTV is a thousand years in the future

printed on them over and over, in a neat, small, blocky typeface. He counted them, using the multiplication trick that he had learned all by himself in Boys' Math Class. Two repetitions per line... fifty lines per page, and... a hundred pages in the stack. Ten thousand repetitions! He was saved! On the top sheet was a note scrawled in purple ink:

Next time, pay attention to Mrs. Croaker. That's how you'll get back to cyberspace for good. -C.

"Johnny? The oatmeal's getting cold!"

"Coming, Mom!" Johnny bounded down the stairs. It was going to be a terrific day!