Story Thieves by James Riley

Author:James Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

CHAPTER 24

AAH!” Owen shouted as the tube shot him and Charm straight up into nothingness, then twisted and jerked them around in a dizzying maze of other tubes and screaming billboards advertising cool science thingers.

“I need to clear our history!” Charm shouted into his ear over the noise of the ads. “The security system is going to catch up with us otherwise. This might scare you a little, so try to stay calm!”

“What does that mean?” Owen said, then screamed in terror as Charm shot at the sides of the tube just behind them with her ray guns. The tube instantly shattered, sending pieces of tube off to plow into various ads and other search tubes.

“That won’t hide us for long,” she said, putting her guns back in their holsters. “We’ll need to be quick.”

“Aah!” Owen told her, hugging her for dear life.

She pushed him off her, and they continued zooming along the tube separately—her looking impatient; him caught between terror and feeling like this was the greatest roller coaster ride ever, though leaning toward the first one, if he had to pick.

Just as Owen began to get used to the ride, or at least everything but his stomach did, the tube spat them out into what looked like a mass of zeroes and ones, the numbers actually breaking their fall.

Charm got to her feet before Owen did, then leaned down and yanked him up with her robot arm so hard he actually flew for a moment. “We’re here,” she said. “The Original Computer.” She made a face. “It even smells out of date.”

Owen sniffed loudly and nodded. There was an odd sort of sour-milk odor, weirdly.

“See all these?” Charm said, pointing at the zeroes and ones. “Can you believe computers ever actually ran like this? Binary? I mean, c’mon. We’re up to centidecimal at this point in modern computers.” She frowned at the streams of ones and zeroes. “It’s like visiting prehistoric times.”

Owen glanced around, seeing nothing but numbers. “So how do we find the location of the Seventh Key in all of this?”

“These numbers here don’t mention anything about it,” Charm told him, glancing around. “We could use an interface, but I don’t see one anywhere. There should be one farther in, though. Come on.”

With that, she led Owen off into the stream of ones and zeros, parting it like a curtain.

“What are these numbers, anyway?” he asked, dipping his hand into a bunch of zeroes. They felt cold to the touch, kind of like water, only less wet. Which was really all water was, but still. He reached for a one, then yanked his hand back as a tiny jolt zapped him.

“Ones and zeros are actually all a computer understands, at its core,” she told him as they walked. “They’re not even that, one or zero. It’s actually just a different way of saying ‘on’ and ‘off.’ ‘On’ means there’s electricity, and ‘off’ means there isn’t. Everything else here is built off of those two ideas. On, off, one, zero.

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