Sticking my head out from the garage the next morning, I can tell it’s really early but that’s about it. The storm has passed, but it’s still warm and blustery, and the sky is pure white cloud.
Nobody is about in Chesterton Road, except for a small open-sided van humming along slowly and tinkling as if it’s carrying glass bottles.
Minutes later and I’m back in the school’s tech lab. My heart is pounding and I’m actually finding it a bit hard to breathe because I’m so nervous.
It’s August 1st. Today is the day that Dad comes off his go-kart, breaks his teeth and gets a metal splinter up his nose that will give him headaches for years and that will kill him twenty-seven years later. And I have to stop that happening, without radically altering anything else.
So. The Plan For Today is save my dad’s life and get back to my own time having found Alan Shearer. That’ll keep me busy.
My hands are shaking as I slot the laptop battery back into position and screw the cover back on.
I can’t bring myself to press the ‘on’ button, I just can’t.
I walk around the room once. Twice.
I’m about to go a third time but instead I reach out and press the button firmly once, kind of taking myself by surprise.
One second.
Two seconds.
You must have listened to a laptop starting up? It takes a couple of seconds, and then …
A soft ping.
I feel like crying again, this time with relief. The screen flickers, and lights up. And then …
just …
stops.
No. Please no.
The start-up screen is there, but there’s nothing on it. No documents, no folders. There’s no whirring sound of the hard disk. The clock is blinking 02:13, which must be the correct time somewhere in the universe. The battery indicator says 65%. Yet there’s no cursor. I rub the touchpad desperately, begging the cursor to appear. I hit keys randomly.
Nothing.
I slump forward, head on my arms and I’m just numb. I hit the keypad again, then restart the laptop, but still – the folder with all the data on it is not there.
I’m just washed over with a sense of total weariness, and I slam the laptop closed.
And then I open it again slowly, chewing my bottom lip. If this works, then I may be in with a chance.
Again, I stare at the lit-up screen, and I pull my key ring from my pocket. Attached is my memory stick and I push it into the USB slot at the side of the laptop. The laptop might not read the hard disc properly, and can’t perform many functions, but there’s still a chance it can read a memory stick.
Its little blue light flashes, and an icon blinks to life on the screen. With no cursor, I have no choice but to hit ‘enter’ and it works – the document opens, revealing page after page of numbers and symbols: Dad’s code for the time travel program.
Right. Now I have to work quickly. The laptop’s battery icon has already gone down to sixty-three per cent and I have a huge job ahead of me. All my laptop will show me is the information from my memory stick. None of the time travel stuff is loading up and I have no idea how to make it.
But this might work …
Pushing a plug into the wall and flicking a switch, I turn on Pye’s six-screen supercomputer, and pull the nearest one round to face me. The screen is old-fashioned: dark with flickery green letters and numbers, but it’s my only chance.
Copying from the laptop, and using the laptop’s keyboard to navigate up and down the lines of text, I start the task of copying every single character and space into the old computer.
“Precision counts,” and I have never been more aware of how right Grandpa Byron was. I cannot afford to make a single, solitary, tiny error.
After a few minutes, I work out a method, which is to do five characters at a time. I read them out loud slowly, from the laptop:
“Six, five, forward-slash, five, two.” And then repeat them out loud again as I type them into the computer: “Six, five, forward-slash, five, two.” I then check what I have just input.
It’s slow, and it’s the only way I can be sure of not making a mistake.
But after half an hour, I have only done a bit more than half a page of code, and the battery is down to fifty-two per cent. There are seven pages of this stuff. That’s twenty per cent of existing battery life gone, but only about ten per cent of the code rewritten, all of which means I have to go twice as fast, which I just can’t.
But I’m trying. I increase my character input to six, seven and then eight at a time, shouting out the numbers to myself like a series of phone numbers. To remember them quicker without checking, I shout them, I sing them:
“Four, one, colon, slash! Double six, six, dash!”
“X, X, forty-four, equals, bracket, three, five!”
I take a long drink of water from the lab tap and keep going, hitting the keys harder until my fingers are hurting, yelling the numbers and obsessively watching the decreasing battery.
Thirty per cent …
Twenty eight per cent …
And then it really starts to decrease quickly. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen per cent … and I’ve still got two pages to go.
One page, and I’m hitting the keys like a maniac now, shouting, singing, anything to keep my concentration focused and to finish.
And then the screen flickers and dies with half a page of code still to go.
How To Bring A Dead Battery Back To Life
You may get enough life back into it to help you in a sticky situation.
I pass some of the next two hours imagining what sort of sticky situation was imagined by the guy who wrote that entry on WikiHow that I had seen ages ago.
Not being able to print off your homework, maybe? Or potentially missing the last fifteen minutes of a movie?
Not being able to enter the code to transport someone home across spacetime probably didn’t figure.
But whoever he was, I owe him a big Thanks Mate, and countless ‘likes’ – because it worked.
I get twenty more battery minutes, and finish inputting with four per cent left to spare. Now I can use Pye’s networked computer to travel back to my time.
I hope.
Just in case it comes in useful, I connect my mobile phone with the USB charger, and charge it from the laptop until the laptop has only one per cent remaining.
I’m knackered. I slump in front of the homemade supercomputer, breathing hard and watching the green characters flicker.
I jump at the voice behind me.
“How long you been here?”
Pye sits down next to me and looks at the screen. “What the heck’s all this?”
“Long story,” I say. “Got your go-kart?”
“We’ll go and get it,” he says.