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WHIPPING RAIN POURED down all around the Gumshoes headquarters. Inside, Stuart rested in front of the big-screen TV, watching cartoons and reading from his huge stack of Dan Dash pulp comics. He pounded his feet against the arm of the beat-up couch across which he was sprawled.
Timothy, meanwhile, sat behind his computer bank, diligently coding a program on his computer. The heavy clacking from Timothy’s fingers across the keyboard pulsed and echoed above every other noise in the tree house, which drove Stuart bonkers.
In retaliation, Stuart whacked his feet harder against the couch, which in turn drove Timothy batty and caused him to pound the keyboard louder and louder. Before long the noise grew so unbearable that neither could hear himself think.
Eventually, Timothy cracked. “ENOUGH!”
Stuart froze. After a long moment of silence, Stuart stood and bowed deeply. “I win. Admit it. ”
“Yes, yes,” Timothy said. “You’ve won Irritating Noises. That’s all well and good as long as you please quiet yourself down.”
“Come on. Don’t be a sore loser. Just because you don’t have the mental fortitude of a——”
“Excuse me? Compared to me you have the mental fortitude of an untrained chimpanzee.”
“And yet, I won. What is that? Two hundred times in a row? Too bad, so sad.”
Timothy turned back to his work without as much as a further grunt of acknowledgement. Stuart took that as a complete lack of respect and stomped over to Timothy. He peered over the monitor bank in a most annoying fashion. “Hey. No fair. It’s no fun to gloat if you’re not wallowing in it.”
“Sorry I can’t accommodate, but I’ve much work to finish,” Timothy said.
“Too busy to wallow in frustration? This I’ve got to see.” Stuart walked around the counter to look over Timothy’s shoulder. Unfortunately for him, the entire screen was filled with nothing but indecipherable letters and numbers written in a funky computer language.
“What’s that? Swahili?”
Timothy turned his monitor off and spun around to face Stuart. “That is none of your concern! For your information, it’s for a program I’m working on.”
Stuart tried to sneak around Timothy to turn the monitor back on, but he was impeded at every avenue. When Stuart zigged, Timothy zagged. When he ducked, Timothy rolled. Whatever Stuart tried, Timothy countered like a nerdy ninja. This was not the first time Stuart had attempted to disturb Timothy’s work. As a result, Timothy had become exceedingly adept at defense.
“You know I can do this all night,” Stuart said. “I’ll just keep trying until you give up.”
“You are persistently annoying. I have too much work left to accomplish to play this game with you any longer.” Timothy turned back to his computer and flicked the monitor back on.
Stuart scratched his head. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s not a magic eye, Stuart. No matter how hard you concentrate, an image will never appear out of the middle of the code. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work, genius?”
Timothy pressed the space bar and the screen faded to black. “Please be careful. The user interface isn’t complete yet, but I believe I’ve bypassed all of the catastrophic problems.”
Stuart inched backward a few feet. “Maybe I’ll stand over here.”
The screen popped to life. A big, slimy-looking caterpillar inched its way across the screen, eating every piece of code in its path. The more it ate, the bigger it grew. Eventually, the caterpillar reached the center of the screen. It turned to look at Timothy, smiling a big grin. Timothy touched the screen to tickle under the caterpillar’s chin like a proud parent. “Hello, little one.”
“You’ve got weird tastes,” Stuart said.
Stuart watched the caterpillar wrap itself in a cocoon of its own making. Once the caterpillar became fully enveloped, the cocoon pulsated.
“That’s all it does?” Stuart said. “Pretty lame if you ask me.”
“Give it a minute,” Timothy said. “Wait until it reaches maturity.”
“I’ve given it a minute already. One minute of my life that I’ll never get back.”
After pulsating for several mind-numbing minutes, the right side of the cocoon cracked open and a wing fluttered. Immediately after, the left side of the cocoon broke open, and a second wing emerged and flapped. Finally, the entire on-screen cocoon exploded. Shards of cocoon burst across the screen so vividly that Stuart ducked to avoid the virtual explosion. The brown moth, at the center of the shards, flapped its wings while waiting for a command.
“All right, that was cool,” Stuart said.
“If you think that’s ‘cool,’ then watch this.” Timothy feverishly typed on the keyboard. He quickly brought up the school’s administration web page, which required a username and password to access records.
“You’re stuck now,” Stuart said.
A smug grin spread across Timothy’s face. “Oh am I?”
With a couple more keystrokes he activated his moth, which seemingly ate the school’s administration page.
Soon the log-in screen dissolved.
“Bingo,” said Timothy.
Stuart looked. “Access Granted. Welcome, Vice Principal Torres. Wow!”
Timothy looked like a proud father. “I can access personal records, sick days, change grades, and even review the personal file for any student.”
“Okay, now I’m sufficiently impressed,” Stuart said. “Move over and let’s see what this puppy can do.”
“Oh, it’s not a puppy. It’s a Semioscopis packardella, or Packard’s Concealer Moth to the layman. It’s the next logical evolution to the traditional ‘worm.’ You see——”
“Dude, I don’t care. I just want to play with it.”
Stuart pushed Timothy out of the chair, cracked his knuckles, and took a seat in front of the keyboard. “What to do first.”
“Just don’t get us into trouble. There are still some bugs to work out.” Timothy caught himself making a pun and chuckled. “Get it? Bugs. Because it’s a bug.”
Timothy’s prattle gave Stuart an idea. He clicked onto the personal records panel and typed in Timothy’s name.
“What are you doing, Stuart? This isn’t funny.”
“How about Dingus? Dingus Magee.”
Stuart typed Dingus Magee into the name field where Timothy Jorgenson had been. “And let’s make you a female.”
Stuart clicked on the gender button and changed the sex from male to female. “Much better.”
“Hey. Not funny. I have the appropriate anatomical requirements for my gender.”
“And yet it says ‘female’ right here.”
“Not for long!”
Timothy grabbed the keyboard at one end as Stuart latched onto the other. As the lightning violently crashed around them, they unintentionally smashed countless keys. Timothy knocked Stuart into the desk. The crash jostled the mouse, moving the cursor closer and closer to the submit button.
Timothy yelled when he noticed the cursor was hovering over the submit button. But that just startled Stuart. Stuart’s resulting fall sent the monitor flying.
Timothy caught it, but something had come loose. The screen had gone white. “This is not good,” Timothy said. “Did you click submit?”
“I don’t know, dude. I was falling. Remember?”
“Let’s hope not. Otherwise, I might be Dingus Magee forever.”
Stuart brushed himself off. “Don’t worry, man. Just use the worm thing again.”
Suddenly, lightning crashed right outside the window, and the monitor turned blue. It read ‘Fatal error’. Timothy’s face contorted into a horrified mess. “Oh no. Quickly unplug everything!”
Timothy dropped to his knees and ripped cords from their surge suppressors. The computer began to grind and crunch.
Stuart ran around the room unplugging everything from the wall: the lights turned off, the TV went dead, the radio went silent, and finally the computers powered down.
Timothy and Stuart sat in the darkness huffing and puffing.
“Is it over?” Stuart asked.
“I believe so.”
Stuart’s breathing returned to normal. “Cool. Question? Why did we turn off the lights?”
“Everything should be safe as long as the power stays off for a few minutes. Then I will attempt a reboot and see just how much damage was done.”
Another bolt of lightning struck. Thunder boomed through the headquarters, rattling the equipment. As the thunder shook the tree house, a girl’s silhouette appeared in the window furthest from them. Another crackle of lightning revealed the familiar face of a classmate, sobbing under her drenched clothing.
Stuart cocked his head in disbelief. “Madison?”