Free The Time Hackers by Gary Paulsen Page A

issue. I was running out of it, to be blunt. They were starting to play dumber and dumber tricks on each other, and it was just a matter of time … I guess it wasn't much of a plan”—he smiled again—“but as you can see, it worked.”
    “Why the pranks? The bodies, the worms … all of it?”
    Here he laughed. “The chips are not static. They learn by doing. Initially they were not complete but had to learn to make the jumps through time. I did some of the pranks just to get the chips started, and then they did more of their own pranks while they learned. When they locked in—Ibelieve it was the first time you saw Custer looking at you— I knew they were close and I stopped the pranks. In the beginning they keyed to the same points in time and space as one of the—what did you call them, the gamesters?—but as they learned, they would go anywhere any of the other chips would go.”
    “We could have been hurt or killed!” Dorso said. “We were in danger, attacked—arrows were shot at us.”
    “We could all have been killed. We probably
would
have all been killed if it hadn't have been for you and your friend.”
    “Frank.”
    “Yes. Frank. I tried to help but I couldn't do much. …”
    “What about at the end? What was all that in the room in the garage and the holograms of my sister and my mother and my bicycle?”
    “I thought… well, perhaps I
didn't
think as much as I should have, but I had a small hope that once it was all over perhaps I could somehow get your laptop back without you knowing who I am or what really had happened. I was wrong.”
    “Why not just do what you finally did do? Just go back and erase the chip and everything? That's what finally happened anyway. In fact, why didn't you just do that in the first place?”
    “Once they started watching me I couldn't really do anything overtly, and before that there wasn't really a problem, was there?”
    Dorso thought about it, or thought as much as hiswhirling brain would let him. There were still a thousand questions he wanted to ask, and he wished Frank was there to help him.
    “I know it all seems confusing.”
    “Confusing is a good word,” Dorso said. “Another one is insane, as in am I going insane?”
    He laughed. “No.”
    “So why did you come back? Why did you come to see me?”
    “Because you helped me so much by getting the computers away from those two. I thought I owed you some kind of explanation, and then too I thought I owed you something for all your trouble. As you said, you could have been killed.”
    “So what now?”
    “Now I will leave and I will spend the rest of my life moving through and studying time, and making certain that if this is ever rediscovered it will only be used for good purposes.”
    “What about me? And Frank? And the gamesters?”
    “Ah, yes. Well, as for the gamesters, they're doing surprisingly well. The one in Victorian London has struck up quite a friendship with the young lady you left him with— her name is Lily, by the way—and the one in the cave, well, let's just say that Cro-Magnon man is more compassionate than I thought, and he has joined one of their clans. As for you boys, as I said, I thought I owed you something. Soo …” The man suddenly looked up. “Oh, look, a flight of passenger pigeons—white men hunted them to extinction, you know. Aren't they beautiful?”
    Dorso watched the enormous flock of birds as they wheeled over the clearing and disappeared. There must have been ten or fifteen thousand of them.
    “They used to darken the sky.” The hacker looked after the birds.
    Dorso waited. Then: “You were saying about Frank and me …”
    “Oh, yes. Well, in a moment you'll hit F1WS on the laptop and that will take you back to beneath your porch in the present. About twenty seconds after you arrive the laptop will disappear. You will then go to Frank's house and get him and come back to your yard, and about three feet from the northeast corner of your garage