The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber Read online

  The Extraordinary eTab

  of Julian Newcomber

  Published by Common Deer Press Incorporated.

  Copyright © 2019 Michael Seese

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in 2018 by Common Deer Press

  3203-1 Scott St.

  Toronto, ON

  M5V 1A1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Seese, Michael.—First edition.

  The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber/ Michael Seese

  ISBN 978-1-988761-28-2 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-988761-29-9 (e-book)

  Cover Image: © Rekka Bell

  Book Design: Ellie Sipila

  Printed in Canada

  WWW.COMMONDEERPRESS.COM

  This book is dedicated to the universe, which has a strange sense of humor, mainly because I “insist on poking a finger in its eye.”

  CHAPTER 1

  “Hey Pickle!”

  The words thundered off the brick walls of Whispering Falls Intermediate School, loosening a few in the process. Time stood still, almost as if someone had begun a giant game of cosmic freeze tag. Balls stopped bouncing. Swings stopped swinging. Sneakers stopped squeaking. In fact, all recess activities and shenanigans came to a screeching halt while the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders scanned the skies on an otherwise fine October day, searching for the approaching storm. Julian didn’t need to look. He knew that doom clung close to the ground because that nasal voice followed by a partial eclipse of the sun could mean only one thing.

  Biff.

  And Julian was not in the mood to deal with him. Not now. Not today. Not tomorrow. Truth be told, not in a duotrigintillion years or forever, whichever came first. But not today, especially, since Julian had other insurmountable problems to worry about.

  Unfortunately, the human oak tree with size-nine shoes and breath like microwaved bacon had a different agenda. Julian’s hope for an uneventful start to the day came to a screeching halt as Biff Masterson, a good head-and-a-half taller, more if you factored in the mohawk, lumbered in front of him and planted his big feet.

  “Pickle, I was talking to you, Pickle. Are you deaf or something, Pickle?”

  Julian figured out early on that Biff seemed to like saying the word “pickle.” Or any word associated with food, for that matter. He could not understand why someone born to be a bully—his real name was Spike after all—would choose to go by “Biff.”

  “Sorry, Biff. I didn’t realize you were talking to me. You said ‘pickle.’ And I don’t know anyone by that name. So I assumed you were thinking out loud about your lunch. Or your breakfast. Or your mid-morning snack. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, stepping around the forest of one. As the new kid in school (the label applied to him more often than he would have liked), Julian had become very good—what the smart folks call “adept”—at analyzing a situation and getting out of it. The skill had served him well on many occasions, in many situations. Each school, he’d found, offered its own unique brand of bully. At Fairpark Elementary, a good day was any day he managed to avoid Mace Winshaft (apparently, his parents really loved Star Wars), who would crack walnuts by placing them against his own forehead and hitting them with a hammer, or a brick, or a Buick, or whatever might have been handy. At Brady Lower Upper Middle School, his tormentor—what the smart folks call “nemesis”—was Maurice Evans, who owned a pet orangutan that he slept with, and wrestled with, and fought for table scraps with. (On Halloween he would send Zaius to school in his place, and no one could tell the difference.) Before that, it was Bertha Patton, who was in a league all her own.

  “Your name is Newcomber,” Biff snorted, coming around like the USS Missouri and blocking the path yet again. Like a plant-eating dinosaur, he was slow of foot, with a brain to match. But he covered so much ground and filled so much space that getting around him required a trip, bordering on an excursion. “That sounds like cucumber. And cucumbers are just like pickles. So, you’re Pickle.”

  Biff’s mouth watered a little as he said it, which disturbed Julian even more.

  “No, pickles are made from cucumbers,” Julian said. “But not all cucumbers become pickles. Using your thinking, pencils are just like trees.”

  “No, they’re not. You can’t write with a tree.”

  “You know, you are absolutely right. They’re not. Hey, hold that thought for a minute. Or a second, if sixty of them is too much for you.”

  Julian figured the complex math would tax Biff’s brain long enough to buy him the time he needed to end this stupid—what the smart folks call “inane”—conversation ASAP. He knew that what he was about to do would be less than wise. Potentially catastrophic, though probably not cataclysmic, Julian thought, using two words from this week’s spelling lesson. But someone he read about in a history book had said something like “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” He reached into his backpack, pulled out the Extraordinary eTab, unrolled it, swiped the screen, and tapped the pulsating icon with the overcrowded clock. He heard the sound and saw the light. A moment later, Julian found himself sitting at his desk in the comfort of his classroom. Fortunately, his techno-magical appearance went unnoticed in the bustle and jostle of the mad dash to the desks in the precious seconds before the bell. He breathed a sigh of relief as he waited for Mrs. Stern to call his name.

  “Spike Masterson? Spike? Tardy. Again,” she clucked, making a little tick mark on her attendance sheet.

  Julian hadn’t expected that to happen. But when it came to the eTab—or any of his dad’s inventions—Julian had learned to expect the unexpected. Not to mention the unlikely, the bizarre, the absurd, the improbable, and/or the downright impossible.

  “Julian Newcomber?”

  “Here, Mrs. Stern.”

  “Good.”

  She continued on down the list and completed the roll call.

  “Now, class, please open your math books and memorize pages fifty to the end.” Julian flipped to page four hundred ninety-six. “There will be a test on this material tomorrow.”

  Silence clung to the classroom as twenty-four anxious souls waited to hear the magical words: “Just kidding.” When they failed to materialize, the children’s groans rivaled those of the old school’s heating system.

  Julian obediently opened his book and pretended to read, just like Mrs. Stern did when she sat at her desk and “read” her teacher’s study guide, even though she was actually sleeping with her eyes open (the snoring always gave it away). But instead of studying his multiplication tables, Julian began planning. He just needed to get through the school day and get home. Today he had a bigger problem to deal with.

  He had to figure how to help himself—specifically, his twenty-year-old self—go back in time to undo a mistake that could pollute the natural timeline, rewrite history, and change the world as we know it.

  No pressure.

  CHAPTER 2

  Perhaps a little history—what the smart folks call “background” and the literary smart folks call “exposition”—would be in order.

  Julian Newcomber, twelve years of age and wise beyond those twelve years, was the oldest son of Abigail and Andrew Newcomber. His mom, according to Gr
andma and Grandpa Newcomber, was a born homemaker. To some people, the word “homemaker” would be another way of saying “stay-at-home mom.” But in the case of Mrs. Newcomber, it meant more than that. A lot more. Julian’s dad was an inventor. And a lot of his inventions didn’t work quite the way he planned. To be more accurate, they failed. Badly. Really badly. So badly, in fact, they often wrecked the Newcomber house. Hence the need for Mrs. Newcomber to be a homemaker, in the literal sense of the word.

  To say Mr. Newcomber’s inventions always failed would be a lie.

  One invention that did work really well was the Expand-O-House. The Expand-O-House was a plain—what the smart folks call “nondescript”—box, about a foot on each side. Julian wasn’t sure exactly what was inside of it or what made it work. All he knew was that his dad would put one on the ground in the middle of a big empty lot, push a few buttons and then run backward as fast as he could. Within seconds, lights would start lighting, flaps would start flapping, and walls would start...walling. Two minutes later, there would be a brand-new house sitting there, complete with a basketball pole in the driveway, two cars in the garage, and a white picket fence surrounding it all.

  Mrs. Newcomber, always the planner, made sure to keep a ready supply of Expand-O-Houses stashed away in a safe, and boom-proof, place. So whenever one house went skyward, all she has to do was retrieve one and let her husband do his thing. Then she would do her homemaker thing. Julian wasn’t exactly sure how she did it. That is, how she managed to fill the new house with new furniture, dishes, clothes, food, and the hamsters, as all of those things cost money. He assumed it had something to do with her other job, which she called “day trading.”

  Julian had once asked his dad what day trading was. He’d answered, “Anyone can spot a leopard, but your mother is the only person I know who can spot a leopard without its spots.” Mr. Newcomber often didn’t make sense, especially on the days a lot of brightly colored smoke spewed from his workshop. Leopards aside, Mrs. Newcomber must have been good at it, as many days Julian witnessed the following exchange between his parents.

  Mr. Newcomber: “How did we do today?”

  Mrs. Newcomber: “Up three thousand.”

  Mr. Newcomber: “Happy Dance time!”

  And though he could have put the new house where the old one had been, Mr. Newcomber thought someone—the news or the neighbors or the police—might ask a lot of questions along the lines of, “Why are there pieces of a house lying all over the place?” So, the family would usually just move, far away, find a vacant lot in a new city, and start over again.

  Which is why Julian was always the new kid in school.

  And as if his parents’ foibles and follies weren’t burden enough, Julian also had to contend with two siblings, twins Dylan and Olivia. Mostly, he thought they were nothing more than dorky little kids who hounded him constantly. After all, they were three years younger. Though, as Dylan liked to remind Julian, it actually was two years and eight months. And soon, there would no longer be a three-year difference, since their birthday was coming up. Regardless of the numerical technicalities, Julian felt older. Still, sometimes he wondered whether something more was going on with them, as funny stuff seemed to follow them around, like a dog you’d shared your sandwich with. He’d have to look into that someday.

  The point is that Mr. Newcomber’s inventions either:

  Exploded.

  Worked.

  Or sort of worked. Which is to say they did work, only not in the way Mr. Newcomber had planned.

  Which brings us to the Extraordinary eTab…

  CHAPTER 3

  The intercom that Julian’s father had installed in Julian’s room buzzed, though “shrieked like a cat whose tail had gotten stepped on repeatedly” would be a more apt description. It was his dad, trying to get his attention.

  Mission accomplished.

  “Julian, could you please come out to the workshop? I want to show you something.”

  Julian put on his football helmet and the Kevlar fireplace gloves, then went out the back door.

  “Yes, Dad?” he said, sticking a cautious head into the barn, now his dad’s workshop, in the back yard. Way in the back yard. Way at the back of their property, and safely away from their house. Though dangerously close to the high-voltage electrical wires overhead, Julian often thought.

  “Check out—what the more casual folks call ‘take a gander at’—this,” Mr. Newcomber said, holding up a black piece of paper.

  “What is it?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “A piece of blank black paper.”

  “You’ve got it, son. Ta-da! I’ve invented blank black paper!”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you Dad?”

  “I like to think so. Sometimes, it’s even the right answer.”

  Mrs. Newcomber often said her husband’s sense of humor was somewhat of an acquired taste. Fortunately (or not), Julian had been fed a steady diet of it for twelve years, and by now, was pretty much immune to it.

  “No, really, Dad. What is it?”

  “Take it,” Mr. Newcomber said, rolling it into a tube and floating it over to his son, despite the fact that it looked like it had no business flying, let alone alighting perfectly in Julian’s receptive palms.

  Weighing it in his hands, it seemed heavier than an ordinary piece of paper. Much heavier.

  Julian unrolled it and examined it closely. He couldn’t see how the thin (though heavy) paper could be anything else.

  “What does it do?” he asked.

  “Turn it on,” Mr. Newcomber said.

  “Turn it on? How?”

  “Run a finger across it.”

  Julian still had on the football helmet. But he wished he had been wearing his swim goggles as well, just to be safe. He took off one glove, closed one eye, and swept a finger across the page. A previously unseen screen lit up, and a small army of icons marched out of the corners and circled the surface before taking their places in neat—what the smart folks call “precise” or “orderly”—rows and columns.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ve never seen a piece of blank black paper do that before.”

  “That’s because it’s really not a piece of blank black paper.”

  “And I’ll just bet you’ve given it a name.”

  “I will not accept such a wager, because I would lose. I call it the eTab.”

  “The eTab?”

  “Yes!” Mr. Newcomber proclaimed as he assumed a heroic superhero, hands-on-his-hips pose and stuck his chin in the air. “Ready for this? It stands for Experimental Talking Analog...Bagpipe.”

  “Bagpipe?”

  “I’m still working on the last word.”

  “Oh. I thought it stood for Electronic Tablet.”

  “Oooh! That’s good, too. I need to remember that. Let me get a pen.”

  As Mr. Newcomber scribbled, Julian looked at the eTab from every angle, in order. Acute. Right. Obtuse.

  “Cool! What apps does it have?”

  “Everything.”

  “Really, Dad? Everything?”

  “OK, not everything. There’s no refrigerator. But email, the internet, a word processor, a camera, the weather, not the weather itself, but the weather report. Not to mention four hundred fifty-three thousand songs, television stations from eighteen countries—I’m working on the rights for some others—as well as every textbook you will need through high school and, depending on where you go to college—”

  “Great,” Julian said, less than excited about the latter. “I’m sure this will help a lot with—Wait! Did you say talking?”

  “I think I did!” said Mr. Newcomber, clearly excited about that feature. “Ask it something. Anything.”

  “OK. What is the temperature today in Antarctica?”

  “Was sagen Sie? Ich verstehe nicht.”

  “What?” asked Julian.

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Newcomber. “I did get a lot of the
parts from this mail order place in Berlin. Maybe you should just forget about talking to it for now. Or, study German.”

  “What does this do?” Julian asked, pointing to the large, brightly glowing clock icon in the lower right-hand corner. A clock with a lot of numbers. Julian stopped counting at fifty. He could have counted higher. He just didn’t want to.

  “That? It’s a clock.”

  Julian said nothing. He’d come to understand that his dad had a habit of pausing for dramatic effect.

  “And it’s something you’re going to love! I call it the Dad Five-Minute Warning app. Did I mention you’ll love it? You know how you’re always asking me for something, and I’m always saying, ‘Give me five more minutes,’ which more often than not manages to stretch out to five days?” Mr. Newcomber asked, too excited to wait for an answer, or breathe. “Well, if you tap that icon, my cell phone will ring, and the eTab will start a five-minute timer. After five minutes, my phone will ring again. If, after one more minute, I haven’t tapped the icon on your eTab myself—it recognizes my fingerprint—then my cell phone will shock me with one hundred milliamps. Don’t worry. It’s not enough to kill me or anything. It will just get my attention. Wait...or should that be volts? I never could keep those two potentially lethal units of measurement straight. I’d better test it on something. Something living. But not living like a plant. Living and breathing. Well, plants do breathe, but—”

  “How about Dylan?”

  “Yes, Dylan breathes as well.”

  “No. I mean, how about testing it on Dylan?”

  Julian, like all big brothers, enjoyed torturing his younger brother whenever possible. If he could trick his dad into testing the jolt on Dylan, that would be a major score—what the smart folks call a “coup” (with a silent p).

  “Yeah, no,” Mr. Newcomber said, scratching his head with enough distracted energy to send a tempest of ripples through his hair, which people often mistook for a mop or topiary. “Hmmm, a squirrel. I wonder if I can catch a squirrel. How does one catch a squirrel? Oh, I know, I can—”