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  “You mean, two essays,” I said. “Right? Whatever you’re planning can’t work just once. It has to work for each of us.”

  “For sure. If it works at all, it can work infinite times. So are you in on this?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Why not? What’s the worst that could happen?” I have, since then, learned that there are some questions better left untested.

  Karzoy’s total lack of skill in the arena with a halberd or pike is made up for by the fact that he’s a bit of a computer genius. Though, smart as he is, he’s not big on writing papers. Which, I guess, is why he’d been searching for a way out while I’d been searching for ways to hack through his defense. I guess that made both of us hackers.

  His real name is a lot longer, and pretty much spelled without much help from vowels, but it sounds sort of like what you’d get if you said “Karzoy,” while in the middle of a violent sneeze that was, itself, in the middle of a string of violent hiccups. I’m a bit of a computer idiot. I’m not big on writing papers, either. And my name, whether or not you are sneezing, is simply Liam. But Karzoy and I have been pals for ages.

  We got right to work. This meant Karzoy started coding, and I hovered behind him, trying to make sense of what he was doing.

  “There are twenty-six letters,” Karzoy said. “So there are twenty-six times twenty-six possible pairs of letters. And twenty-six times more if you add a third letter. Actually twenty-seven, if you include spaces and ignore punctuation. Get it?”

  “Sure.” I sort of got that. Though I had a funny feeling I would soon be switching from sure to huh as he tried to explain things to me.

  “A pathetic, bumbling patzer would start with that sort of brute-force approach,” he said. “But starting with letters is unproductive and unnecessary, unless your goal is to compile reams of gibberish.”

  This was already close to sounding like gibberish. Though I’d learned from him a while ago that a “patzer” was a bad chess player. Which I happened to be. My board game skills had peaked somewhere between Candy Land and checkers.

  “Letters are out,” Karzoy said, continuing the lecture. “It makes more sense to start with…”

  He gave me the sort of expectant look one offers a puppy after saying, “Sit!” I guess he wanted to make sure I was following along by asking me to fill in the blank.

  “Words?” I guessed.

  “Exactly!” He thumped the table with his hand. “However, there are about half a million words in English. So the possible combinations for two words would be…”

  “Half a million times half a million,” I said, surprised I was still an active participant in the conversation.

  “Right! The possible number of combinations gets staggering almost immediately, and soon surpasses all the molecules in our solar system. We’d have to wait centuries for anything that resembled an essay, even if we tapped into the fastest processers available or crowd-sourced the task.”

  “We don’t have centuries. Or even weeks. The essays are due next Friday,” I said.

  “I know. But this is where it gets to be fun. We can filter everything through grammar rules, and toss out anything that fails to parse properly,” Karzoy said. “I’ll admit, that’s a pretty obvious solution. Anyone would think of it. Right?”

  “Uh, yeah. Right. Sure,” I said. “But you have a better idea?”

  Karzoy grinned like he’d just invented both ice cream and hot caramel sauce in one furious burst of inspiration. And, maybe, crushed peanuts. “I figured out that I can combine hermeneutics with a bit tree pruning. And let the AI digest the sample papers she gave us.” He grabbed a stack of essays and put them in his scanner. Then, he resumed typing.

  I waited. I knew an explanation was coming. I didn’t understand most of it, but I got the two main points. Karzoy was going to let the program learn what qualified as a good sentence, and then a paragraph, and then an essay. On top of that, he’d have the program compare what it created against the massive supply of essays that already existed on the Internet.

  “We don’t want to produce something that’s already been written,” he said. “We’d get in trouble. They check for that. All the teachers do. We just want something as acceptable as what’s been written. And something that follows the basic structure of essays that Ms. Fezniak likes.”

  He typed for another five minutes, then spun around in his chair, threw up another fist pump, and said, “Done! It’s running. We’ll have our papers by Wednesday or Thursday, at the latest.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. If he was wrong, I’d be writing an entire essay Thursday evening. Not that I hadn’t done things like that before.

  “Positive,” he said. “Let’s make good use of our free time. I want a rematch.”

  So we played—proving that even the smartest kids don’t learn certain lessons—and goofed off, and smirked at our classmates when they talked about the hours they were spending on their papers.

  On Wednesday afternoon, Karzoy took me into his room, and said, “It’s ready.”

  “Our papers?”

  “Yup.” He tapped a key, and the printer hummed to life. Soon after that, he handed me my paper.

  “Better read it,” he said. “Just in case Ms. Fezniak doesn’t believe you wrote it.”

  “Good idea.” I sat on Karzoy’s bed and read my essay. “Hey, this is pretty good,” I said when I was finished. “You really did it! You are a genius.”

  Karzoy smiled and shrugged. “Thanks.”

  He printed out a second copy for each of us. That was part of the assignment. We had to send a file to our school account, but we also had to turn in two printed copies. I had no idea why, and didn’t really care.

  We handed in our papers on Friday. On Monday morning, Ms. Fezniak handed back the papers. Each student got one copy, with a grade and hand-written comments.

  But not us. I looked at Karzoy when it was obvious he and I were the only ones who didn’t get our papers back.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him at lunch.

  “No idea,” he said.

  “Are you sure they aren’t the same as some real paper?” I asked. That was the only explanation I could think of for not getting the papers back.

  “Positive,” Karzoy said. “They absolutely do not exist in any online data base. I checked.”

  At the end of the day, right before the bell rang, Ms. Fezniak told me and Karzoy to remain seated.

  I expected her to accuse us of cheating. I was prepared to get some sort of punishment, and to act like I was sorry. I didn’t expect the police to show up.

  “Burglary is a serious crime,” one of the officers said.

  I couldn’t even think of an answer.

  “And copying two of my old papers was not a smart move,” Ms. Fezniak said. “I don’t know how you got into my home, but I am horrified at your actions.”

  “But…,” I said. I had no words. I glanced over at Karzoy. He was speechless, too. We could really have used some of those monkeys, now. It turned out that even though there are zillions of papers online, there are way more that aren’t on the Internet. Including many of the student papers Ms. Fezniak had saved from her thirty years of teaching. I guess that’s why she wanted two copies. She gave one back with comments and a grade, and kept one for herself. It was our bad luck that our infinite monkeys had spewed out a pair of papers that were way too close to two of the ones in Ms. Fezniak’s collection. Later, Karzoy told me the odds against this were so astronomical as to be virtually impossible, even though he’d used a couple real papers to help train the software. I told him the odds were meaningless when I was involved, and that bad luck was virtually inevitable. If things could go bad for me, they would.

  In the end, we confessed about the software. It was better to get punished for cheating than for burglary. And we still had to write our essays. On top of that, the school and our parents decided community service would be a good punishment. We had to spend fifty hours picking up litter in the pa
rk, jabbing it with a stick and stuffing it in a garbage bag. I never realized what a diverse and disgusting assortment of things people threw on the ground.

  “You know, we could make robots to do this,” Karzoy said, halfway into our first hour. “Small ones. We could sneak them into the park and let them do the work. The basic cybernetic—”

  I smacked him with the blunt end of my stick. He’s pretty bad at combat in the real world, too. But, at least, I didn’t slice him in half. Not that I didn’t want to.

  MY FAMILY HISTORY

  “Christopher, can I see you for a minute,” my teacher, Mrs. Woolrich, asked as the bell rang at the end of the day.

  “Uh, sure.” My heart raced. And a tingle ran down my spine.

  “Don’t worry. You aren’t in trouble,” she said.

  “That’s good.” I felt my tongue flick at my upper lip. I do that when I’m nervous. I walked up to her desk, and spotted my essay lying there. It didn’t have any marks on it. No grade or comments or anything. But she must have read it. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have wanted to talk to me.

  Mrs. Woolrich picked up the essay. “I’d like to ask you some questions about this.”

  I nodded, and waited. I’d felt great when I’d handed it in. I thought I’d done a really good job, and had totally followed the directions.

  “You know this was supposed to be about your real family,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “It wasn’t a story assignment,” she said. “We finished our fiction lessons last week. I wanted you to write about your real family, this time.”

  “I did.”

  “I know you’re new here, but it’s important, when we’re writing an essay, to stick with the truth.”

  “I did,” I said. I knew about sticking to the truth. I’d been to a bunch of schools, and they all had that same rule. They had other rules, too, that were really important to follow.

  “Your father and mother are bears?” she asked, tapping the second line of my essay.

  “Big ones,” I said. I raised my arms and growled like a bear. That was fun, because it was so far from the truth.

  She tapped the first paragraph. “They’re grizzly bears, and you all live in a cave near Folsom’s Woods?”

  “Yup.”

  “And they make you sleep on the hard stone floor of the cave?” she asked.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’m used to it. It’s nice and cool.”

  “All you get to eat are berries?”

  “I like berries,” I said. “That’s what bears eat.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a very good situation for a child.” She pulled her phone out of her purse. “Maybe I should give your parents a call so we can discuss this in person.”

  “We don’t have a phone. Dad doesn’t trust them. He says they’re too modern.”

  “Everyone has a phone,” she said.

  “His paws are too big to use the keyboard,” I said. “And he’s so strong, he’d crush the screen. Mom’s paws are huge, too.”

  Mrs. Woolrich put the phone back in her purse. “Well, maybe I should come out to your house—”

  “Cave,” I said.

  “Okay, your cave, and pay your parents a visit.”

  “I don’t think they’d like that,” I said. “They’re very busy.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’m sure they’ll make time,” she said. “I have a meeting to go to, right now. But later on, I’m paying your parents a visit. Tell them I’ll be there after dinner.”

  “I will.” I waited to see if there was anything else she wanted to say.

  “You can go,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I headed out. My parents weren’t bears, of course. Bears are lowly mammals, with no ability to read or write, and their cubs don’t go to school. The thought of that made me laugh.

  “I’m home,” I said when I got to our house, which definitely wasn’t a cave. We’d rented it, but only for a month, since we had no plans to stay around. I was still laughing at the idea of a bear cub going to school.

  Mom met me on the porch. “How’d it go?”

  I paused by the entrance, unzipped my boy suit, and enjoyed the feeling of afternoon sunlight warming my scales. “She totally fell for it.”

  “Wonderful,” Mom said. “When will she be coming?”

  “After dinner,” I said.

  “After her dinner,” Mom said. She hissed out a laugh and flicked her tongue across her lips.

  “And right in time for ours,” Dad said as he joined us.

  We all laughed at that. We might be cold-blooded killer lizards who sneaked among the humans and used them for food, without feeling bad at all about doing it, but we did have a sense of humor.

  WHEN DEATH COMES CALLING

  I was asleep when my bedroom door creaked open.

  A figure stood at the entrance, backlit by the night light in the hallway. I couldn’t see his face. He appeared to be wearing a robe with a hood and long sleeves. He was holding a sickle in his hand. The blade brushed the top of the door frame.

  This is not going to be a good dream, I thought as my eyes opened wider than I believed possible.

  He stepped inside, making no creak on the spot where my floor always creaks.

  I sat up and switched on my lamp.

  The light revealed a man’s face inside the hood. No grinning skull. No empty eye sockets. He looked like someone who could sell men’s cologne in a TV commercial. Handsome or not, he still held a weapon that could dish out a lot of damage. I inched back toward the corner where my headboard met the wall, and tried to accept the impossible truth that this wasn’t a dream at all.

  I fought down the urge to scream. I didn’t think anything good would come of bringing my parents running into the room. Or my little sister.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He stared at me like that was the stupidest question in the world.

  Black robe with hood, sickle, silent footsteps. The answer was obvious.

  “You’re Death?” I said. My voice broke on the second word, creaking like the door.

  He nodded.

  To my surprise, my first thought wasn’t to plead for mercy or make a dash for the hallway. My first thought was the small happiness that came from knowing he wasn’t here for someone else in my family.

  Wait.

  That wasn’t necessarily true.

  “Did you come just for me?” I asked.

  “Relax, Thomas,” he said. His voice was deep and soft. “I’m not here for that.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Nope.”

  “Honestly?” I’d read stories where Death tricked people in all sorts of ways.

  “Honestly.” He started to drag his finger across his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to…”

  He let the hand drop, and smirked as if he realized how strange it would be to finish that sentence. But at least I pretty much believed him, now. He wasn’t going to take me away.

  “So why are you here?”

  “Sometimes, even Death needs a little help.” He reached into a pocket of his robe and pulled out a phone. He had the long, slender fingers of someone who could make playing cards disappear and coins multiply right before your eyes. “I heard you’re good with these.”

  “I’m great.” I felt a jolt of fear as the words left my lips. Bragging to Death seemed like a good way to make bad things happen. Though what I said was true. I was awesome with operating systems, and pretty good with hardware. I could hack the unhackable and repair the irreparable. Everyone has a knack for something. That was mine. I could fix almost anything that went wrong with most phones, tablets, and even laptops.

  He held out the phone. It was a new model that had just hit the stores last month, with the ultra-strong glass and the modifiable interface.

  “See what you can do with this,” he said.

  I reached out, making sure our fingers didn’t meet. I guess he noticed.

  “I’m
not contagious,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “My touch isn’t lethal.”

  “Good to know.”

  “I’m just doing my job. I’m good at it.”

  “I know the feeling.” I switched on the phone. It was stuck in the middle of a system update.

  “Can you fix it?” he asked.

  “Probably.” I tried doing a hard reset, but it didn’t respond. “I’m going to have to open it up.”

  “Do what you have to,” he said. “Try not to kill it.”

  I stared at him. He shrugged. “That was a joke.”

  I got my electronics tool kit from the middle drawer of my desk. I figured the best bet was to pull the battery. Five minutes later, I had the phone back in working order. Ten minutes after that, I finished installing the update.

  “Fixed?” he asked.

  “Almost. I want to check whether any of your apps was damaged.”

  As I was testing the phone to make sure everything worked, I opened his calendar. There were five names on his list for tonight. My stomach clenched as I recognized one of them. Wilbur Cutgreve.

  Oh, no! Not him.

  Mr. Cutgreve was this nice old guy who lived on the next block over. I’d known him for as long as I could remember. He was as much a part of the neighborhood as the giant willow tree in our front yard, or the red fire hydrant on the corner. He loved decorating his house for all the holidays. Whenever we got a lot of snow, he paid me and my friends to shovel his driveway. In the summer, he was always sitting on his porch, playing dominoes or gin rummy with his next door neighbor, Mr. Vishner.

  He had one of those ancient flip phones. It never needed to be fixed. But it always needed to be found. Half the time I went over there, he asked me to call him, so he could track down the phone. That was easy, even if it was all the way across the house, or in the backyard, since the ringer was set as loud as possible.

  “I’m sure everything is fine,” Death said. “I don’t even use most of those apps.”

  The voice startled me back to the present. I guess I’d gotten lost in memories.