Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

93

Mike's fingers flew over the keyboard of Fang's laptop. "I just gotta write a bit of code here," he muttered. "Get you in through a bunch of different back doors. Lotsa people got firewalls up, stuff like that, but this should bypass most of 'em."

He opened Fang's main blog page and scanned it quickly. "Okay, I've gotta try to get access to them through their IP addresses, since you don't have most of theire-mail addresses," he said. "This could be tricky, but I'll give it a shot."

"You are a criminal mastermind," the Gasman said admiringly.

"I try," Mike said.

"Wait," said Fang, reading over his shoulder. "Switch over to my e-mail for a sec. I just saw a pop-up alert on the bottom of the screen."

"Yeah, this one has three red flags for priority," Mike said, pointing.

Fang's heart sped up.

We're in Germany. Town of Lendeheim. Big castle here, head of Itex. Lots of really bad stuff. Come as fast as you can. (Hi Fang! From Nudge. I miss you!) Do NOT blow this off. Come!!! We have days, maybe hours. I mean it, you better get your butt over here. Max.

Huh. Fang sat back and nodded at Mike to keep working.

So. Max wanted him back, eh? She didn't say whether she still had Frankenbirdy with her. If she did, Fang didn't want any part of it.

On the other wing, it had cost her a lot of pride to ask him to come. She'd never even taken his blog that seriously, and now she was using it to beg him to come back. Well, order him to come back. Which was as close to begging as Max would get.

What were they doing in Germany? How had they gotten to Europe? How did she expect him to get to Europe?

He looked at the date on the e-mail. Early this morning. And Germany was about ten hours or so ahead...

How would Max define "really bad stuff"? As opposed to just ordinary bad stuff? Stuff bad enough to make her swallow her pride and ask him to come help.

So they were talking pretty unimaginably bad.

"Okay, I got it," said Mike, sitting back. He had a proud, satisfied smile on his face. "It'll work a little like a virus, in that it'll access other addresses through people's e-mail programs, but it won't cause any damage." He frowned. "I think. Anyway, type your message and then hit this special Send box I created. Let's see what happens."

Fang swallowed. This was it. This was his chance to get kids to take this seriously, tell them what was going on. All over the planet, kids would read this message.

This was his chance to save the world.

He started writing.