Jeff Conroy stared out the window, nose to the glass, breathless. Seconds earlier, they’d been driving along on solid ground, but now their rusty old van was sailing through the sky.
The road was so far below that it looked like a snake winding its way through the grass. Except those weren’t blades of grass. They were trees. And those weren’t little model houses or toy cars like you’d find on a train set. They were the real thing.
As amazing as it might seem to be in a van that could fly, Jeff was not enjoying the ride. He was scared, and feeling more than a little sick to his stomach as the vehicle swayed back and forth through the air.
The van continued to sail along gracefully, but the view out the windows was partially obscured by the thick black magnetic straps that clung to the van’s metal body. They led up to the large helicopter above, and had been used to lift the vehicle off the road.
Harry Green, sitting at the now totally useless steering wheel, glanced back helplessly at Jeff, who was in the middle of the van, next to his dog Chipper.
“What are we going to do, Chipper?” Jeff shouted over the noise of the rotating chopper blades as he looked at the ground far below.
Chipper did not know. Chipper had only just woken up.
Five minutes ago, before their van had been tracked down by The Institute, Chipper had been dreaming.
Even though there were almost no other dogs like Chipper on the entire planet, he still resembled the most common of mutts in at least one respect.
When he slept, he dreamt.
While the scientists at The Institute had spent millions of dollars to create what was in effect a running, barking, sniffing computer, outfitted with some of the most sophisticated software ever invented, the one thing they could not do was keep it awake twenty-four hours a day.
Chipper could read multiple languages, access maps in his head and do complicated calculations but, unlike an ordinary laptop that could run all the time, Chipper sometimes needed to lie down, shut his eyes and catch a few winks. Well, he didn’t have to shut his eyes, considering they weren’t real ones, but he could put them into sleep mode.
And when Chipper did finally drift off, he had dreams. Sometimes they were happy dreams, and sometimes they were nightmares.
Before the van became airborne, Chipper had been having a very happy dream, a dream of happier times.
He was dreaming about when he was a puppy.
Oh, what a glorious time it was, before his body was outfitted with chips and wires and circuitry and memory banks. Back then, Chipper’s thoughts weren’t like the ones he had now. These days, Chipper tended to think in actual words, just like people, but when he was a puppy it wasn’t like that at all. There were impulses, and instincts, and feelings of joy and fear and curiosity.
There was so much to be curious about. He’d been born on a farm, one of a litter of four. Two brothers and one sister. The people who owned the farm had given them all names. He was Chipper, of course, and his sister was Bonnie, and his brothers were Scout and Wonder. Their mother, a beautiful border collie, was called Princess.
If you were a dog, a farm was the best place in the world to be born and raised. So many smells! Hay and grasses and trees and cows and chickens and millions of scents! For a dog, whose nose was sensitive to smells, it was overwhelming, but in a good way. And unlike those poor, sad city dogs, who had to sit around all day in houses or apartments waiting for their owners to come home, and who might only get a few minutes each day to sniff about outside in the real world, all the while leashed to someone trailing along after them carrying a little plastic clean-up bag, farm dogs had it made.
You could run and run and run all day long. You could—
“Chipper!”
—round up the sheep or chase squirrels or hang out watching the cows get milked or jump into the back of your owner’s pickup truck and be driven all over the property. You could flop down on your side in the dirt, in the sun, and feel the heat through your fur.
These were Chipper’s memories when he had a dream. In many of them, he was with his mom.
In the dreams, Chipper had the power of speech. He could tell his mother how much he loved her. He could tell her how much he liked life on the farm, and how he would never, ever leave.
But then, sometimes, the dreams would turn dark, as dark as the SUV that arrived one day. The SUV with the men in dark suits, the men from The Institute.
Chipper would plead with his mother not to make him go away with the men. He wanted to be a regular dog for ever. He—
“Chipper!”
He didn’t want anyone opening him up and putting in all sorts of fancy equipment. He didn’t want anyone taking away his real eyes and replacing them with cameras so that the people back at The Institute could see what he saw. He didn’t want anyone giving him the ability to figure out what seven times fifteen times eleven divided by sixteen was.
Who needed to know that when you were a dog?
Sometimes, when he was having a dream like this, Chipper tried to make the men get back into their black SUV, turn around and leave the farm. Sometimes he was able to do it, and sometimes he wasn’t. This was turning into one of those times when—
“Chipper!”
Chipper activated his eyes.
Where was he? And who was this boy yelling at him?
Oh, right. He was in an old Volkswagen camper van. Harry Green, that guy in his late sixties who’d been staying in one of the cabins at the boy’s fishing camp, was up front behind the steering wheel. And the boy in the back, sitting right next to Chipper, waking him up, was Jeff, his twelve-year-old friend, the one he had set out to find when he’d busted out of The Institute.
“Were you dreaming?” Jeff asked. “I couldn’t wake you up!”
Jeff was holding a cell phone in his hand, the kind that could do everything from make phone calls to surf the Internet. But the only thing Jeff used it for now was texting. And not even to write texts, but to receive them.
From Chipper.
As advanced as Chipper was, he could not actually speak. He could think things. And those thoughts could be translated into words that were then transmitted as texts to Jeff’s phone. Jeff’s friend Emily had figured it out. She was one smart cookie.
Jeff didn’t have to text to Chipper. All he had to do was talk to him and Chipper understood every word.
Chipper responded.
Yes. I was dreaming.
Jeff glanced at the phone and read the response. Chipper noticed that the boy looked very anxious. Chipper also quickly became aware the van was driving very quickly. He hopped up on the seat at the tiny dining table. The battered old van also had a bed at the back with storage underneath, a tiny stove and refrigerator, and a narrow closet to hold odds and ends.
They were on a country lane. A quick glance ahead and back revealed that the van was the only vehicle on the road. But Chipper was hearing more than just the van’s rasping engine. There was something above them.
What is happening?
“They’ve found us.”
Chipper did not have to ask who had found them. That would be The Institute. But as far as Chipper could tell, they were not being followed.
Where are they?
Jeff’s index finger pointed straight up.
Chipper stuck his head out an already open window. His black and white fur fluttered in the high wind as he craned his neck to look up.
They were being chased by a helicopter.
“Does he see it?” Harry shouted.
He had helped Jeff and Chipper get away from the fishing camp Jeff’s aunt ran after The Institute had tracked them down there.
“He sees it,” Jeff said.
“He got any bright ideas?”
“You got any ideas, Chipper?” Jeff asked.
Chipper thought. He did not have any, at least not yet.
Working on it.
As he transmitted those words to Jeff’s phone, thick black straps dropped from the sky alongside the van.
They reminded Jeff of the brushes in a car wash. Back when he still lived with his parents, when they were still alive, they used to take their car through the wash, and Jeff had loved to watch the brushes slapping and dragging along the vehicle.
But these were different. They dangled and fluttered in the air like huge strands of dark fettuccine and then, suddenly, latched on to the car, as though they were magnetic. Five straps down the right side of the van, five straps down the left.
“What the heck is that?” Harry shouted.
He turned the wheel hard one way and then the other, swerving down the highway at more than seventy miles per hour. Veering left, then right, trying to shake those bands off the van.
I think we are in trouble.
“What’s he saying?” Harry shouted.
“He thinks we’re in trouble!” Jeff replied.
“Oh, well, thanks for that, Lassie!”
Harry continued to yank back and forth on the wheel, sending the van swerving all over the road.
But suddenly, when Harry turned the wheel, there was no response. The van did not do what it told him to do.
“What the—” Harry said.
The black bands on the side of the vehicle went rigid. Jeff peered out the window, down at the road. Chipper did the same from the other side of the van.
“Oh no,” Jeff said.
Yeah. Oh no.
That was when the van began to lift off the road and fly over the countryside.
Which soon led to Jeff’s big question: “What are we going to do, Chipper?”
