Tracy Tam: Santa Command (7 page)

At the bottom right corner of the screen was a button that said, “Mouse over for more information.”

“I don't care what you think.” That was Erlek. “You are coming with me, and so is that little nuisance.”

The doorknob twisted, and Tracy froze, her heart pounding in her chest. Would they notice the screen if she turned around and blocked it with her body? She was about to do just that when she heard Beth's protest and Erlek's hand being yanked from the door handle.

“Ouch!” the elf cried.

“You will convince Walt to give us more time,” said Beth, “or I'll tell him what you did last Thursday in toy storage.”

“I didn't break
that
many toys.”

“Five Leappads, two bicycles, and a Furby!"

"If you do that, I'll tell him about the time you…"

Tracy was still for a moment more, but when it seemed the argument was continuing, she sighed with relief and continued her task. She hovered the mouse over the Orlando area, and a text box appeared.

Name: Eugene Albert Blankenship

Region: East Orlando

Number of Houses: 708

Santa Command reloads: 5

So the guy who delivered presents to her house was named Eugene? Couldn't they have picked a guy who sounded more, well, Santa-y? Then again, if they were fooling the whole world, what did names matter? Santa was all about the look, and as long as the guy had the white beard and red suit, no one would know a thing. From what Phil and Beth had said, even Eugene didn't know it. His memory got wiped every Christmas.

Tracy's head hurt just thinking about that. She'd seen enough Star Trek to know that when people started messing with the mind, things got ugly. Did he forget other things too, like his wife's name, or his grandkid's birthday, or what he had for breakfast? Did they replace his memory with things that never happened, like a bad dream? And most importantly, did it hurt? It had to, considering Beth's reaction.

For the first time, Tracy realized she might not be safe after all. Beth seemed nice, and Phil seemed harmless, but they had a boss. And from what she'd heard, Walt wasn't a jolly guy in a red suit. He was someone to be afraid of.

“You have thirty seconds to get her or I'm calling Walt!” Erlek's voice boomed through the door.

“Oh no!” Tracy mumbled to herself. She moved the mouse to close the file, but instead of clicking the x in the corner, she moved her hand to her pocket instead. Her goal had been to find out the science behind Santa, and that hadn't changed. If she didn't get out in time, and they did manage to wipe her mind, she was going to need proof.

She pulled the turtle shaped zip drive from her pocket, plugged it into a slot on the computer, and started dragging files over to it. While the computer was transferring the third file, she got an error that said her drive was full.

“Oh no!” Tracy opened her drive, selected a bunch of files she'd downloaded at home from some video site, cut them from her drive, and moved them to the desk top. She was in such a hurry that her finger slipped, and she accidentally clicked one open. A string of numbers and letters filled the screen. She frowned. That certainly wasn't the TV show she downloaded. With no time to think about her messed up program, she closed it back up and started dragging files again.

The computer didn't like the next file. It was so big, a box appeared on the screen showing the slow, slow, slooow progress of the transfer. Tracy glanced toward the door. Phil, Beth, and the…creature were talking too low to hear again.

“Come on.” Tracy drummed her nails on the desk, and then because she thought it couldn't hurt, she took a couple of other Santa files and dragged them over to her zip drive too, hoping they'd just queue up and save her a little time.

A loud buzz came from the computer. The hard drive whirred loudly, and the mouse froze in place on the screen.

“Uh oh!” Tracy tapped, then pounded on the keyboard. The whirring sound got louder and a bright red light came on inside the computer tower. She glanced toward the door, but thankfully no one else seemed to hear it. She tapped enter a few more times, and then
it
happened.

The blue screen of death.

Tracy bit off a scream as she read the words on the screen.

A problem has been detected and your operating system has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. Beginning dump of physical memory.

And then a second later…

Dump of physical memory complete.

“No!” Tracy cried. “No! No! No! No!”

She pounded the keyboard, but nothing happened. The blue screen sat there, taunting her.

“Fine,” Beth yelled from the hallway, “but you need to let us talk to her first!”

Then, the doorknob turned.

Tracy yanked her turtle out of the computer and enacted part two of her plan.

Santa Command—Main Frame

December 25
^th

0140 hours

Phil hovered behind Beth's shoulder as she opened the door. He had no idea what she was going to tell Tracy. This was about as bad as things could get.

But when the door was fully open, he saw the frozen computer. He also noticed that the girl was nowhere in sight, and he realized things were about to get a lot worse.

Tracy

Tracy barely fit into the crawl space above the ceiling. When she first spotted the hatch, she assumed it was like her attic back home, large enough for her to walk through without ducking her head. Instead, Tracy found it difficult to even crawl. The floor was made up of narrow strips of plywood with nothing but the drywall of the ceiling and fluffy white insulation on either side of it. Tracy had no choice but to follow the path laid out by the boards. Because of the pipes and cables running across that path, she had to sometimes stretch out on her belly and wriggle herself through like a snake.

Also, it was very, very dark. She heard skittering all around her and wondered if she was hearing birds and squirrels, which would have been okay with her, or roaches and rats, which were not.

She was still wearing E. Higgens' coat. That made it harder to get through the tight spaces where she had to squeeze beneath the overhead support beams, but if she was going to escape, she was taking the coat as evidence. Maybe the computer files had finished uploading to her zip drive, maybe not, but she wasn't going home empty handed.

That was another problem, getting home. Her new plan involved getting to the loading bay and sneaking back on Santa's sleigh. She had gotten a good look at
her
Santa's picture on the computer and was sure she could figure out which one was him. His entire route was pretty close to her house. Ideally, she'd be able to get off close enough to walk home. If not, maybe she could call Ellen. She hadn't counted on Santa's crew being so uncooperative. Then again, she'd counted on Santa being real.

That was what made her head spin. For all of her life, heck, for all of her parents' and grandparents' lives, and on back for centuries, the Santa Commission had told them one thing above all else: that Santa was real.

But he wasn't. He was just some guy in a suit who never remembered a single Christmas Eve. He was worse than department store Santas. At least they knew the truth of what they were.

The dust in the crawl space tickled Tracy's nose. She lifted her hand to her face and discovered that her cheeks were wet, and it wasn't from her outburst back in the computer room. She had set out to find the truth behind Santa. Where she'd expected to find rocket engines and fireproof clothing, she found instead something very different. And a lot more upsetting.

Who were Beth and Phil? What kind of people worked for someone who wiped minds? That wasn't science. It was science fiction. She half expected little robot elves with red eyes to come marching through the crawl space chanting, “You are mine! You are mine!”

At the very moment she pictured herself being carted off by an army of tiny robots, something skittered to her right, and she jumped. She squinted in the dark, but when the sound faded away and she realized no robots were coming for her, she breathed out a sigh of relief and moved on.

At least, she tried to. The hem of her coat caught on an exposed nail. She shoved her hand beneath her leg to unsnag herself, and as she adjusted her weight, the board beneath her slipped, and the nail scraped her thigh.

“Mmph!” She stifled a cry. Her leg throbbed in pain. How many ways could she injure herself in one night?

The answer came immediately as she rolled away from the nail, off of the board, and onto the ceiling. The drywall gave way beneath her, and she crashed down into a very strange room.

Santa Command—Main Frame

December 25
^th

0200 hours

At that moment, Phil didn't care where Tracy was. He didn't care what she was doing. He didn't care what secrets she was learning. All he cared about was getting that computer back on line.

He quickly did the math in his head. The Alabama Command center was in charge of 187 different Santa routes. That was 160,000 houses! With two and a half hours to go, that meant there were still about 40,000 houses without presents. If he didn't get the Main Frame up immediately, they would fail. For the first time in the history of Santa Claus, the big guy would not complete his rounds.

First, Phil pulled the plug on the computer, hoping a simple restart would get everything going again. It did not. The blue screen returned and started flickering, almost like the computer was laughing at him.

Phil gripped the sides of the desk and let out an “Arggh!”

“You should have come with me when I asked.” Erlek stood to the side grinning smugly. “Then you wouldn't be in this mess.”

“Correction.” Walt appeared in the doorway, his body a shadow against the brightly lit hallway. “You wouldn't be in this mess if you hadn't insisted on bringing that little girl here.”

And now Walt's here
, Phil thought.
Just great.
At least his boss couldn't do anything before he fixed the computer. Phil was the top programmer at Santa Command, and the only one who
could
fix it.

Walt stood blocking the door with his hands on his hips. “Every control room is at a standstill. We have no clue what people are seeing out there! It's our job to keep the secret. If we fail, what do you think my boss is going to do?”

Phil's blood pounded through his veins, and he wondered if he was going to have an early heart attack right then and there. He didn't worry so much about being fired, because he knew that was going to happen. He had joined Santa Command to help keep the secret, and that's what he was going to do. “I'm on it. Just give me a few minutes.” He pulled a small spiral notebook and pen from his pocket and wrote down the error listed on the screen.

“Can I do anything?” Beth asked.

Phil sighed with a small amount of relief. At least there was one person who wasn't trying to send his blood pressure through the roof. In fact, there
was
something she could do, and Phil had the power to order it. “I need some more time.”

“Time?” Beth asked like she wasn't sure she'd heard correctly. At Santa Command, that word carried a lot of weight.

“Do you have any idea what you're doing?” Walt asked.

“Yes.” Phil answered both of them as he calculated what he thought he needed and not a second more. Still, he struggled with getting the words out of his mouth. Stopping time was tricky. It didn't always work out as planned, but at the moment, it was the only way. “I need half an hour.”

Erlek blew out a low whistle. “Glad I'm not you.”

Phil wanted to strangle the creature, but instead chose to focus on the computer screen. As Beth was leaving the room, Phil called back over his shoulder. “And do me a favor. Take the Inkling with you.”

Tracy

Tracy sneezed as the fluffy white insulation settled around her like snow. Well, at least something at Santa Command reminded her of the North Pole.

“Ouch,” she said as she sat up and brushed dust out of her hair. Her tail bone was sore as well as her right arm. Again. She flexed her fingers. At least nothing was broken this time. She pushed herself off of the broken pieces of ceiling and to her feet.

She was in a square room, empty except for a large, oval shaped mirror mounted to the wall. The room had no windows, and the lights were out, but there was light coming from the mirror. It gave the room a soft, yellow glow like a living room lamp at night.

Tracy couldn't look away from the mirror, like it contained every happy memory in her life all rolled into one. She walked slowly toward it, even though the feeling in her bones told her to go for the door or find her way back to the attic. She needed to find out what the deal was with the mirror. Why did it glow like that? Why did she want to reach out and touch it?

As she got closer, the yellow light shivered, then swirled into an image, not a reflection, but a picture of a library. It was a lot like a trick she'd seen in Belle's house at Disney World, and she wondered if Santa Command had the same designers.

Once the picture stopped shifting, Tracy gaped at how welcoming everything looked. There was a red arm chair sitting next to a crackling fire. Green garland and red bows were draped across the mantle. The floor to ceiling bookshelves were stuffed with books. It was as if someone had reached into her mind and came up with the perfect reading room.

It was so detailed, she was certain she was looking through a window and not a mirror. But if the mirror was actually a door into another room, why not just build a door? Why go to the trouble of making it seem like a magical entrance when everything else in this building was fake? And why did her stomach feel so tingly when she looked at the mirror?

No, it wasn't tingles. She was just tired. The computer back in the other room had said it was around 2 am. No wonder the chair, with its fuzzy overstuffed cushions, looked so inviting.