Cloneward Bound Read Online Free Page B

shoulders. “Listen, Fisher. I don’t know how long this investigation is going to last or whether any agents are going to come to the house to investigate further, but I don’t want you to worry about it, okay? I’ll be fine.”
    “That’s good,” Fisher said as his vision blurred and the room started spinning. He thought he might faint. Through the haze, he saw his parents headed for the door. “Have a good time,” he said under his breath. It took his parents several tries to make it out the door, because Mr. Bas’s silk scarf and Mrs. Bas’s shawl managed to wreathe together and tie them up neck to neck.
    When the door closed, Fisher stayed in place, not evenwavering, like he’d been nailed to the floorboards.
    He had no idea how long he had been standing there when a crash from the kitchen made him whip around. He slipped up to the doorway and eased his head around, expecting to see a tall man in a black suit and sunglasses punching down the wall in pursuit of Fisher for his crimes.
    Thankfully, the noise turned out to be a package of soup crackers that had been set down too close to the counter’s edge.
    “Young Fisher,” came a voice straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. It sounded like an English butler, but was, in fact, the toaster.
    “Oh, hi, Lord Burnside,” Fisher said, relieved. “Have a good day?”
    “Well, I must confess that this morning I slightly over-crisped a slice of whole wheat. I’m afraid that dreadful blunder put me in the darkest of moods for much of the day. Luckily, your father likes his toast dark so at least my foul mood produced something of worth. But if I cannot reliably and consistently perform my function, what good am I?” Lord Burnside had small glowing spots on his side that served to indicate eyes, and they dipped into a melancholy frown.
    “I wouldn’t let it get you down,” Fisher said, inching once again toward the hallway. He needed to think. Heneeded a plan. “After all, just think how many pieces of bread would be left completely untoasted if it wasn’t for your hard work!”
    “Dear me,” the little appliance said, eyespots growing wider. “All of that poor, cold, utterly uncrunchy bread! That would be disastrous. Indeed, perhaps I exaggerated the importance of one mistake, compared to the vast amount of important work that I do. Thank you, young sir. You have provided a very valuable perspective on the matter.”
    “Anytime, your lordship,” Fisher said. He took the stairs to his room two at a time, slammed the door, and sagged against it.
    His eyes landed on the cover of
Issue #412
of Vic Daring, Space Scoundrel, lying open and facedown on his bed. The artwork depicted the rakish adventurer catapulting himself free of a wrecked ship in a sleek chrome space suit, hurtling into black space, with no idea where the desperate escape might take him.
    Fisher empathized. He, too, had to hurtle himself into the terrifying black space … of Los Angeles.
    Twenty minutes later, Fisher was standing in front of a suitcase, which was, at the moment, still empty except for a solar-powered umbrella, a device that Fisher hadn’t really thought through before he made it. Fortunately, it worked very well as a portable powersource whenever it wasn’t actually raining.
    “Oh boy! LA! City of Angels! The bright lights! The stars! The big time! Prowlin’ the mean streets!”
    Once again, Fisher was conversing with a machine. It was CURTIS, Fisher’s AI companion. CURTIS sounded like a pizza delivery guy from Brooklyn, but he had an extremely powerful computing mind.
    CURTIS had spent most of his time on the TechX mainframe being very bored, and so had downloaded vast amounts of TV from the Internet. It was all he’d really known of the outside world before Fisher had taken him. Now he was giving Fisher advice on all the sights to check out in LA.
    FP was taking careful steps around the room, trying not to touch anything that wasn’t already secured to the