Frek and the Elixir Read Free

singing songs. Frek had been tweaking one of them to resemble a believable character for a story. Practicing for the day he tried to get a job at the Toonsmithy.
    The arms on his virtual cuttlefish looked a bit too short today, and Frek would have started working on him, but just then Goob Doll Judy came barging in, sliding across the wall leaving a wake of yellow sparkles.
    â€œYou shouldn’t be on my wall when I didn’t ask to see you,” said Frek.
    â€œYou should know that Gov’s curious about you,” said Judy, widening her pale brown eyes. “Something happened last night in the sky. It’s the start of a new adventure!”
    Toons had all sorts of tricks for roping more and more people into watching them. Frek quickly made his pet cuttlefish get big enough to cover up Judy. When Judy’s ponytails came poking out among the tentacles, Frek pasted another urlbud to the wall, the Gaiatopia. This site was complex enough to cover both Goob Doll Judy and the Merry Mollusks.
    Frek stared at the orchid-bedecked trees, at the dragonflies, the scuttling rodents, the languid snakes, the crazy monkeys, and the lurking big cats. The Gaiatopia was populated by toons of all the lost species of Earth—at least all the species that the designers could remember. NuBioCom had collapsed the Earth’s biome in 2666, and the species they’d winnowed out weren’t ever coming back. NuBioCom didn’t exactly advertise the fact, but if you poked around on the Net, you’d find that the old DNA codes were gone as well. Erased from all the memory archives. These days evolution was limited to NuBioCom’s designs for commercial kritters, and to the toons.
    Not for the first time, Frek let himself dream of finding a way to bring back Earth’s real plants and animals—of going on a quest for a magic elixir to heal his home world. But he had no idea of where to begin. Visiting the Gaiatopia always made him a little sad.
    When Frek peeled the two urlbuds off the wall, it reverted to looking like silvery paisley. Goob Doll Judy was gone, too. Once all the urlbuds were stored away, Frek set to work on the mess of wooden blocks left in his room by Ida, who’d been building a maze for Wow the other day. Despite Ida’s injunctions, Wow had of course just stepped over the blocks to get to the scrap of anymeat that Ida had placed at the maze’s end. The kids could never quite decide how smart or dumb their dog was.
    Frek decided to stash Ida’s blocks under his bed, which was a bouncy platform grown right out of the house tree wall, with a pair of legs at the outer corners to hold it up. A bunch of stuff was already under there, but the blocks fit easily enough, as did the curved ebony shapes of Frek’s Space Monkeys puzzle, his real metal spring, and the wooden top that he could never get to work. And then Frek crammed his throwing disk under the bed, also his ball-paddles, his model rocket made of a tweaked snail’s shell, and the box holding a tank-grown microscope eye you could uvvy-link to.
    With all of this gear out of the way, the only thing left to get rid of was Frek’s battered old Solar Trader game. He’d been playing a big tournament with Stoo over several days this week. The colorful money leaves and deed petals and hotel seeds were all over the place. The edges of the game’s turmite-paper box were broken, which meant that after Frek got all of the Solar Trader stuff sandwiched in between the flattened top and the bottom he couldn’t carry it very far, or everything would slide out.
    He tried to push the box under his bed, but it wouldn’t fit. A giant shove might have done it, but Frek was worried all the game pieces might spew out. He leaned over and peered under his bed at the clothes, blocks, and toys. In toward the middle was a pillow, a fancy pillow of Geneva’s that Frek had forgotten about. He’d hidden it there last month