It was the second lunch period and Jay had just sat down to eat his lunch, when suddenly his cellphone rang. Some of his new friends were there with him: Madison, Laura, Brooke, and Biff. Erica and Leonard sat at a different table, together.
He answered his phone. "Hello?" He listened. "Mother? What is it? What's wrong?" He listened more.
Laura seemed a bit concerned. "What is it, Jay?"
He waved his hand towards her.
He listened more. "The device?"
Everyone at his table stopped eating and stared.
After another minute, he hung up.
"What's wrong?" Madison asked.
"My mother said that she found the device in my room and took it to work with her. Now, the entire office building is filled with geeks. That's nearly a thousand people."
They couldn't believe it. A thousand geeks?
"We need to go there," Jay said.
"You mean skip school?" Laura asked. "I don't think that's a good idea. I'm trying to get my attendance up." Before her change, she was tardy nearly half the time and had skipped school more than once.
"Well, we're not doing it for fun. It's an emergency. My mother said that her boss is planning on sending the device's signal over the radio. Do you know how many people would be affected by that? We have to stop it."
"Wouldn't it be better if everyone were like us, though?" Biff asked.
"No, it wouldn't. I only thought it would be better if more people were like us. Not everyone. There would be no diversity."
They all nodded their heads. They did understand his point of view and that was good. Because unlike the people at his mother's job, his friends weren't zombies, carrying out the orders of her boss. This made him think that something had happened to the device after he used it at the mall. Something that made people that had turned into geeks want to make other people into geeks too. Some sort of a malfunction? Jay may never know.
"Now I wish I had never changed Sarah's father."
"What does Sarah's father have to do with this?" Brooke asked.
"Sarah's father is my mother's boss. She works at McMillan Tech Industries in Pittsburgh."
"Oh."
"I have to call Sarah."
