"Okay, okay, okay," Tucker exclaimed, grinning. He punched a few buttons on his PDA and said, "4,297 times 84."

"360,948; Tucker, that's basic math," Danny answered, rolling his eyes.

Sam sighed, still worried. "Not in those numbers, Danny. Are you sure this is okay?"

"Okay? Sam, this is great!" The ghost boy jumped to his feet and began to pace, unable to sit still any longer. "I mean, I feel like I know everything!"

"Size of the Taj Mahal in square inches?"

He took a breath, then stopped when the answer was not immediately forthcoming. "Except that," he allowed. "But! I do know that the first program Bill Gates wrote took thirty-four kilobytes and wouldn't fit on his computer!"

Tucker scoffed. "Big deal; I knew that."

Sam rolled her eyes as the two boys started throwing computer-related facts at each other, each trying to outdo the other. She couldn't seem to share in their revelry at Danny's newfound intelligence, which she thought might be due to the fact that girls are more sensible than boys. There was just something familiar about the look in his eyes. After a few minutes, she concluded that he'd simply been around Kat for too long and stood. "Much as I'd like to sit around listening to the two of you act like geeks, I have to get home."

Tucker made a face as he checked the time. "Yeah, I've got to go, too. See you, man."

Danny pouted for a moment and tried to convince them to stay. As he watched them go, he had the odd thought that they were only leaving because they felt threatened by his genius. Strangely enough, that made him feel a little better. On the other hand, he was bored. There was no one else in the house, so he could do whatever he wanted.

Was it ironic that he couldn't think of anything to do?

At last, he ran up to his room, and resumed doing next week's homework. It was something to pass the time.

"He might be able to hear us. I was getting some weird interference earlier."

"What kind of interference?"

He moved forward toward the voices, trying to hear them better. He wasn't sure where he was, but he thought he should know. Something told him that those voices didn't belong, but he wasn't sure what.

"Random neurons firing? He's half human and half ghost; I'm beginning to understand just how impossible that's supposed to be."

"What are you going on about?"

It was a darkened hallway full of doors, but something was wrong. The silvered walls and floor squirmed as though it was a living thing, occasionally revealing a more normal surface beneath. As he crept into the faded light, he realized that the hall was literally covered in tiny, writhing bugs. They stopped moving and turned to see him as though possessed of a single mind.

"I'll tell you after I figure out a way around it. He's listening right now."

"What is this?" he asked, backing away.

A mass of the spider-like creatures converged to become Technus, full of smug egotism as usual. "This is a nightmare. You should wake up, now." Suddenly, the remaining horde swarmed over him, eliciting an alarmed scream. He tried to run, but tripped over his feet and fell…

…hard onto the not-squirming floor of his room. Still slightly in the dream, Danny jumped to his feet, swatting at the imaginary creatures for several minutes. Eventually, he realized there was nothing there, but he could still feel them. It made his skin crawl.

He sat gingerly on the bed, rubbing his arms and shaking with revulsion. The dream itself was quickly fading, but he remembered Technus was there. Had it been more than a dream?

The force of inner denial almost gave him a headache. Of course, Technus wasn't involved. And how could he be? He could only possess technologies, not biological organisms. Not that he hadn't thought of a perfectly good way to hack into Danny's brain. After all, he was Technus, master of-

…Wait.

Danny blinked and shook his head. What had he been thinking about? It was something important, he thought…

Oh, right. The nightmare bug attack. He shuddered again at the memory of those things swarming over him. They reminded him of how he had envisioned Jazz's bloodstream nanobots, for some reason. He idly wondered if those things were still active.

His skin still itched, making him restless. It was well after midnight, but he didn't expect to fall asleep anytime soon. The nightmare had gotten him rattled like few others had. When he found himself stuck reliving a few of those nightmares, he decided to go down to the lab for a distraction. If nothing else, maybe a few games of solitaire would put him to sleep. Although the thought of being pulled back into that mass of silver spiders almost made him wish for insomnia again.

He sighed slightly at the memory of Pandora, or Hope Thatcher. A whole week that never even happened…the enraged fire spirit had granted him his every heart's desire in exchange for her freedom. Of course, her methods had involved burning things. It had taken a long time for him to realize exactly what that meant. Some things had been obvious, such as burning the school or the police department, or causing an explosion that killed several of his classmates. A few things, however, he didn't realize until much later.

A wish to make Paulina like him had involved burning and cauterizing several pathways through her brain until her personality had been sufficiently altered. A similar wish to make Sam forget Paulina…he didn't want to think about that one. Or the wish he had accidentally made for Jazz to disappear. Maybe those things never happened, but he would never forget that they had been partially his doing.

He stared at the blank computer screen, debating whether to even bother turning it on. He didn't really want to play solitaire. After a few minutes, he unhooked all the cables, grabbed a screwdriver, and started to take it apart.

He'd first met Kat because of Pandora. He grinned a bit at that memory; he had marked her as being related to Technus almost immediately. Even without the familial resemblance, she had that same ego. He had yet to figure out how they could tolerate each other. The astral gremlin seemed to love her father, but they both professed to despise emotion. Then there was the fact that he had once framed her for a series of black outs. She had retaliated, Danny later learned, by trapping Technus in some kind of electromagnetic field and turning him over to Walker. From what he gathered, they did that sort of thing to each other a lot.

The ghost boy stared forlornly down at the dismantled computer and began putting it back together again. There was the time he had been forced to go to Washington. Vlad had purchased a small mansion on the coast of Puget Sound and invited them all to be killed by a pair of water spirits that looked like bloated corpses. Ronan and Julia had decided to go through eternity forcing people to relive their deaths, and had chosen Jazz and some local guy for their victims. Danny stopped them, of course.

Was it strange to be so trapped in the past? He was barely aware that the computer was in one piece again and had no real memory of how it had come to be that way. He decided that he was just more exhausted than he realized and, after plugging all the cords back in, flew back up to his room.

Certain that the ghost child couldn't overhear his thoughts, Technus reflected on all he'd managed to learn. First and foremost, the boy didn't seem to hold Kat in quite as high esteem as he'd originally assumed. His thoughts of her had been colored by amused exasperation.

Second, the boy had two very powerful enemies that no one knew about previously. He thought they had been sent to the Ghost Zone and resolved to find out for certain. Having a renewable source of hydroelectric power would solve so many problems.

Technus decided not to report to Vlad anymore. It wasn't as though he'd be missed after the last one. The plan required that he brainwash Danny into joining the older half ghost, but he had a better idea.

Danny shuddered in his sleep as his dreams were invaded by maniacal laughter that sounded disturbingly like Technus'.
A/N: Okay, little recap there of my first three stories. I'm working on one that's about Kat discovering that Danny keeps a journal, and the whole fic is a recap from that point of view. It's not going well; I'm just not good enough to make it properly amusing. Instead, it's coming out really bland and boring. So I'm probably going to do something like this instead, either a little every story or all of it in this one. It depends on how it works out happening.