Read Philippa Fisher and the Fairy's Promise for Free Online

to figure out how to get you back to Earth by the time she remembers about that.”
    “Oh, well, that’s good,” I said, not sure I meant it. I mean, of course I wanted to get back to Earth. I didn’t want to be stuck up here forever. But — well, I wouldn’t mind spending a bit of time here. I was at ATC! I was actually in the middle of Fairy Godmother headquarters!
    Except that I couldn’t enjoy it. Not when my mom was in trouble. Somehow we had to try to get more details about the really bad thing that was going to happen to her. We had to stop it!
    “Come on,” Daisy said, breaking into my thoughts and knowing exactly what I was thinking. “Let’s get to my desk. We’ve got work to do.”
    We sat in front of Daisy’s computer. The computer looked similar to our computer at home. The weird thing was how you got it to work. You had to speak to it, and it would respond with pictures and patterns and lines and lines of text.
    Daisy said that if you really knew what you were doing, you just had to think about what you wanted to know and it would come up with answers. I still hadn’t quite gotten my head around this whole think-it-can-happen-and-hey-presto-it- can -happen idea yet, so I stuck to saying things out loud.
    “Where am I?” I asked, just for fun.
    The screen burst into light, a thousand colors spilling across it, spreading and weaving into every space in swirling, dancing loops and lines. Through the colors, three big letters emerged: ATC .
    OK, I knew that.
    “Who am I?” I asked. The screen went blank.
    I turned to Daisy, trying not to be too freaked out. Did I still exist, or, now that I was at ATC, had I been wiped off the face of the earth forever, with no way back?
    Daisy glanced at the screen. “That’s good,” she said.
    “What? How can it be good?”
    “It can only tell you what’s already in its program. It’s not programmed to recognize humans up here. If it doesn’t know you, that means it’s unlikely anyone realizes there’s a human up here — yet.”
    “Yet?”
    Daisy paused. “Well, it will catch on eventually,” she said. “Any changes in the atmosphere gradually seep through and need to be identified and categorized.”
    Changes in the atmosphere? Identified? Categorized? “Daisy, you haven’t actually made me feel a whole lot better.”
    “Look, trust me,” she said. “If the computer doesn’t know who you are, all it means is that we’ve got longer to plan a way of getting you out of here before we land ourselves in any more trouble.”
    “OK,” I said.
    “Good. Now, let me think. We need to find out what’s happening with your mom first, and worry about the rest later.”
    Daisy was right. That was all that mattered right now. Finding out what was going to happen to Mom — and figuring out how we could stop it.
    Daisy shut her eyes and sat in silence for a moment. The computer seemed to be waiting. I waited, too. What was she thinking? Was she asking the computer a question? Would it know the answer this time?
    I looked at the screen. A small word was emerging in the center of the screen.
    YES.
    I stared at the word. Yes? Yes what?
    YES, I WILL KNOW THE ANSWER THIS TIME.
    Whoa! The computer had heard my thoughts! It was answering me!
    Daisy gave me a quick nudge. “Stop thinking things,” she said. “Your thoughts are getting in the way.”
    Stop thinking things? How was I supposed to do that?
    JUST DO IT , the computer replied.
    OK, this was getting spooky now. I had to stop thinking. I tried to do something Mom had once taught me when she came back from a meditation and yoga weekend. You imagine that your mind is like the sky, and if any thoughts come into it, you think of them as clouds floating slowly across it. Mom had spent a week doing it every day until she decided that she needed to spend more time thinking, not less. She thought it might make her brain lazy.
    I shut my eyes and concentrated on the image for a while, and it must have worked,