The Turing Test

Fandom: Psych
Title: The Case of the Disappearing Teacher
Characters: Shawn and Gus
Rating: General
Disclaimer: Neither Psych nor its characters belong to me.

Original Posting Date: 25 December 2007



Shawn Spencer, age eight and three quarters, had a best friend, one Burton Guster, called Gus, age eight and seven-twelfths. ( Shawn would've said he was eight, but Gus loved exactness. Also, reducing fractions.) They were often mischievous but at heart were good boys.

One morning, Shawn and Gus were attending class when their teacher, Mrs. Shockwell, simply did not show up. Now, this was very unusual, for Mrs. Shockwell had never missed a day of school and was always very prompt. Instead, a young lady by the name of Miss Gage came to teach the class.

As all students know, substitute teachers are evil, and Miss Gage was no exception.

At recess, Gus and Shawn hid out under the play fort with their baseball cards. "Shawn, what do you think happened to Mrs. Shockwell?" asked Gus. (Mrs. Shockwell was Gus' favorite teacher. She let him skip ahead in the book, even when the rest of the class wasn't ready yet.)

"Maybe she was eaten by a dinosaur," said Shawn, paying more attention to the baseball cards in his hands. (Mrs. Shockwell was nice and all, but a Jose Canseco card was way more important.)

"Shawn! Dinosaurs are extinct. Unless Mrs. Shockwell invented a time machine and then stumbled back to the Jurassic Age, she wasn't eaten by a dinosaur!" said Gus. (Gus was a huge dinosaur fan. He knew all of their scientific names and in what era they belonged. He was even saving up his allowance for a trip to Dinosaur National Park.)

"Who says she didn't build a time machine. She's smart. Trade me Jose Canseco for Don Mattingly," Shawn waggled the cards under Gus' nose.

Gus batted away the cards, "No one can build a time machine. They're only in movies and stuff." (Actually, Gus had his own secret plans for a time machine hidden und his mattress. Someday, he'd get it to work.)

"Oh, like in Back to the Future. Wait, if she didn't get eaten by a dinosaur, where is she?" asked Shawn. (Back to the Future being Shawn's favorite movie. Which Shawn had forced Gus to watch twenty six and a half times in the last four months.)

"Maybe she's sick," said Gus.

"That's stupid. Teachers don't get sick. I bet she's a spy and she got called up for a mission," said Shawn. (Shawn's dad thought he wasn't old enough to watch James Bond movies. Which hadn't stopped them from going over to Jason Parker's house to see it, because his mom would let them watch anything. This really worked to their advantage in high school.)

"Teachers do get sick. Miss Marten got sick all the time," replied Gus. (In fact, Miss Marten, Shawn and Gus' second grade teacher, did not often get sick. She actually just hated teaching. She retired two years later, sold all her worldly possessions, bought a boat, and was never heard from again.)

Giving up any hope of going back to baseball cards, Shawn said, "I guess that's true. Hmm..." He sat, thinking hard, "Maybe Miss Gage kidnapped her and has her tied up in the school's basement." (If Shawn ever kidnapped someone, he planned on hiding them in his basement.)

"Wait," said Gus, "You may be on to something." (Gus had hidden a hamster in his basement once for two weeks before Houdini had escaped and his mother mistook it for a rat.)

"Miss Gage is evil. All substitute teachers are evil. And she made us do those stupid spelling drills, with that sort of evil, she could've totally kidnapped Mrs. Shockwell," said Shawn. (Spelling was one of Shawn's most hated subjects. He wasn't bad at it, but that didn't stop it from feeling like another one of his dad's crazy memory exercises.)

"I bet Miss Gage isn't even a real teacher," said Gus, getting into the spirit. (Miss Gage indeed was a real teacher with a degree in elementary education from NCSU.)

"I bet she's an alien," Shawn replied, excitedly. "She's here to take over the world and eat all of us!" (It could be argued that Shawn had watched way too much television in his short life.)

"So, how are we going to save Mrs. Shockwell?" asked Gus.

Shawn stopped to think for a moment. "I bet she's in the basement," he said. "We'll go look for her after school." (Shawn's plan consisted of repelling in with a SWAT team at his back, doing a front roll and then shooting all the bad guys. He hadn't quite figure out how he was going to get all the right equipment yet, but it would come to him on the way.)

Plan in hand and recess over, Shawn and Gus returned to class. Both were on the look out for any extra evil on the part of Miss Gage or any clue as to the location of their abducted teacher. (No clues were found, though Shawn later argued that the excessive home work Miss Gage assigned was a sign of true evil.)

Once the bell rang and class was let out, Shawn and Gus set about finding their way into the school's basement. (They never even got close. The door to the basement was back behind the principal's office and was locked. The only person who had the key was the janitor and both Shawn and Gus knew better than to mess with him.) This activity was thwarted by the arrival of Shawn's father, who insisted they come home.

Sitting in Shawn's bedroom, Gus said, "Tomorrow we'll find the basement and free Mrs. Shockwell."

When they arrived at school the next morning, rescue plan firmly in hand, they were a bit miffed to find Mrs. Shockwell sitting behind her desk as if she had never gone missing at all. Shawn considered the situation, either she had been sick, or he had been right and Mrs. Shockwell had built a time machine in the school basement and had used it to defeat the evil aliens last night.

Either way, Shawn still considered it their first unsolved mystery. They would figure it out some day.