The Winter of the Robots (18 page)

“What’re those?”

“A kinematic controller from the hobby store and an adaptive panel that allows people with disabilities to drive.”

“Which means …”

“Combined, they mean the robot brain can control the car.”

“Cool.” I watched him for a few minutes, envying his confidence as he went about his work.

“So, this must be the ultimate robot wars, huh?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t you like to see this thing take on Rolf’s egg?”

“Ha,” he said. “That wouldn’t be a fair fight. But yeah, this is a good challenge.”

“A challenge,” I echoed. “Oliver, do you think your father
made
those robots we’re fighting?”

“He definitely did,” he said. “Peter, too. They were both part of the team that built them. I emailed Peter, but he said everything he did at Nomicon is still top-secret.”

“It must feel weird, building a robot to fight your dad’s own robots.”

“It is weird,” he said. He focused on his work, but I could tell his chin was trembling. “You know, it’s more like a mission than a challenge,” he said.

“You don’t think these robots caused the accident?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nomicon did, and these things are what’s left of Nomicon.”

I glanced at the clock on the wall behind Oliver. “Oh, drat. I have to be home ten minutes ago. Anything I can do?”

“Start programming,” he said. “You’re good at it.”

Oliver lent me his laptop so I could work on the program. He had special software to help write and debug the code. I went up to my room, the laptop under my arm, ready to get to work.

“You said you’d do something with me!” Penny wailed. “Sorry, something came up.”

“But I’m bored.” She ran up the stairs after me. “Where did you get the computer?”

“It’s Oliver’s. He lent it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re building a new robot and I’m programming it,” I said without thinking.

“I want to help.”

“No. Sorry. You can’t this time.” Penny was pretty sharp, but there was no way I could let her get mixed up with this. She was only nine.

“Can I at least
watch
?”

“You’re going to watch me work on the computer?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds boring to me, but be my guest.” I opened Oliver’s software and started clicking around, seeing how it worked. Penny’s eyes were like two spotlights on me. I couldn’t concentrate.

“Why don’t you read a book or something?”

“OK.” Penny looked at my books, took one at random. I didn’t notice which one it was.

“This book is dumb,” she decided after reading the back. She started to put it back, but a shiny circle rolled out.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” I shoved the computer aside and tried to get to it first, but she was way too fast.

“It’s a DVD. What’s on it?”

“It’s a horror movie. A guy at school lent it to me. It’s really violent and disgusting.”

“Cool! I want to see!” She took it and ran for the stairs.

Darn it, a few days ago the sci-fi book about the giant
fungus seemed like the safest place in the world to hide something. I put down the computer and went after her.

She already had the TV on and was putting the disc into the player.

“Penny, come on. It’s private.”

“Let me see what it is, or I’m telling Mom and Dad.”

I sighed. “I thought you were done blackmailing people.”

“Just let me see what it is, then. So I won’t have to blackmail you.” The junkyard flickered to life on the screen. “I know where that is,” said Penny. “Did you go back? Are there otters?” She fast-forwarded, seeing the ruins of the building and the car. “This is boring.”

“So stop watching.”

She stopped when she saw the robot. “It’s real,” she said in a whisper. “I knew it! I thought I imagined it.”

I could see the gears turning in Penny’s brain.

“And you’re building a new robot? What is it going to do?” She wasn’t taunting me this time. Her voice was steady and serious. She sounded like Mom in the middle of an interrogation.

“Nothing. Just robot games.”

“Tell me what it’s going to do, or I’m telling Mom—”

“It’s going to paddle little sisters who don’t mind their own business.” I ejected the DVD and headed upstairs. Penny didn’t follow me, and didn’t fight anymore about it, so I should have known she was up to something.

I was bleary-eyed and half asleep on Monday at the bus stop. I’d been up late figuring out robot mechanics and remembered too late that I hadn’t done a scrap of homework.

“Hey,” said Rocky. “How’s
your robot
?”

“OK,” I said. Why did she sound angry?

“You blew me off on Saturday,” she said. “I waited and waited for you to call, then I realized you’d left without me.”

“What?” Dmitri had told me she didn’t want to come. He must have lied to me, to keep her from coming. “I’m sorry, we should have invited you.”

“I want to be a part of this!” she said. “I really like robots, OK? I like making things. I like programming. Plus, I’ve been using power tools since I was ten. I have skills, man. I can do stuff.”

“I know. Seriously.”

“Dmitri says there’s no room at the garage,” she said. “Do you want help with the program?”

I thought about it. I’d been able to work with Penny on the last robot because she was always there, from the beginning, and learned the program along with me. Even then it was like trying to tie a shoe with someone else, each of you taking one lace. My new code was an undocumented mess, full of variables and functions I’d made up on the fly. I wouldn’t know how to divide the job up and share it.

I took too long to answer. Rocky started punching me in the arm. “You too! You boys are all alike.”

“No we’re not. Stop it.” I held a hand out, caught her
fist. I held on to it a moment longer than I needed to. She let me a moment longer than she needed to, then pulled her hand back.

“I’ll find something to do,” she said, “whether you like it or not.”

Dmitri brought Viddy to school on Wednesday. Viddy was similar to the robot we were building, and I could use it to check my code.

“Have you seen Rocky?” he asked me.

“Not since Monday.”

“Hmm. She must be sick.”

“Must be? You haven’t talked to her either?”

He lowered his voice. “She dumped me.”

“Oh.” I forced myself to frown. “That’s too bad.”

“It’s OK. We’re still friends.” I had a feeling it wasn’t OK.

He patted the box with Viddy. “Don’t let this little guy get hurt. I’ve grown attached.”

“Of course,” I told him. “I’ll treat it like my own robot.”

As soon as I got home, I uploaded the program to Viddy’s logic controller. I’d already mapped the inputs to its sensors and outputs to its actuators.

First I tested Viddy on the table, making sure he wouldn’t roll off the edge.

“Awesome!” said Penny, as the car flew back and forth across the table, braking and turning when it reached an edge.

“Proof of concept,” I told her, using one of Oliver’s expressions. I would use the same setup to make sure our giant robot wouldn’t sail off the ledge and crash down on the riverbank. “It’s when you do something just to prove you can do it. Now let’s see if it can bat stuff up.”

“Cool,” she said. “I want to help.”

I fashioned a dipper and boom from parts in Oliver’s box of robot gear and rigged it up on Viddy’s rear end. I tested it on windup toys in the upstairs hallway—it took a few trials and errors, and frantic moments of debugging the code, but soon Viddy could chase down the windup toys and knock them over. The sensors worked together to find things that moved, calibrate their height, even get a basic sense of their shape. I set off a windup frog. It took three hops before the robot zoomed in and knocked it sideways, helplessly kicking its legs.

“Jim, what concept are you trying to prove?” Penny asked.

“Never mind.” I wound up a monkey and set it loose. The robot watched it clack by without making a move.

“It likes monkeys?” asked Penny.

“It looks more like a person,” I explained. “We want the robot to ignore things shaped like people. That’s what I’m testing.”

“Hm. What about the otters?”

“Good point. I’ll have to protect them, too.”

“Aha!” She stabbed an index finger into the air. That’s
when I knew she’d guessed what we were up to, and how I accidentally told her she was right.

Penny and I went to the Nor-Stor-All on Saturday to see the robot. Dmitri had told Sergei we were coming.

“I’m not crazy about this idea,” Sergei told us. “We’re not doing nickel shows.”

“I’m not giving you a nickel,” said Penny. “My price is keeping it a secret.”

“We have five minutes before I go to work,” said Sergei. He opened the storage-locker door.

In front of us was the biggest and most dangerous robot I’d ever seen. The dipper and boom were now mounted on back, the blade installed in front. The car was jacked up on truck-sized tires so the blade fit beneath the grille. The robot looked like a giant crocodile with a crooked tail and a bad overbite.

“Wow.” Penny gave it an awed look.

“It’s amazing,” I said. “What about the ball?”

Sergei explained that he’d need to add some reinforcement to the frame, and use a hydraulic lift to get it up there. He was saving that part for last, since it would be dangerous to work on the car with a quarter-ton ball hanging over it.

Penny crouched in front of the car, patted the hood as if it was the head of a big, friendly dog.

“What a cutie,” she said.

The name stuck.

I worked late into the night on Oliver’s laptop. I was able to wijack Internet access from the coffee shop across the street, and kept my IM open. At about two a.m. a message popped up.

I changed from my hanging-around-the-house sweats into outside clothes, walked carefully down the stairs so I didn’t wake anyone. Rocky was waiting for me, hugging herself and shivering.

“My parents would freak if you came in,” I told her.

“I know. Same here. Let’s just walk.”

“Sure.”

She walked toward Osseo Road. I followed. The intersection that was usually crowded with impatient cars was now deserted, the lights flashing red. We crossed, ignoring the sign with the red slash through a guy walking.

“Dmitri says you two broke up?” I ventured.

“He’s a nice guy, but he thinks girls should stay at home and make cookies.”

“Maybe it’s a Russian thing?” I suggested.

“I don’t care what it is,” she said. “I don’t want to make cookies, and nobody gets to tell me what to do just because I kissed him a couple of times.”

Only a couple of times?

“Besides,” she said, “he lied to me and kept a bunch of secrets and makes excuses for all of it.”

“Is that what you want to talk about?” I asked. Had I become her confidant?

“No, this is more important,” she said. “I found something to do, just like I promised.”

“What?”

“Research. Some of it at the U’s engineering library, and some actual field research. Do you know what kind of business Nomicon did?”

“They made robots and other stuff.”

“They made
war
robots and other
war
stuff,” she said. “I found a story about them in a journal on military engineering. These robots were for recon missions. The idea was to drop them into a combat zone and let them gather up the useful supplies. The robots would protect the cache until somebody came to collect.”

“And it looks like they’re pretty good at it,” I said. “Is the Army using them now?”

“Nomicon made four prototypes, then the project was cut.”

“Why was it cut? Those robots are brilliant.”

“The accident shut down the company,” she said. We passed in front of the elementary school and onto the playground. Oliver and I played here as kids, but all of the equipment was new. Rocky grabbed the cold chain of a swing and sat down. I took the swing next to her, stretching my feet out.