“Oh yes, I can see that. And yes, I do want her help,” I replied.
He took a breath, looked at me for a while, and then looked at the pile of books I’d placed on the table. “Well, I can see you’re taking it seriously. They are mostly good books and you’ll need more. Have you got a team yet? No? Well, I’m sure Lucia will help with that, too. I’m assuming that Lucia put a time limit on you. How much time do you have?”
“Forty-two minutes,” I said.
“And why do you want to enter this competition?” he asked, stroking his beard in a very cliché way.
“Well, initially it was to get out of trouble, and a bit to stop this horrible kid at my school from making my life awful, though, it will probably make things worse.”
“That’s not going to cut it. Not for me or for Lucia. Why else? What is going to be the impact on you if you do this?”
Who are these people and why do they ask these questions? This was my second life-changing job interview within twenty-four hours.
“Well, I guess…”
“Don’t guess,” Dasan snapped.
“Ok, I’ll learn a lot about robots. As you said, I’ll have to work in a team. And I want to beat this other kid, so I will also learn a bit about competition.”
Please be the right thing to say.
I reached deep within myself. “And I want to build something. It was actually pretty amazing to turn on the robot and make it do something. I’d like to do that again.”
A few seconds went by. Then he opened his laptop, typed very, very quickly for about a minute, and then looked up. “Ok, I’ll help you.”
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
“Here is what I suggest you do. Get a takeaway double espresso, extra hot. Go get the J bus that leaves at 3:46 and get off at Hills Park. Then open this piece of paper,” he said as he wrote in his notebook, tore out the page, and folded it twice.
“Can I get a double espresso, takeaway, please?” I yelled toward my non-friend waiter and reached for some money.
“I’ll pay for that,” said Dasan.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, taking the piece of paper and putting it in my pocket. “I appreciate your help.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Just promise me you’ll give this everything you can. And please promise me you won’t ask her to repeat something. Get going,” he said, extending his hand in the international signal for fist bump.
I firmly bumped him back, stood up, and put my backpack on. I picked up my books under one arm, took the cup of coffee, and strode out of the café.
3:42 p.m.
Four minutes to get to the bus station without dropping my books or the coffee. My power-waddling skills were improving dramatically.
I turned the last corner to see the bus door close.
No, come on, I’m this close. Here goes…
I stepped onto the road in front of the bus. The bus driver waved me away.
I put on an expression that said, Oh no you don’t—I’m getting on this bus whether you like it or not.
The bus driver waved me away one more time, then shrugged and opened the door. I struggled up the stairs and fell into the first seat I found, dropping the books but managing to hold the coffee. After paying my bus fare, I regathered my composure while I watched the town go by.
You can do this. You can build a robot and make a real go at this.
4:19 p.m.
The bus pulled up at Hills Park with eleven minutes to go. I hustled off, thanking the bus driver, and put the books and coffee on the ground. I opened the piece of paper.
I scanned the area and saw a sign for Hills Park Road about one hundred meters away. I took off like a hasty penguin. Houses 8, 24, 42, 60, 88, 104, 106, and finally 108.
4:23 p.m.
Seven minutes to go, and I’m going to make it.
A big hedge covered the front of the house, except for a gate across the driveway. An intercom panel was camouflaged in the shrubbery, where I found a note.
Definition: A prime number can be divided evenly only by two numbers: the number 1 and itself.
Another test? Are you kidding me? Ok, ok, ok, I’ve got this. So, 1, 2, 3, not 4 (2x2), and then 5. So, 1235.
I hit the keys and waited. Bleeerrrr sounded the clear signal that said “incorrect.”
What? Why is that wrong? How can it be? No…ahhh. Number 1 is not considered prime by most mathematicians because it is only divisible by one number—1…so confusing. So, it is 2, 3, 5, not 6 (2x3) and 7. So 2357.
4:29 p.m.
I hit the keys at pace and waited…
Clink! Whirrrrrr.
The gate opened inward. I rushed in, down a path and up to the front door, about to knock (it down). Another note.
Surely not another puzzle?
I quickly walked down another path beside the house. I came to a beautiful garden, with flowers, trees, and a pond with a bridge. Seeing nowhere else to go, I raced over the bridge. It took me between two trees which opened up into a sun-filled clearing. In the middle, on a wooden bench seat, sat Lucia, reading a huge book.
I skidded to a halt in front of her. “Found you!” I said, like we were playing hide and seek.
Lucia looked at her watch, placed a bookmark in her book, and looked me up and down.
“Is that a double espresso?” she asked, almost smiling.
T-Minus Sixteen
Lucia sipped her coffee, legs crossed at the knee, floral skirt almost touching the ground. She tapped her free hand on her knee.
What do I do now?
A full minute went by.
“So, can you help me?” I asked.
Lucia picked up a red notebook beside her and wrote while she narrated:
More patience and comfort with silence.
What? More comfort with silence? What’s that supposed to mean? And more patience? It’s been a minute at least, maybe five, how long do I have to be patient for? I should ask her. Actually, that’s not a very patient thing to do.
With great effort, I closed my mouth and tried very hard to wait.
More notes were added into the red book:
Learns quickly.
“Oh, thanks, that’s great,” I beamed.
Before I’d even finished the sentence, Lucia struck a line through the last note with a brutal fffwweeck of her pencil:
Learns quickly.
I held in a heavy sigh. I won the battle, but only just.
“Ok. Here we are. I’m glad you found me. This is going to be an interesting challenge and I haven’t had one of those for a while. For clarity, you are going to be the biggest part of that challenge. If I solve you, the rest will be easy. But you will challenge me. Oh yes you will,” Lucia said. Her voice was like a marching band. It had a friendly beat but hurried you along.
“Um, ok, thank you, I guess,” I responded.
“The time for guessing has passed. We must act. Yes?”
“Um, yes, I gue…sorry. Yes,” I finished with a bit more certainty.
“Let’s walk,” Lucia said, finishing her coffee and striding down the path.
I left my books on the bench and hurried to catch up to the sprightly woman.
“Why are we here, AZ?” Lucia asked.
“Here? In your garden?”
“No, why are you and I here together? Why is this thing happening? This competition?”
“Well, the short version is that I beat this guy named Dalk solving a puzzle at school and he didn’t like it. So, his dad yelled at Principal Tajek and I said I’ll enter the robot competition. My first test robot dropped a piece of cake on your head, and then you turned up at my school offering to help, then I tracked you down and here we are.”
Without slowing down, Lucia added to her red notebook:
Better storytelling.
“Yes, but why? Why did you beat him? Why did you choose the robot competition as the way to pacify the situation?”
“Well, I beat him because he insulted me, and I chose the competition because it seemed the easiest way out.”
“No, wrong on both counts. He’d insulted you before, surely, and entering a robot competition is not easy at all. Try again.”
“Well…”
“Enough with all these ‘well’s and ‘so’s, just say what you want to say,” Lucia said, not looking at me.
“W—” I took a sharp intake of breath and, with my chin up, said, “I was sick of it. Sick of him saying he is so smart and winning all the time.”
“Especially when…”
“When what? I don’t know what you want me to say,”
“I think you do. We can’t proceed until you say it,” Lucia said, “He insulted you. He thinks no one is as smart as him. He always wins. And out of all the students in the class, it made you angry enough to act. You were the only one who did. What made you so angry? What made you do something when for years you had done nothing but sit back and take it?”
Why is she doing this?
“I was just angry, so I tried…”
“No. That’s not it. You know why. You were the only one who did something, why?” Lucia walked faster now, her words as crisp as the air.
I stopped, hit my clenched fists against my thighs and yelled, “Because I’m smarter than him!” My breath came in gasps, sounding loud amongst the quiet trees.
Lucia walked toward me, crouched down, and looked up into my watery eyes with a wicked smile. “Yes. Yes, you are.”
T-Minus Fifteen
The next Saturday morning I was at a nearby sports field, watching a girl warm up for soccer. Her name was 10, which was also the number on her jersey. I don’t think 10 was the name written on her birth certificate, but it was what she wanted the world to know her by. It was pronounced “ten,” written as 10, and never, ever referred to as a nickname. Her teammates and the other team had arrived—the game was about to start.
“We’ve got this. This game is ours,” 10 said to her teammates, as the referee blew her whistle.
I sat nearby under some trees and watched 10 play. She was really good. Tough, but her team definitely respected her.
When the game finished, I waited as 10 sat on the sideline in the shade, chatting with her team.
Lucia had said I need a team. I can’t do it all on my own. 10 had come second to Dalk three years in a row and was my obvious first choice.
From reading her fairly extensive blog, I learned that soccer was her preferred sport and her only form of meditation. In one post, she wrote: “When I lace up my boots, I enter another world. The grass, the lines, the goal posts, the nets, and the big open space. The wonderful empty.”
The rest of the team finally went home and 10 sat alone, looking up at the sky.
“Did you win?” I asked, approaching the shade of the tree.
10 looked up at me.
“I wondered if you would come and talk to me,” 10 said, shading her eyes from the sun. “I assumed you would make a minimal effort, take the inevitable and painful boasting from Dalk for the rest of your school life, and then move away as far away as possible. But you’re here talking to me. You’re actually taking it seriously.”
“Um, yes. Yes, I am.”
“Great. Best of luck to you,” 10 said.
“But I can’t do it alone. I’d like you to join my team. Together I think we could win.”
She laughed a bit and then stared at me for ten seconds.
“I’d like to join your team,” 10 finally said, with a firm nod of her head.
“That’s great, I really think that we—” I said as 10 raised a flat hand to stop me.
“I’d like to…” 10 continued, “but I won’t. For two main reasons. One, because I really don’t care. And two, technically, you can’t beat him. You just can’t. He has money. Resources. Support. It’s not Dalk that wins that competition, it’s Jax Enterprises—one of the world’s leading robotics companies. I didn’t just come second. I came a way, way, way, nearly there, way, way, way back second. Ok, technically, three reasons. Three, I am not going to be humiliated again. I’m not even entering this year. What’s the point?”
10 got up, shoved her things in her bag, and turned to leave.
“We can beat him,” I said.
“You can’t,” 10 replied over her shoulder.
“We can,” I repeated.
“There is no ‘we.’ ”
T-Minus Fourteen
The Private Blog of 10
I just got back from soccer. As I guessed, AZ came and asked me to help her build a robot. I said no.
Two hours and one short shower later, I was in my lab. The screen showed what looked like multicolored, oddly formatted gibberish on a black background. I knew what it meant and so did my computer. It was code. A program for my robot.
My headphones found their home over my ears and my world filled with jazz music. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and started coding. Less than five minutes in, I was rudely interrupted by my own thoughts.
Don’t even think about it. There’s no way it makes a difference to work with AZ. Ok, maybe a tiny difference, but not enough. Forget about it. Back to coding.
She seems pretty determined. I wonder why? It’d be so good to wipe even just a bit of that smirk off Dalk’s face…
I watched the video of last year’s robot competition. I thought I had him. But he had me. Completely had me. I paused the video with the smile on his face and a look of shock on my face. I gave it everything. I lost.
A ping pulled me out from my sorrow, and I opened my messages. It was AZ. She had gotten my number from a girl in our class.
AZ: I can’t do this without you.
10: He’s beaten me three years in a row. Technically smashed me.
AZ: Yes, he’s beaten you three times. But if you quit now, he wins forever.
10: You saw last year’s final. It was my best and it was way short.
AZ: It wasn’t your best. You know Moore’s Law?
10: Yes. Computing power doubles every 2.5 years. So what?
AZ: Think about it, every year, your robot-building ability doubles too. Remember two years ago?
10: Maybe… IDK.
AZ: You double. Trust me. What if you had resources like Dalk?
10: Sure, that would be great. You plan on winning the lottery? You know that gambling is technically a tax on people who are bad at math?
AZ: You said there is no “we” but there is a “we.” There’s already a team. Mrs. D’Silva has been really supportive from the start and now Lucia Machado is helping me.
10: The crazy loner who lives in the hills? Great. Now our problems are solved.
AZ: When you’ve got money, you’re eccentric, not crazy.
AZ sends me a link to Lucia Machado’s Wikipedia page.
10: Wow. She’s done some stuff.
AZ: Yes, she’s done some stuff and she’s offered to help me, but she says I need a team. A good team…
AZ: We need you.
10: …
AZ: …
10: …Even if we had support, why would I go through all the work just to probably lose again?
AZ: I can’t answer that, but I’ll tell you why I’m doing it. Every year for as long as I can remember, I’ve seen guys like Dalk win these competitions with a smile on their face like they’re entitled to it; it’s as if they’re just breezing through life. I’m smart, I work hard, but I’ve never even tried to go up against them. But I’m doing it now because I want to know, if I work in a great team, and give it all I’ve got, that I can be just as good. Maybe I can even do something amazing. We can do it together.
10: …<
br />
AZ: They say you regret the things you don’t do much more than the things you do. I don’t want to be a grumpy seventy-year-old saying that maybe I could have done something awesome if I had just tried and not given up.
Five minutes go by.
10: …
AZ: …You still there?
10: Yes, I’m still here. I’m just thinking.
AZ: Ok, just checking… :)
10: Here are my conditions.
AZ: YES!
AZ: YES!
AZ: YES!
10: Calm down, I haven’t said yes yet. You need to hear my conditions first.
AZ: Anything, I’ll do it.
10: Condition one.
AZ: I love it! It’s fine, I’m in.
10: AZ, really?
AZ: Sorry, go ahead.
10: Ok, now I need a new condition one, which is you need to exercise a bit more restraint with your enthusiasm. Just a healthy amount, ok?
AZ: Affirmative.
10: Condition two: We are a team till we agree the team is over.
AZ: Done. Of course.
10: Condition three: We do good. Our work helps, not hurts. We don’t make an evil robot Skynet-style or add features like drone missiles.
AZ: We’re just making one normal robot! But yes, of course, never. No Skynet. No drone missiles. No robotic Jar Jar Binks, either, just saying.
10: Agreed. No Jar Jar. Let’s make that condition four.
AZ: Yep, that’s good.
10: So, what do we do first?
AZ: We get to work!
Day One of Working with AZ
AZ and I get to work. We work in my lab after school during the week and most of the weekend. We have 22.8 weeks until the competition. Her mother and dad came to visit us and check out our workspace. Her mother knew her stuff about the equipment but spent most of the time on her phone. Her dad just asked about safety. They seemed happy enough to let AZ work here with me.
After they left, we addressed some big questions from AZ:
“So why have you lost for three years in a row?” AZ asked, reading off of a notebook.
She's Building a Robot Page 3
