Robots Go Wild!

by James Patterson

  Good. She’s not giving up.

  Not just yet, anyway.

  Later, Maddie and I are hanging out in her room, pretending to be doing our homework. Mostly, we’re thinking about E. And Mom.

  And Maddie being stuck in her room forever, with no eyes or ears out in the real world.

  Yes, for maybe the first time ever, even Maddie is worried.

  When all their chores are done, some of the robots roll into Maddie’s room to wait and worry with us.

  All of a sudden, E strides into the room looking as good as new!

  “Are you okay?” asks Maddie.

  “Never better. Dr. Elizabeth Hayes, the finest robotics engineer in all the land, adjusted my voltage regulator, my photoelectric sensors, and my inverting encoder. She also removed a metal object that was crossing circuits in my motherboard. I feel fantastic. Fit as a fiddle, bright as a button, fresh as a daisy, and good as new.”

  “We’ve been studying similes in Ms. Tracey’s class,” explains Maddie.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, old bean,” says Geoffrey, the butler-bot, “why were you madder than a monkey on a motor scooter this morning?”

  “My malfunction,” says E, “was caused, we think, by a paper clip flicked into my ear canal. We believe its metal made contact with my internal wiring, thereby shorting out my functionality grid.”

  “Penelope Pettigrew!” I say. “I saw her flinging paper clips at your head.”

  “We have no evidence that Miss Pettigrew was the perpetrator,” says E. “I am simply grateful to once again be fully functional. I hope to be heading back to school first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Yippee!” says Maddie.

  Yes, she’s that excited.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “What if whoever did this tries to chuck some other tiny chunk of metal into your head holes? A staple, maybe. Or a bobby pin.”

  “Not to worry, Sammy. Mom just installed a thin but impenetrable plastic mesh over my ear openings. My hearing will not be impaired, just the ability of foreign objects to enter my cranial cavity.”

  “Um, is your cranial cavity the same thing as your head?”

  “Indeed so, Sammy.”

  “So you’ll be fine going back to school for Maddie?”

  E nods. Maddie beams.

  “All the necessary attitude adjustments have been made,” says E. “Mom has certified me as good to go. What happened at school today won’t happen again.”

  If the school lets E come back, I think.

  And that’s a big if.

  The next morning, in the principal’s office, Mom makes an impassioned plea to Mrs. Reyes for E to be allowed back in the third-grade classroom.

  Dad and I are there to cheer her and E on.

  “This isn’t just about my daughter,” Mom tells Mrs. Reyes. “If we can prove that robots like E can safely function in a schoolroom setting…”

  “Like SS-10K is doing, you mean,” says Mrs. Reyes.

  O-kay. That made Mom wince a little. But she keeps plugging.

  “I’m glad Dr. Ingalls and his team at IRAT are also exploring the field of robotic stand-ins for homebound students,” she says. “The more colleges and technical schools working on this idea, the better.”

  “But Lizzie had the idea first,” says Dad, who came along for the meeting because, as he put it, “I didn’t have anything else to do today.”

  Yes, he’s been kind of pouty (and unshaven) ever since his publisher canceled his book contract.

  “E’s problems are solved,” Mom assures Principal Reyes. “He can function just as safely and maybe even more effectively than the Substitute Student Ten Thousand.”

  “As long as nobody pokes him in the ear with a paper clip,” says Dad.

  Mom shoots him a look. It’s the same look I get when I’m goofing around in church.

  Dad holds up both hands like he surrenders. I notice that his hands aren’t stained with ink like they usually are.

  Wow. He really is throwing in the towel.

  “Somebody jabbed E with a paper clip?” asks Principal Reyes.

  Mom nods. “I found a bent piece of thin metal lodged inside E’s cranial cavity.”

  “That’s his head,” I say, just to be helpful.

  “Once the foreign object was removed, I gave E’s operating system a total reboot. Long story short, he is ready to go back to work. For Maddie.”

  “And for all humanity,” adds E. “Rest assured, Principal Reyes, my problems have been solved so that Maddie might solve more math problems. She particularly enjoys word problems, especially the ones about two trains leaving different cities at different times.”

  “You make a strong case,” says Mrs. Reyes. “But I have to be honest, guys. I’m still not sure. What’s that old saying? ‘Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.’”

  “A quote by George Bernard Shaw,” says E, probably just to show Mrs. Reyes that he’s operating on all cylinders. “Mr. Shaw, however, was an Irish playwright, not a scientist.”

  Oh yeah. E’s supersmart when he’s not nutty.

  “Point taken,” says Mrs. Reyes. “But…”

  E’s eyeballs flicker.

  “Please, Mrs. Reyes?”

  It’s Maddie. Speaking through E.

  “We promise to be good,” she says. “Going to school means so much to me.”

  Her voice is choked with emotion.

  E’s big, blue eyeballs are getting kind of watery, too.

  There isn’t a dry eye in the principal’s office.

  E is given one more chance.

  If you ask me, Mom did an absolutely awesome job fixing E.

  School goes great. E is better than good. In fact, he’s fantastic.

  From what Maddie tells me when I check back in with her at lunchtime, things couldn’t be going better.

  “Everything’s wonderful,” she tells me.

  There are no loudspeaker announcements calling me down to the third-grade classroom.

  No snide comments from Creekside Robotics Club president Jacob Gorski.

  Even Eddie Ingalls leaves me alone.

  As soon as school is done for the day, Maddie switches E to internal control mode so he can be my bro-bot on the bike ride home.

  “See you guys later,” Maddie says before signing off. “And, Sammy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I LOOOOOOOVE going to school! Maddie out.”

  E’s eyeballs do their blue flicker dance.

  “Good to be back on the job matriculating,” he says.

  “Good to have you here,” I say.

  SS-10K is also proud to see E back on the job, doing his duty as Maddie’s substitute student. He strides across the parking lot with a hearty, arm-chugging ZHURR, ZHURR, ZHURR as E and I mount our bikes.

  The big bot even shakes E’s hand. “You have made me proud to be a substitute student like you, only incredibly better. Given your severely limited operating system and your inferior circuitry, you did quite well this day. Keep up the good work, Eggbeater. Remember: We are here to serve humans. Now, if you will excuse me, Freddy and I have homework to do.”

  E and I watch SS-10K march away—arms swinging, knees pumping.

  “I don’t like that bot,” I say. “He’s a big, fat phony.”

  “Of course he is, Sammy. He is a robot. By definition, his intelligence is artificial and, therefore, not real, or, as you call it, phony.”

  “Fine. But, for whatever reason, the big bucket of bolts just makes me angry.”

  “If I might be permitted to quote Buddha…”

  “Sure. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

  “‘Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.’”

  “Maybe. But Buddha never had to go to school with Penelope Pettigrew, Eddie Ingalls, or SS-10K.”

  The next morning, our house is buzzing along like usual.

  As Maddie m
ight say, it’s another “grand and glorious” school day.

  Downstairs, Dingaling, the doorbell-bot out on our front porch, starts swinging his hand bell.

  “Someone’s at the door,” I say, slurping down my cereal.

  “I wonder who it is.” Maddie slurps back. “It’s awfully early.”

  Dingaling rings again. Louder. He’s very annoying that way.

  “Sammy?” Dad hollers up the stairs, sounding kind of crabby. “Can you please go see who the heck that is? I’m trying to think up a new idea for a graphic novel, and all I can come up with right now is a story about a church bell battling the Liberty Bell and they both get headaches!”

  “No problem, Dad,” I shout, quickly spooning one more clump of cereal into my mouth.

  E places a firm hand on my shoulder. “Finish your breakfast, Sammy. It’s the most important meal of the day. Students who skip breakfast do not do as well at school as those who eat it. I will go deal with whoever is at the door.”

  “Thanks,” I say, my mouth full of soggy, mushy food.

  E troops downstairs. When Maddie and I are finally done slurping and “nom, nom, nomming,” she says, “I’m so glad I still get to go to school.”

  “Me too.”

  “The whole third grade is going to start working on science project ideas today!”

  “Cool.”

  “I might show how a compass works with chopsticks, a glass, a magnet, some string, tape, and graph paper.”

  “I’d be happy to help you with that,” says E as he motors back into Maddie’s bedroom.

  He’s covered with word magnets. Those tiny ones that come in a kit so you can make refrigerator poetry.

  I check out E’s butt.

  The magnetic phrase back there is “I mustache you to kick me.”

  “Um, E?” I ask. “Who was at the door?”

  “Penelope Pettigrew, the girl who sits behind me in Ms. Tracey’s class. She said she wanted Maddie, that is, me, to look ‘prettier’ today and kindly volunteered to decorate my torso with what she called temporary word tattoos.”

  I start peeling the rubbery magnets off E’s metallic skin.

  “She’s making fun of you,” I say.

  “And me,” adds Maddie.

  “Really?” says E, who, I sometimes forget, still needs help being an eight-year-old kid. “But I think these magnetic decorations might make us more socially acceptable at school.”

  “No,” I say. “They’ll only make people laugh at you.”

  “Why would Penelope want people laughing at me?” asks E innocently.

  “Because she is studying to be a Mean Girl by the time she gets to middle school,” says Maddie.

  “I apologize,” says E, dropping his head. “I did not fully understand her motives.”

  “Wait here,” I say, because E looks so sad.

  I dash down the hall to pull something off a metal cabinet I have in my bedroom. I bring it back to E and slap it on his shoulder.

  “Now, that’s a temporary tattoo you can wear with pride!”

  It’s my Notre Dame Fighting Irish magnet.

  “I am honored to wear this magnet, Sammy,” E says proudly. “I went to the University of Notre Dame. I remember meeting a very attractive vending machine. Her GPS coordinates will forever remain in my memory.”

  It’s true. E went to ND once with Mom. It was, basically, a college-level show-and-tell session.

  The alarm in my smartphone starts chirping. It’s eight AM. School starts in twenty minutes.

  “We’d better go,” I say, grabbing my backpack.

  “And, E?” says Maddie.

  “Yes?”

  “Try to avoid Penelope Pettigrew today.”

  E actually grins. “Of course. I will make that my secondary primary objective.”

  Trip meets us at the corner, and the three of us bike off to school.

  It’s a perfect fall morning.

  I tell Trip how Penelope Pettigrew dropped by the house to plaster E with magnetic graffiti.

  “Why is that girl so nasty?” he asks as we pedal down the block.

  “I think she’s kind of jealous,” I say. “She might’ve been the star of Ms. Tracey’s class until Maddie and E showed up.”

  “Well, you need to keep far away from her,” Trip tells E. “Don’t let her sit too close. If you want, I can loan you an old peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich that I forgot I had in the bottom of my lunch bag. It’s kind of moldy. Rotten banana stench is a smell that usually scares people away.”

  “Thank you, Trip,” says E. “B-b-but I don’t think I w-w-want to smell b-b-bad.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Fine and dandy, like cotton candy. Look good, feel better. I’m super-duper A-OK.”

  E sounds like a rolling computer glitch. I’m wondering if all those magnets Penelope slapped on his skin warped something inside his microchips, the same way magnets can damage cell phones.

  “You sure you don’t want a sandwich, E?” says Trip. “If you unwrap it and put it on your desk, I’ll bet Penelope Pettigrew won’t want to sit in the row right behind you anymore…”

  All of a sudden, E starts singing.

  “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…”

  He sounds like a bad episode of Sesame Street.

  “E?” I say. “We need to take you home. Right now. Penelope Pettigrew magnetically scrambled your brain!”

  “I’m serious, E. If you goof up at school again…”

  “Hasta la vista, Señor Rodriguez!”

  E turbo-pumps his bicycle and blasts off.

  We’re near the same pet store in the same strip mall we pass every morning, but this morning, we don’t actually pass it. E veers off course and zips into the parking lot.

  He hops off his bike and tears into the shop.

  “Jailbreak!” he screams.

  With the help of the shopkeeper, Trip and I are able to corral most of the critters and put them back in their cages.

  But while we were doing that, E slipped out of the pet shop.

  Trip and I race outside.

  “How do you like your eggs, Sammy?”

  I whip around.

  It’s E.

  He comes out of the convenience store next door to the pet shop with maybe three dozen eggs, some plastic-wrapped snacks tucked under his arm, and a sixteen-pack of toilet paper.

  “How about scrambled?” shouts E. “Just like my brain!”

  He holds up an egg, aims right for us… and then fires!

  E actually starts egging Trip and me!

  “This is the real reason they call me Egghead!”

  While he’s pelting us, E also starts laughing like a mechatronic maniac.

  Trip and I duck and cover while shouting at E to stop. We have egg yolks splattered all over our school clothes and gooey egg whites dripping from our hair.

  E tosses rolls of toilet paper up into the trees and sends them streaming through any open car windows he can find in the parking lot. While he’s TPing the strip mall, I notice that his eyes go from blue to purple to red.

  Something is seriously wrong.

  “E?” I call out, dodging the next egg flung my way. “Let me power you down. We’ll take you home.”

  “You can even ride my bike if you want to,” offers Trip.

  E beans him in the butt with another egg.

  “Fine,” says Trip. “Be that way!”

  “Look, E,” I say. “I’ll call Mom at Notre Dame. She’ll drop everything and—”

  E drops everything. Eggs. Toilet paper. Some kind of spongy, pink snowball cupcakes that bounce across the asphalt.

  “I am not going home!” E declares, tearing my Notre Dame magnet off his shoulder. “I am going back to college. I want to see that vending machine again! I have her coordinates!” His eyes blink and whirl. “Recalculating route.” He sounds like the GPS in Mom’s minivan. “When possible, I will take the next illegal U-turn and go to Indiana
’s world-famous Studebaker Museum.”

  “What?” I shout. “Why do you want to go there?”

  “It’s on the way to Notre Dame.”

  I actually think letting E go to Notre Dame might be a good idea. Maybe Mom and a bunch of her graduate students can, I don’t know, catch him in a big butterfly net or something and then drag him into their robotics lab for a major overhaul.

  But the Studebaker Museum is full of automobiles, wagons, and buggies built by the old Studebaker car company. They have lots of shiny antiques on display for E to dent, ding, and destroy.

  “Just go straight to Notre Dame,” I say as E tramps toward his bike. “Please, E? Mom will do that warm and fuzzy soldering-iron thing inside your head that you like.”

  “No. I want to take the scenic route.”

  “Why? Let’s just go see Mom.” I’m practically begging.

  “Today, I will play like a champion.”

  Great. E’s repeating the Notre Dame football team’s battle cry. It’s what the players all say right before they race onto the field to clobber somebody.

  This isn’t going to be good.

  You ever have a nightmare first thing in the morning and get stuck with it replaying in your mind all day?

  Welcome to my world.

  E goes on a rampage. On his way to Notre Dame, he tears all over South Bend, leaving behind a trail of destruction, chaos, crushed ice-cream cones, melted chocolate, crying babies, barking dogs, and very scared cats.

  Trip and I always get to E’s targets five minutes after he’s already been there and caused major damage.

  “We’re closed!” says the zookeeper at the Potawatomi Zoo when we bike up to the entrance. “And we won’t reopen until the black-tailed prairie dogs quit chasing after the Jamaican fruit bats!”

  “Sir,” I say, showing the zookeeper a selfie of E and me on my smartphone, “have you seen this robot?”

  The zookeeper trembles. “That’s him. That’s the motorized monster who created all this chaos. That thing’s an electromechanical master of disaster!”