The Homework Machine

by Dan Gutman

  Dad always told me that one of the best forms of defense is to attack, so I did. After I captured his rook, he offered to call it a draw. I could have gone for the win, but I guess I just didn’t have that killer instinct yet. But I had my first draw.

  Dad said I wasn’t just a woodpusher anymore. That’s what you call a weak player, a woodpusher. We started another game.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  There were all kinds of rumors swirling around, and I wasn’t sure how to handle them. You don’t want to punish students based on some silly gossip in the school paper or what somebody wrote in a bathroom stall.

  I was talking about it in the teachers’ lounge, and one of the other teachers suggested I give the class a surprise test. That would tell me how much the students were remembering from their homework. Normally I don’t like the whole idea of giving tests for students this age, but it seemed like a good idea.

  I made up a multiple-choice test that covered just about everything we had studied all year. The solar system. The explorers. Arizona geography. Everything. The children were a little surprised when I sprung it on them, to say the least.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  It was totally unfair, I thought. Miss Rasmussen tells us all year long that she doesn’t believe in tests. Then, bang, out of nowhere, she hits us with this huge test.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  Well, the class did pretty well as a whole. I was pleased about that. Brenton got every question right. No surprise there. Sam and Kelsey failed completely. Their grades were the worst in the class. It was like they had never seen the material before. But they had been turning in excellent homework. That made me very suspicious. They should have done better.

  What was most surprising though, was that Judy got a C. She’s an extremely bright girl who turned in perfect homework every night. There was no reason why she shouldn’t have done better. I had no choice but to believe the rumors about cheating were true. I was preparing to present the evidence to the principal.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I couldn’t believe I got a C. I never got a C before in my life! I was so ashamed. Instead of bringing the test home to show to my parents, I stuffed it in the back of my locker. If anybody asked where it was, I decided I would pretend it was lost.

  As it turned out, I never had to pretend anything. After what happened, I felt silly for even caring about what I got on the test.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  Snik was absent the day we got the test back. I thought maybe he stayed home from school because he knew he failed. But he was absent the next day, too. Then Miss Rasmussen came in after lunch that second day and she was crying. She told us that Snik’s father was killed. I started crying. I know what it’s like to lose your dad.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  I’d rather not talk about what happened to my dad. Is that okay?

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  I was told that Sam’s father was driving an armored vehicle with three other soldiers and it was ambushed in the middle of the night. Sam’s father and the soldier sitting next to him in the front seat were killed. The other two soldiers in the back were severely injured.

  It was a horrible tragedy, the kind you simply can’t prepare for. Sam wasn’t the only child who was upset. Kelsey had lost her father when she was younger, and she was distraught. Counselors were brought in to help us all get over our grief. We made cards. We gave Sam lots of hugs when he came back to school. What else could we do? It’s not like a wound that will heal in time.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Brenton and I were very careful about what we said to Snik after his father was killed. He knew how we felt about the war. We didn’t want to say anything that might be insensitive. It was just so sad. Snik was the only one who didn’t cry. Maybe he got it out of his system at home. We all felt so sorry for him.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I was so angry! We had met Snik’s dad. He came into our class that day and told us what it was like to be a soldier. He was a good guy. Now he was dead. And for what? It wasn’t like World War II, when America had to, like, save the world from Hitler. It was more like Vietnam. It was a war for nothing. And Snik’s dad died for nothing. Just like my dad died for nothing when I was little.

  It was stupid. I couldn’t stop crying. It was like the world stopped turning.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  Dad and I were in the middle of a game when it happened. I just let the pieces sit there on the squares where they were. I’ll never move them, ever. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife. But if there is, someday my dad and I will finish that game.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  It was a difficult time for everyone that first week after we got the news, especially for Sam and his mother.

  Mr. Dawkins’ remains were flown back home a few days later. Just about everyone in the school attended the funeral.

  After what happened, I couldn’t bring myself to go to Principal Wilson with my suspicions of cheating. I just couldn’t do it. It was getting close to the end of the year. For better or worse, I decided to let it slide.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I thought that we wouldn’t use Belch after Snik’s dad died. It would have been rude to go over his house at a time like that. But Snik invited us over. He needed the company, I guess. And we were all addicted to Belch at that point.

  SAM’S MOM

  It was an awful time for us after my husband died, of course. But people were so wonderful, coming around to see if we were okay, cooking us dinners, and so on. Sam’s friends Brenton and Judy and Kelsey came over every day after school and worked on their homework together up in his room.

  One day I walked in without knocking and they all looked at me like I had caught them doing something wrong. But they were just using the computer Brenton had given Sam. I backed out of there and left them alone.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  After the funeral, there were a lot of outsiders around. I don’t just mean tourists. I’m talking about official-looking guys with suits or military uniforms. It was creepy.

  One day I was riding my bike and one of these guys stopped me. He didn’t say anything about Snik’s dad. He started asking me questions about computers. My parents always warned me to be careful around strangers. I yelled at the man and told him to leave me alone or I’d scream. I pedaled away as fast as I could go. Now I was really paranoid. The police or FBI were after us for sure.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  Snik was depressed because of his dad, and who could blame him? Brenton’s head was up in the clouds somewhere, like always. And Judy was a basket case. I was worried about her the most. She claimed some weird guy stopped her on the street, and he was probably an FBI agent. I thought that maybe she was hallucinating. That girl just can’t deal with stress.

  Well, somebody had to take charge. So I called a meeting. Yeah, me. At my house. The four of us. We had a long talk. There were so many things we had to talk about.

  First, I reminded them all that Belch was supposed to make our lives easier. But with all the problems and worrying, it made everything harder. We were spending more time worrying about Belch and trying to keep it a secret than we would have if we just did our stupid homework without the stupid machine.

  I reminded them all that we had a pact to keep our secret, and that one of us must have spilled the beans. Which one was it? I knew it wasn’t me. They all looked at each other for a long time. Judy said it wasn’t her. Snik said it wasn’t him. We all looked at Brenton. He just looked down and said real quietly, “It was me. I’m sorry.”

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  I guess I can admit this now. I was the one who called in the tip to the police hotline, and I leaked the item to the school paper. This is what I told them, and it was the truth. I had given it a lot of thought. It may not have been morally wrong for me to use Belch for my
homework, but it was probably morally wrong for Snik and Kelsey, because they were using it as a crutch.

  It was morally wrong for me to break the agreement we had made. But it would also have been morally wrong for me not to break it and let them continue using Belch. It was a lose-lose situation. In the long run, it would be better for Snik and Kelsey to do their own homework. But I didn’t have the courage to confront them directly. In that regard, I am a coward.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  I couldn’t believe it. How could he do that to us?

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I thought I was going to pass out. My life was over.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I thought Snik and Judy were going to kill him! They were so mad. I told them they were being stupid. What was done was done. Brenton made the machine. He could do anything he wanted with it. It was our own fault. There was nothing we could do about it now. Even if Brenton hadn’t told anyone, somebody would have found out eventually. I threw my arm around him and told him I forgive him.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  We had a lot of angry words, but what was done was done. We had to decide what to do next. Should we turn ourselves in? Run away from home? For the time being, we decided to stop using Belch and hope the whole thing blew over.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I called Judy that night. I had to say something else that had been on my mind for a long time, and it was so obvious it was ridiculous. I told her that she liked Brenton and Brenton liked her. They might as well come out in the open about it.

  Well, she denied it, of course. She said I was crazy. I didn’t care. I knew I was right. I may not know much about math or geography, but I know when two people like each other. Brenton and Judy were going out with each other, and they didn’t even know it.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Well, I told Kelsey she was nuts about me and Brenton. But I will say this. Kelsey really impressed me. I was proud of her taking over like that, and I was glad we had the meeting. It made me feel a little better the next day in school.

  But then Miss Rasmussen handed me a note that said Brenton, Snik, Kelsey, and I were “invited” to a meeting in Principal Wilson’s office the next week. Invited.

  This was it. We were going to be suspended. Kicked out of school. My life was over.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  So Judy says we should just admit everything and tell the truth about Belch. She says that when criminals plead guilty to a crime, they get a lighter punishment than if they claim they’re innocent. I tell her she’s crazy. She’ll never get into law school someday if they ever find out she cheated her way through fifth grade. She’s upset, of course. She says she never wanted to use a machine to do her homework in the first place.

  Then Brenton says it might be possible to destroy any evidence that Belch ever existed. He could erase all our data and wipe the hard drive clean.

  Now that sounded like a good idea to me. We were in agreement. We decided to go into Principal Wilson’s office the next week and deny everything. We’d pretend there was never any such thing as a homework machine.

  Chapter 9

  MAY

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  So the four of us gather at my house that Saturday. We didn’t all have to be there just to erase all the data. I guess we wanted to say good-bye to Belch. After all, it had been an amazing machine, at least before everything went wrong. It deserved a decent good-bye.

  Brenton sits down at the keyboard and starts doing his thing. He says it would only take a few minutes to destroy all the data and erase the hard drive. But five minutes go by and he’s still fooling with it. He has this worried look on his face.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  Something was wrong. I had never locked the files or password protected them, but something was preventing me from deleting them. I tried everything.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  Judy started to panic. She was grabbing Brenton by the shoulders and asking, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” He told her to stop it because he couldn’t concentrate. He kept wiping the sweat off his forehead. The machine wasn’t letting him delete anything.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed the power cord and just yanked the plug out of the wall.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  Judy went nuts and pulled the plug. We all thought that would be the end of it. But nothing happened! Belch was still on the screen and the little red power light didn’t go out. Then she really went nuts.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  Apparently, in the months we had been using the machine, it somehow discovered a way to conserve its energy or run without a traditional source of electricity. That’s how intelligent it was. It had probably discovered some obscure Web site that described an alternative energy source that we couldn’t begin to understand. I was frustrated that I could not seem to turn the thing off, but at the same time I marveled at the power of artificial intelligence. I was proud of it, in a way. It had evolved, with no help from me.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  It was like some weird science-fiction movie where the scientist creates this machine that becomes too powerful and develops a mind of its own and gets out of control and turns evil and tries to take over the world! I told Brenton to stop kidding around and just turn the thing off, but he couldn’t. It was too smart. Judy was out of her mind. We all were.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  The machine was using us instead of us using it. We couldn’t stop it! There was no telling what it might decide to do. Brenton said it might be a good idea for us to go into another room to talk about what to do next. I asked him why, and he said, “Belch might be listening,” That really freaked me out.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  There was no getting around it. We knew what we had to do. We had to destroy Belch. Not deprogram it or erase it or delete some stupid files. We had to destroy the thing, before it destroyed us.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s busting stuff. I have a few baseball bats in the garage. We could have just taken Belch outside and whaled on the thing and busted it up good. But the others said that the police or the FBI or whoever was snooping around asking questions would find all the little pieces all over my yard.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  We talked about all the ways we could destroy Belch. Judy suggested we take it apart piece by piece and then mail each piece to a different country. But we didn’t have time for that. Snik wanted to set it on fire or stuff it full of firecrackers and blow it to smithereens. I said we should just open up the back and pour Cheez Whiz all over the insides. My mom once dropped Cheez Whiz on a calculator by accident and it never worked again.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I just wanted it to go away, forever. They were throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas. We could melt it. Run it over with a bulldozer. Dig a hole in the ground and bury it so deeply, they wouldn’t find it for a hundred years.

  I guess I was the one who suggested we throw it into the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t serious. It was just a dumb idea.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  Judy had a brilliant idea! We didn’t even have to dig a hole. We live right next to the biggest hole in the world! It’s like a mile deep. The Colorado River is at the bottom and it’s almost three hundred miles long. The river would carry Belch away and we’d never see it again. It was foolproof.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Why would I be part of such a crazy plan? I don’t know. Sometimes, when I’m under stress, I don’t think straight. Desperate people do stupid things. I didn’t use good judgment. My brain wasn’t working. Everybody thought it was such a great idea. I got swept up in it.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  It was like chess. We were in Zugzwang. Any move we made would have made our position worse. It seeme
d like our best and only option was to throw Belch into the Grand Canyon.

  The bottom of the canyon is a mile down, but it’s not a steep cliff like one of those Roadrunner cartoons. We couldn’t just drop Belch over the edge and expect it to reach the bottom. It would be necessary to throw it a good distance to clear the rocks and trees. There was only one way to do that.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  The catapult! I thought, what a genius Brenton is! We’d get the catapult he built for school and bring it out to the South Rim of the canyon. We’d load Belch up into it and chuck the thing out of our lives forever.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  We waited until it was dark that night. The moon was full, I remember.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  We snuck into Brenton’s garage and took out his catapult.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  We took the catapult over to Snik’s house and disconnected Belch. The red light never turned off.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  We loaded Belch onto the catapult.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  We wheeled the catapult over to the edge of the South Rim.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  We found an isolated spot where it looked like it would be the shortest distance to the middle of the canyon.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  We made sure nobody was around.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  We all said good-bye. It was like taking an old friend to the airport when they’re moving away and you know you’ll never see them again.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  We did a countdown. Ten … nine… eight … you know.