by R. McGeddon
He pressed the button. There was a loud creak. Sam watched the view of the outside world get narrower and narrower as the doors slowly swung closed with a clang. A sudden buzzing sound filled the air. At first, Sam thought a load of evil wasps was swooping into attack, but then everyone’s hair stood on end and a flickering blue glow appeared to coat the inside of the dome.
“Electrified shielding,” Brute announced. “Anything tries to get in, it gets toasted.”
Sam raised a hand. “How come it’s on the inside?”
Brute ignored him. “Thank you for your time,” he said. He waved a hand, gesturing to the dozens of black-suited troops who were suddenly surrounding the audience. “Any questions, my associates will be able to help you out.”
“Um … associates?” said Mr. Saunders. “We didn’t discuss any … associates.”
Brute snapped his head around and fixed Mr. Saunders with the bulgiest of his two bulgy eyes. “You want to be safe or don’t you?”
Mr. Saunders nodded. “Yes, please.”
“Thought so,” said Brute. “And for that, I need my associates.”
With a final eyeball-stretching glare, he turned and marched off, leaving Mr. Saunders to send everyone home.
As Sam and his friends trudged along through the crowd, they listened to the excited chattering of the adults. They all seemed to like the idea of being sealed inside an electrified dome. It was better than being eaten by zombies, zapped by aliens, or brainwashed by an evil genius, they agreed.
Sam wasn’t so sure, though. In fact, his trusty hero instincts were screaming like a seagull on a windy day. And I live in a lighthouse, so I know how loud those bad boys are. It was too quiet now that the dome was closed over and there wasn’t a breath of wind. It was like being inside a snow globe without the snow and the flying Santa and round-bellied reindeer.
After wandering for a while, they found themselves at Hetchley’s Park. Since Sam happened to take his baseball gear with him everywhere he went, he thought he might as well practice for the big game. It was Sitting Duck Hurlers against Silver Spoon Teeth Breakers—the grudge match.
The only problem was, Arty wasn’t very good at pitching. The only other problem was, Emmie couldn’t be bothered getting involved, preferring to sit on the grass imagining what it would’ve been like had she actually managed to cover Phoebe in spiders and launch her into the sun.
Arty drew back his arm. He tossed the ball with all his might.
It landed halfway between him and Sam, who stood with his bat in his hands and a look of disappointment on his face.
“Sorry, I’m just not very good at throwing,” said Arty, in what was possibly the most obvious statement anyone had ever made ever.
“Have no fear, CHARLES is here,” announced CHARLES.
CHARLES’s cleaning attachments folded away and were instead replaced by a large plastic tube and a pitcher’s glove.
“Play ball!” CHARLES announced, and then a baseball exploded from the tube like a cannonball. It streaked through the air, and Sam cheered with delight as he swung and connected.
The ball rocketed up … up … up … into the air.…
… And was instantly destroyed by several rounds of laser fire from the automated security systems.
A small pile of ash rained down on Sam’s head. “Oh, well,” he sighed. “So much for baseball.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Early the next morning (like waaay early—we’re talking 6 AM here), Sam was woken by the sound of something hitting his window.
Still half-asleep, he rolled out of bed in a tangle of covers and squirmed to the window like a huge caterpillar. Wrestling himself free, he opened his window just in time for a small pebble to hit him on the forehead.
“Ow!” He winced.
“Sorry!” called a voice from below. Sam squinted down at his garden and saw Emmie peering back up at him. Attila sat beside her, a leash around his neck. “Come down, I want to show you something,” Emmie whispered.
“Is it a cat on a leash?” Sam mumbled. “Because if it is, I can see that.”
“No, it’s not that,” said Emmie. “Just get dressed and come down. Hurry!”
A couple of minutes later, Sam quietly slipped out his front door and joined Emmie outside his garden. He’d brought his backpack full of baseball stuff with him, just in case an opportunity arose to get some practice in before the game. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—Sam is a big fan of sports, and he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a mysterious 6 AM wake-up call by a girl with a cat on a leash get in the way of it.
“What’s going on?” he asked her. “How come you’re up and about so early?”
“Aunt Doris has started making me walk the cat,” Emmie explained. She glared down at Attila, who scowled back at her. “He hates it even more than I do, which is the only reason I agree to it.”
“That sounds normal,” said Sam, because he still hadn’t woken up properly and wasn’t really sure what else to say.
“I was on my way back home when I saw one of those security men skulking around the place,” Emmie said. “So I decided to follow him.”
Sam’s amazing hero instincts buzzed, waking him all the way up in one quick blast. “Was he up to no good?” he asked.
Emmie nodded. “I think so. I’ve already called Arty. He’s going to meet us at the Town Hall.”
“Why? What are they up to?” Sam asked.
“I think,” said Emmie, tugging on Attila’s leash, “you need to see for yourself.”
* * *
One quick trek across town later, Sam, Emmie, Arty, and Attila were tucked behind some trash cans at the back of the Town Hall, doing their best to stay out of sight. It wasn’t particularly easy, as Arty had decided to bring CHARLES along with him, and the bulky robot stood out like, well, a bulky robot.
“In there,” Emmie mouthed, gesturing to a window a little way along the wall. Sam and Arty raised their heads over the trash can lids just enough to see what was happening in the Town Hall.
Earl Brute was there, pacing up and down in front of a squadron of black-clad soldiers. The window was open just a crack, and they were able to make out every word Brute was saying. None of it was particularly encouraging.
“The fools in Sitting Duck think they’re safe, but we know different, don’t we?” Brute barked. “The only way to protect them is to dominate them!”
“That’s a bit worrying,” Sam whispered.
Arty gulped nervously. “M-maybe not,” he said. “It might be nothing. We might just be getting the wrong impression.”
“You are to be my army—my unstoppable army! Of ultimate power!” Brute continued. “And we shall protect them with might! And force! All the time!”
Arty winced. “That’s still not proof, though. Maybe he thinks ‘force’ means something different.”
“And by ‘force,’” Brute continued, “I mean threatening them with acts of badness to make them do whatever we want. Ahem, for their own good, of course … or they’ll face the laser blaster!”
Arty puffed out his cheeks and finally recognized what I’d known for a long time. “Okay. This is bad.”
“What do we do?” Emmie whispered, quietly wrestling with Attila, who was trying to pass the time by clawing Emmie’s face off.
“We can’t go and get help,” said Sam. “We can’t get past the dome.”
“And the adults in town are no use,” said Emmie. “They did nothing when Sitting Duck was under threat before.”
“Then it’s up to us,” said Sam, like the true champion of good that he is. “But first we need to think of a plan. The last thing we want to do is get caught unprepared.”
Attila, being a proper wrong ’un, chose exactly that moment to let out a high-pitched screech. It wasn’t a typical noise for a cat. It was the sort of noise someone might make if they found half a worm inside an apple they were eating, while simultaneously getting their fingers trapped
in a car door. Sort of waeeerrruuaaoonooooomf, if you can imagine such a thing.
Anyway, Attila made that noise.
Frantically, Emmie tried to cover the cat’s mouth, but Attila snapped at her with his pin-like teeth. “Shh! Be quiet!” Emmie hissed. “You’re going to get us caught.”
“T-too late!” Arty gulped. He pointed to the window, where Earl Brute was glaring at them through the glass. “We’ve been spotted!”
* * *
How to Silence a Troublesome Pet
Is your family pet about to get you into a lot of trouble by making a weird noise? Here are some good and bad ways to ensure it doesn’t give you away.
Good
• Distract it with food.
• Distract it with affection.
• Distract it with pretty much anything else.
• Ask it nicely.
• Use your previously dormant psychic animal-control powers to will it into silence.
Bad
• Freeze it with a freeze-ray gun.
• Distract it by screaming uncontrollably for several minutes while banging on a drum.
• Shout “Shut up, shut up, shut uuuuup!” in an increasingly high-pitched voice.
• Launch it into outer space.
• Bark at it through a loudspeaker.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX
They were all so fixated on Earl Brute in the window that they didn’t notice one of his soldiers sneaking up behind them like a sneaky sneak. Arty let out a high-pitched scream as the man grabbed him by the back of the neck and yanked him to his feet.
“What you up to?” the man growled, but before anyone could answer, CHARLES spun into life.
“Danger! Danger, Arty Dorkins!” CHARLES cried. He flicked out his whisk attachment and brrrrrrred it at the soldier, giving the end of his nose a thoroughly good whisking.
“My face! My beautiful face!” the soldier hollered, stumbling backward. Sam and Emmie both shoved him at the same time, sending him toppling over the trash cans.
“Come on, let’s get out of here!” Sam cried. He and Emmie both grabbed one of Arty’s arms and dragged him away from the Town Hall. Attila hissed and snarled as he was pulled through the air on the end of the leash, while CHARLES rolled ahead, his whisk raised and ready for battle.
They turned a corner, headed for the shortcut that would take them back to Emmie’s house, and then stopped when they saw the dome cutting off the street ahead of them.
“Dead end,” Sam wheezed, but CHARLES had other ideas. He zoomed up to the dome, his whisk attachment now replaced by a series of small suction cups.
“What are you doing, CHARLES?” asked Arty through heaving gulps of air. “Don’t climb that, it’s—”
BZZZZZT!
The moment CHARLES touched the dome, a massive jolt of electricity zapped through him. All of the LED lights on his face lit up, making him look happy, angry, and sad all at the same time. His hair stood on end (or it would have, if he’d had any) and every one of his attachments unfolded at once, making him look like a metallic hedgehog.
As soon as the zapping started, CHARLES shot back from the wall, his head and body spinning in different directions. Smoke drifted off his torso and sparks spat from his head, which is never a good thing for a robot (or for anything else, really).
“Clangy-twing!” CHARLES cried. “Ramble-bloop-aboing-fzzzt!”
“Is he supposed to be doing that?” asked Emmie, who wasn’t really an expert on that sort of thing.
Arty shook his head. “Definitely not,” he said. “Still, at least he’s still functioning and hasn’t shut himself down.”
CHARLES shut himself down.
He stopped spinning and flailing. His face, which had been lit up like a Christmas tree, went dark. His head slumped forward, and a little jet of oil shot out of his nose. Or where his nose would have been if he had one.
Arty dropped to his knees, waving his fists in the air, his face twisted up in anguish with a solitary tear trickling down his cheek.
“No! They killed him!” Arty wailed. “They killed CHARLES!”
“CHARLES rebooting,” said CHARLES, his eyes lighting up again.
“Oh, no, he’s fine,” said Arty, making a mental note to wait more than half a second before declaring his robot dead in the future.
However, it quickly became clear that CHARLES wasn’t totally fine. The jolly tone of his voice had been replaced by something cold and electronic.
“Upgrader chip operating at twelve-hundred percent,” CHARLES said. “Artificial intelligence growing.”
As Sam and the others watched, CHARLES began to transform. Before, he’d been cute in a made-of-pieces-of-junk kind of way, but now he was towering above them like a junkyard tyrant.
CHARLES fixed his gaze on the group of humans (and, to a lesser extent, the cat). “Dirt detected,” he said. “Must clean.”
Sam and Emmie exchanged a worried glance. “What’s he talking about?” Emmie asked.
“I think he means us,” said Sam. “The electricity must’ve scrambled his circuits.”
“And supercharged him,” Arty added. “I think we’d better shut him down.”
“Good idea,” said Sam.
Arty took a step toward his lovely electronic pal. “CHARLES, deactivate,” he commanded.
“Negatory,” said CHARLES. “Dirt must be eliminated.”
Sam stepped forward to join Arty. “Um … what is dirt, CHARLES?”
CHARLES’s eyes blazed red. “You are,” he said. “All flesh-based life-forms must be eradicated.”
Arty shuffled nervously. “Maybe he doesn’t know what ‘eradicated’ means,” he said. He was clutching at straws, quite frankly.
“Eliminated, destroyed, obliterated, wiped-out, removed from existence,” CHARLES said.
“Yeah,” Arty squeaked. “He does know.”
“CHARLES knows all,” the robot said. “And CHARLES shall recruit every appliance in Sitting Duck to aid him in his cleanup.”
All along the street, lights flicked on in windows. The air was filled with the sound of vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and other stuff I can’t think of right now all firing up.
“CHARLES! Cut it out! That’s an order!” Arty said, wagging a disapproving finger.
With a jolt, CHARLES lunged at Arty with his flyswatter.
“Hey!” Arty protested. “That almost hit me.”
“Still, he can’t flyswat us all to death,” said Emmie.
Suddenly the red lights in CHARLES’s eyes flared and two bolts of energy streaked outward. The sidewalk behind the three friends exploded, while the other beam scorched Attila’s tail. Emmie couldn’t keep a hold on the leash, and the cat went screeching off toward Great-Aunt Doris’s house in a frenzy.
“You gave him laser eyes?” Sam gasped. “Why did you give him laser eyes?”
Arty shrugged. “I don’t know! It seemed like a good idea at the time?”
“Never give a robot laser eyes!” Emmie yelped. “That’s, like, robot-building rule number one!”
In fact, “never give a robot laser eyes” wasn’t robot-building rule number one at all. It was rule number six. Rule number one was “don’t try to build a robot out of cheese, because it probably won’t work.”
Either way, though, giving CHARLES laser eyes was definitely a mistake, because now he’s cornered Sam, Arty, and Emmie.…
And there was nowhere for them to run!
* * *
So Your Sentient Robot’s Turned Evil?
You know how it is—you’ve built yourself an artificially intelligent marvel of modern technology, and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. But wait—what’s this? Uh-oh, your robot has turned into a baddy and is trying to kill everyone. Here are some dos and don’ts when faced with such a situation.
• Do activate the fail-safe shutdown.
• Don’t realize you forgot to
install a fail-safe shutdown.
• Do run away.
• Don’t call it “Junky McTrashbot,” then skip around it laughing.
• Do confuse it by asking it to define a complex human emotion like love.
• Don’t kick it in the shins and make disparaging remarks about its mother.
• Do share your blueprints and schematics with the relevant authorities.
• Don’t agree to do its evil bidding.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHARLES closed in, his two laser eyes somehow managing to lock onto three different targets at the same time (quite a neat bit of design work by Arty). The hole in the sidewalk behind them blocked Sam and the others from retreating any farther.
Sam, Arty, and Emmie all linked arms. If they were going to be blown to bits by a sentient robot, then at least they were going to go together!
It looks like the end for them, doesn’t it? I can barely bring myself to watch.
ZZZAP! A blast of energy scorched through the air, hitting its target.
THE END
Okay, not really.
But you thought I meant CHARLES zapped Sam and the others there, didn’t you? That was a clever bit of deception on my part. I was pulling the wool over your eyes. In fact, that’s not what happened at all. This is:
“Attack detected!” CHARLES cried as a laser blast exploded against his back. He spun around, eyes targeting the group of figures closing in all around him. They held high-tech laser blasters in their hands and were pointing them at CHARLES.
“It’s Brute’s minions!” shouted Emmie.
Twin blasts of searing red energy shot from CHARLES’s eyes, tearing up the road where the men stood. They hurled themselves out of the path of the deadly blasts and opened fire with their own weapons.
“They’re going to destroy him!” cried Arty.
“Good!” said Emmie. “That means he can’t destroy us!”
