Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove

by Bob Pflugfelder

  “Yes,” Berg answered, straightening a bit. “I’m a private patrol officer for the Learnasium. A new one … and a late one. I can never find the changing room around here. Anyway, bye!”

  With that, he scooted around Tesla and the others and lumbered off down the hallway.

  “I think he’s going the wrong way,” said Silas.

  “Oh, well,” said DeMarco. “Maybe he’ll finally find those scumball vandals he’s hoping for.”

  “Come on.” Tesla started walking up the hall again. “Hiroko and Uncle Newt are still waiting for this head.”

  Nick noticed that his sister wasn’t walking as quickly as before. And that her eyes had a certain distant, distracted look.

  Nick knew what that meant. And it made him nervous. Because he was positive that his sister was thinking this:

  So there’s a you-know-what around here, huh? Maybe we should find out exactly what this you-know-what is.…

  “For the thousandth time, Silas,” Nick said. “Animatronic figures are not robots.”

  The kids had found their way back to the Hall of Genius, where they were watching Uncle Newt and Hiroko reheading the beheaded Nikola Tesla.

  “Robots can do stuff,” Nick went on. “Build things or explore places or dispose of bombs or whatever.” Silas looked unconvinced, so Nick added, “Like those robot insects we built that one time.”

  “They really did stuff,” DeMarco chimed in. “They freaked out that guy who was afraid of bugs.”

  Nick ignored DeMarco and waved his hand at a nearby display, which showed the Renaissance physiologist Sanctorius Sanctorius seated in the hanging chair that he used to measure his weight every day for thirty years. (It’s not that Sanctorius was on a strict diet; he was trying to understand human metabolism.) When the Hall of Genius animatronics were activated, the weighing chair would move slowly up and down while Sanctorius gnawed on a rubber chicken leg. “These animatronics are cool,” Nick said, “but basically they’re just fancy decorations.”

  “Robotic decorations,” Silas insisted, “that look like people! I’m telling you, this is just asking for a robot uprising. Haven’t you ever seen a Terminator movie?”

  “Hey,” DeMarco interrupted, “when robots look like people, doesn’t that make them cyborgs?”

  Nick shook his head. “Cyborgs are people with machine parts that enhance their abilities. Robots that look human are called androids.”

  “That’s it,” DeMarco said. “Mandroids.”

  “Androids,” Nick corrected.

  “They always turn evil, too,” Silas said.

  Nick sighed. He was glad Tesla had bailed on this conversation and drifted away to give Nikola Tesla’s hands one last look before they were reattached to his body. Nick had no fear of robots running amok, but if his sister had to listen to Silas babbling about it much longer, she might go berserk.

  There was no danger of Tesla hearing Silas at the moment. She loved robotics more than anything, except for her mom and dad, and maybe lemon macadamia nut cookies, and she’d been fascinated by the mechanical hands since she first laid eyes on them. Nick glanced her way as Silas described the telltale signs that a robot was about to turn evil, and he saw that his sister still had the same pensive, faraway look he’d noticed in the hallway.

  Tesla, Nick realized, was still stewing over their conversation with Berg, the muscle-headed guard.

  If there’s one thing you should never say to Tesla Holt, it’s “I know something you don’t know.” Because before long, she’ll find a way to make that statement untrue.

  Case in point: the plaque that accompanied the Nikola Tesla display. About a quarter of the text had been covered with duct tape, as if someone was trying to censor part of the scientist’s life. When Tesla had noticed, she asked Uncle Newt and Hiroko about it, but they didn’t have a clue. They were just there to fix the animatronics. Ever since, Tesla had a tendency to drift over to the display, where she’d pick idly at the edges of the duct tape on the sign until Nick told her to stop.

  And now Tesla had something new to pick at:

  What was the you-know-what?

  “Hey, Tez,” Uncle Newt called to her. “Hand me those hands, would you?”

  “Huh, what? Hands?” said Tesla, snapping back to the here and now. “Oh, sure.”

  She picked up the animatronic hands from the worktable and walked them across the room. Uncle Newt took one hand, Hiroko took the other, and they inserted them into the white cuffs poking from the sleeves of the figure’s frock coat. There was a click and a clack, and then Uncle Newt and Hiroko stepped back and grinned at each other.

  “Success!” said Uncle Newt.

  “Well, maybe,” said Hiroko. “We should probably make sure he still works.”

  “Hmm. Good idea.”

  Uncle Newt walked to a nearby table covered with petri dishes and test tubes and opened a drawer. Inside were a computer screen and a keyboard and a phone—the hidden control station for the Hall of Genius.

  Uncle Newt started typing on the keyboard. As he worked, Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, stared at him with unblinking eyes from the other side of the table. Like Uncle Newt, Fleming wore a white lab coat, though beneath his was a dark suit, compared to Uncle Newt’s typical outfit of jeans and a moth-eaten, ketchup-stained T-shirt.

  “Here comes the power,” Uncle Newt said.

  There was a low humming sound. Then, one by one, spotlights came on all around the Hall of Genius.

  Despite the name, the exhibition space wasn’t a hallway at all. It was a large teardrop-shaped room with an entrance/exit at the narrow end. Animatronic figures and their information plaques lined the curving walls, and in the center was the biggest display—the Wright brothers set to launch their first airplane and, looming above them, a flying machine designed and piloted by Leonardo da Vinci.

  “Annnnnnd … go!” said Uncle Newt. He punched Enter on the keyboard.

  For two seconds, everyone was absolutely quiet, even Silas. Then the propellers on the Wright brothers’ plane started to turn. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press began stamping out pages of the forty-two-line Bible. The cylinder on Thomas Edison’s phonograph started spinning, and the inventor’s own voice could be heard saying, “Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow.” All around the room, animatronic scientists and philosophers and inventors began picking up test tubes, leaning over microscopes, tinkering with machinery, and even—in the case of a towel-wrapped Archimedes, the person who discovered liquid displacement—dipping a foot into a bathtub and opening his eyes wide as the cellophane “water” rose up over his ankle.

  “Whoa!” said Nick.

  “Wow!” said Tesla.

  “Cool!” said DeMarco.

  “Creepy,” muttered Silas.

  Hiroko walked over to Uncle Newt and, smiling, gave him a high five.

  “Now we just need to make sure Nikola Tesla has his head screwed on right, then we can go home,” said Uncle Newt. He turned to his niece. “Tez, would you do the honors?”

  Tesla grinned. “I’d love to.”

  She and Nick had been hearing about the animatronic figures all week, ever since the X-Treme Learnasium first called Uncle Newt to see if he could come in for an emergency last-minute overhaul of the Hall of Genius. But now would be her first chance to really see one of the figures in action. (Instead of bringing along Tesla and Nick to be his helpers, like they’d wanted, Uncle Newt had foisted the two of them onto Silas’s family and recruited Hiroko to assist at the museum—just because she used to be a robotics specialist at NASA, like Uncle Newt. Nick and Tesla pouted for days afterward.)

  Tesla walked over to the information display in front of her namesake. Printed on the sign was the scientist’s (partially tape-covered) biography, along with an explanation of the scene the animatronic figure was enacting: Tesla demonstrating one of his inventions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

  Beside the text
was a big red button.

  Tesla reached out and pushed it.

  “Hello,” the mechanical Tesla said in a heavily accented voice. “Would you like me to show you how an induction motor works?”

  “Yes,” answered Tesla.

  “Excellent,” said the animatronic Tesla. “It is really quite interesting.”

  Tesla gave Uncle Newt and Hiroko a thumbs-up. The voice-recognition software was working perfectly.

  “The key,” Nikola Tesla went on, “is creating a rotating magnetic field.”

  “You were right, Silas. The robots are dangerous,” DeMarco grumbled. “That one’s about to bore me to death.”

  Nick shushed him.

  “Hello!” boomed a voice behind the three boys.

  “Eee!” said Nick.

  “Aaa!” said DeMarco.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” said Silas.

  The three of them whipped around to see a man in an old-fashioned suit and clunky headphones staring at them as he fiddled with a black box studded with gauges and dials.

  “Would you like-a to hear-a how I create-a the wireless?” the man said in a ridiculously thick Italian accent. “It all began-a with the discovery of a-radio waves-a.”

  “Who is that?” DeMarco asked as the animatronic man droned on.

  “It’s Marconi,” said Nick. “The guy who invented radio.”

  “He sounds more like one of the Super Mario brothers,” said Silas.

  “Is the accent too much?” Uncle Newt called out from the other side of the Hall of Genius.

  Hiroko put a hand on his arm.

  “I wouldn’t worry about the accent, Newt,” she said. “Why is Marconi talking at all?”

  “Well, obviously the kids activated him. Right, boys?”

  Nick, Silas, and DeMarco all shook their heads.

  “We didn’t touch a thing,” said Nick.

  “Oh,” said Uncle Newt.

  Uh-oh, said the look on his face.

  “Hello!” said another voice. This one came from a portly, balding man wearing little round granny glasses. “Would you like to hear the truth about my experiments with electricity and lightning?”

  It was Benjamin Franklin, holding a kite and a key. He immediately launched into a lecture about lightning and electricity. Meanwhile, Nikola Tesla and Marconi kept talking.

  “Uh … are the animatronics starting to turn on by themselves?” Tesla asked.

  “They’re not supposed to,” Uncle Newt answered.

  “Hello,” said Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin.

  “Hello,” said pioneering microbiologist Louis Pasteur.

  “Hello,” said anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey.

  “Hello,” said primatologists Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall.

  “Hello,” said Johannes Kepler and Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Isaac Asimov…

  In a few more seconds, every animatronic figure in the Hall of Genius was talking and moving, all of them explaining and demonstrating their discoveries.

  Uncle Newt began typing frantically on the keyboard.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “According to the control dashboard, none of this is happening.”

  “Well, it is!” Hiroko said.

  She had to shout to be heard over the din of scientific explanations.

  Then the animatronic figures began talking louder. And faster.

  “People remember me mostlyforthecottongin,” Eli Whitney spat out, the pitch of his voice rising to a squeak as his words sped up. “ButIalsohelpedrevolutionizemanufacturingbypopularizingtheuseofinterchangeableparts!”

  “Ugh!” DeMarco moaned, slapping his hands over his ears. “It’s like being screamed at by fifty Mickey Mouses!”

  The animatronics were moving so fast that several of them began to wobble.

  “Turn them off! Turn them off!” yelled Hiroko.

  “I can’t! I can’t!” Uncle Newt yelled back, still typing furiously.

  A beaker flew out of Louis Pasteur’s hand, shooting past Nick’s head.

  Charles Darwin’s head fell off and crushed another blue-footed booby.

  “Arobotmaynotinjureahumanbeingorthroughinactionallowahumanbeingtocometoharm,” Isaac Asimov screeched, and then he toppled over. Right onto Nick and DeMarco.

  “It’s here!” Silas screamed. “Robo-geddon!”

  And then the whole room went black.

  When the lights went out, the shrill jabbering of the animatronics came to a sudden stop. For a few moments, the only sound in the utter darkness of the Hall of Genius was a low groaning.

  Then slow, stumbling steps.

  Then a heavy thump.

  “If that’s a robot,” Silas said, “I surrender.”

  “It’s not a robot,” said Tesla. “It’s me getting Nick and DeMarco out from under Isaac Asimov.”

  “Thanks for the help, Silas,” DeMarco added sarcastically.

  “Sorry, man,” Silas mumbled.

  “Nick, are you okay?” Uncle Newt asked. “I’d come help Tesla, but I’m afraid I’d step on you.”

  “It’s okay, I’m fine,” Nick said. “But wow—those robots are heavier than they look.”

  “Ha,” Silas said half-heartedly. “You called it a robot.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Nick shot back.

  There was more movement in the dark, and then something bumped into Uncle Newt and Hiroko from behind.

  “Yah!” said Uncle Newt.

  “Sorry. It’s just me again,” said Tesla. “I wanted to see if the controls were still on.”

  “No. There’s no power to anything,” Hiroko said. “We won’t know what happened until—oooh, my eyes!”

  Just as abruptly as they’d gone out, the lights turned back on.

  Everyone spent the next few seconds blinking and rubbing their eyes. Then, one by one, they turned to stare uneasily at the animatronic figures surrounding them.

  The animatronics were motionless. Dead.

  “Well,” Nick said, “if that was Robo-geddon, I guess it’s over.”

  Silas walked over to the toppled Isaac Asimov figure and prodded it with his toe. He looked almost disappointed when the scientist and science-fiction writer didn’t push himself up and lunge at him.

  “I don’t know,” Silas said. “There’s always that moment when you think the evil robot has finally been defeated, but then its eyes start glowing red and whammo!”

  He gave the figure on the floor another poke, but there was no whammo.

  The sound of quick footsteps rose from somewhere in the distance, and soon a man and a woman came hustling into the Hall of Genius. They were about the same age, maybe a decade younger than the forty-ish Uncle Newt and Hiroko. The man was dressed in a T-shirt, an unbuttoned and untucked lumberjack shirt, and wrinkled jeans. His hair was short and messy, and even his thick glasses sat slightly askew on his confused face. The woman had the opposite appearance: she wore a tidy businessy-type suit, her hair was carefully styled, and her face bore the confident expression of someone who was in charge—and knew it.

  “Oh, hello,” said Uncle Newt as calmly as if two neighbors had just stopped by to chat. In reality, none of Uncle Newt’s real neighbors ever stopped by to chat, mostly because of the explosive noises, strange clouds of smoke, and other phenomena that tended to erupt from his basement laboratory. “Kids,” he continued, “meet Katherine Mavis, the Learnasium’s executive director, and—”

  “What are you guys doing here?” the man interrupted. “I thought the Hall of Genius was finished.”

  “I tasked them to come in today for some last-minute R&R of the exhibition, Mr. Jones,” the director explained to her slovenly dressed companion. His confused look became even more confused, so she added, “Rehab and repair.” Then Mavis looked down at Charles Darwin’s head, which was lying on the floor near her feet. The head stared back, booby feathers tangled in its hair. She turned around slowly, regarding all the other heads, hands, and props littering the hall, shaken lo
ose when the animatronics went wild. “What happened here? It sounded like a riot broke out!”

  “A riot of chipmunks,” Jones added.

  “I’m sorry,” Hiroko said, looking profoundly embarrassed. “We don’t know what went wrong. We powered everything up so we could test one of the animatronics, and then the whole exhibit started going nuts.”

  Jones squinted at Hiroko through the thick lenses of his fashionably clunky black-framed glasses. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in days, and his dark gel-slathered hair stood straight up on end, as if he just stuck his finger in an electrical outlet.

  The words MIGRAINE MONKEY MISSLE TEST were printed across the front of his T-shirt, beneath a drawing of a depressed-looking chimp riding a saddled rocket.

  “The exhibit started going nuts?” Jones echoed. “I’m sorry, but what exactly does that mean in technical terms?”

  “The pneumatics, hydraulics, and sound files all activated simultaneously and then accelerated so far beyond their performance parameters that some of the animatronics probably burned out their motion actuators,” Hiroko said.

  “You know. Going nuts!” Uncle Newt added. “My theory is that … uhh …”

  His face went blank, and he rubbed his chin for a moment. Then he said, “Whaddaya know. I don’t even have a theory.”

  Jones sighed, scratching the first “M” on his Migraine Monkey Missile Test shirt. “Well,” he said, “let’s see what I can come up with.”

  He walked over to the control screen—which had reactivated when the lights turned back on—and began typing, hard and fast.

  “Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine,” he said as he typed and a flurry of login screens and control panels and dashboards and graphs came and went with eye-blistering speed. “I don’t see anything wrong with the network access control, and there’s nothing on the servers that would explain why an exhibit would ‘go nuts.’ ”

  Then he glanced over his shoulder and eyed Tesla with suspicion.

  “You didn’t let someone play around with the controls, did you?” he said to Uncle Newt.