How to Tame a Human Tornado

by Paul Tobin

  Then Liz was on the phone again.

  “Bottom of the lake, huh?” she said. “See you in a bit.”

  The red light turned out to be, as these things do, a bomb.

  “Piffle,” I said.

  “I’m going to predict that you are disturbed by the bomb,” the Nate-fish said, circling the bomb in question, which was shaped like a large translucent beach ball, glowing from the inside with weird symbols all over it.

  “That can’t have been your hardest prediction,” I told the robot fish. “Pretty much anyone is disturbed by bombs. The calculations must have had me at one hundred percent disturbed. Well, I mean . . . disturbed by the bomb, although Liz would probably predict me at one hundred percent disturbed in general, because of me liking cake more than pie, or because of the time I dressed like a ghost and hid in her closet. Okay, the five times I did that, or the time that—”

  “I predict you are now babbling, because of your anxieties about bombs, but you don’t have to worry. I’ll have disabled all of them by now.”

  “All of them?” My voice was squeaky. Bombs are bad enough, but it’s when they travel in packs that things really go wrong.

  “Maculte and the Red Death Tea Society have surrounded their underwater headquarters with defenses, such as the bombs, or the poison-water, or the Annoyed Octopus.”

  I said, “The Annoyed Octopus? What’s that?” Then, before the Nate-fish could answer, I said, “Hold on. That’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?”

  The fish didn’t answer. It just swam ahead, with the searchlights of its eyes scanning the depths. As we descended, we went past other beach ball–size bombs, all of them glowing red, suspended in the depths. I made sure not to touch any of them, because just because they were disabled didn’t mean they were friendly.

  After two minutes of silence that were far more silent than silence has ever before been, we reached the bottom of the lake. It was a thick murky silt, like most lake bottoms, with occasional rocks and some weird plants and a huge pile of inert robots. I suppose most lake bottoms don’t actually have huge piles of inert robots, but this one did. There were hundreds of them strewn out over the lake bottom. They were shaped like men, but their heads were entirely smooth, and they had flippers for feet and an extra set of arms.

  The robots all had a soft, red glow.

  I said, “Did you disable those, too? Like the bombs?”

  “I predict you will ask about the robots. They are called “Tea-bots,” and I easily disabled them by using quantum entanglement to subtract resonance from their anti-matter engines. Hah! Can you believe Maculte didn’t protect them from fifth-dimensional quantum entanglement? Ha ha ha!”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I said, laughing along, pretending to be someone who knew what the robot fish was talking about.

  It was at that point that the ground beneath us shook. It was a small tremor, though one that sent the murky silt swishing and swirling, like we were in a heavy fog made of dirt.

  “Piffle,” I said. “We really need to stop these earth-squeaks before they become earthquakes. How much farther is it?”

  “We’re here,” the Nate-fish said.

  I looked around.

  But there wasn’t anything to be seen.

  I mean, it’s true there was a murky dirt-fog, and it’s true there were hundreds of inert Tea-bots, and occasional rocks and some weird plants, and a confused seventh grade girl named Delphine Cooper, and a robotic Nate-fish with searchlights for eyes, but none of that really counted as being “here.”

  “Where is here?” I asked, but the fish didn’t answer. Instead, it began burrowing in the dirt, spraying silt upward in what amounted to a miniature mud tornado. The Nate-fish burrowed until I could no longer see it, and then I couldn’t see anything, because without the searchlights there were no lights at all.

  “Piffle,” I said, into the vast darkness.

  The darkness just . . . kept being darkness.

  It was hard to breathe, because of being nervous, and because of the crushing depths of the water, and because I couldn’t ever remember feeling more alone.

  “So . . . it’s pretty dark down here,” I mentioned.

  Nothing.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Piffle.”

  And then the lights came back, with the Nate-fish swimming back up out of the silt holding a cord in its mouth, a length of rope that stretched down into the soft sandy dirt.

  “Pull this, would you?” the fish said.

  “Okay!” I said, so happy to have someone to talk to that it didn’t matter if it was a robot fish asking me to do weird things.

  I pulled on the rope.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I told the fish, on account of the nothing that was happening.

  “Wait for it,” the fish said, which made me run through my mental repertoire of glares, but before I could choose the best one . . .

  . . . the bottom of the lake fell away.

  The rush of the waters whooshing down into the sudden void swept me along in a miasma of silt and churning waters. I was flailing and struggling, but even with my jetbelt the current was too strong.

  “I probably should have warned you about this,” the robot fish said, swept along beside me.

  “You think?” I said.

  And then everything went black.

  My phone rang. I opened my eyes. And struggled to my feet.

  I was in a huge room, at least three hundred feet square, and almost as tall. The walls were made of crystal, though they were dull, barely shining at all. There were three hovering globes of light, swaying somewhat, so that shadows were shifting on the walls.

  “Delphine?” my phone said. It was Liz’s voice.

  There were several unconscious members of the Red Death Tea Society against one wall, along with more of the Tea-bots. There were scorch marks on the wall next to them, and various cracks in the crystals.

  “You there?” I heard from my phone.

  There was an eerie ringing hum in the room, like music from someone else’s earphones.

  “Seriously,” my phone said. “Delphine?”

  The robotic Nate-fish was flopping at my feet. There was no water in the room, though I couldn’t see where it had all drained. The robot fish flopped, flapped, shuddered, and then went still.

  “If you’re there,” Liz said on my phone, “then say something. In fact, unless I hear you speak in the next five seconds, I’m going to assume you like pie more than cake. Ready? Three, two, one, zero. I know I said you had five seconds but I was nervous and impatient. I still am.”

  In the far corner of the room there was a strange . . . ​ robot? It was at least ten feet tall, with no features at all. It looked to be made of rubber, with thick arms and legs, an even thicker torso, and tentacles for fingers. A thin band of light circled its entire head.

  The robot straightened when it saw me.

  And began to move closer.

  “Delphine,” my phone said. “I’m really starting to get nervous.”

  The big rubber robot came charging toward me in gravity-defying leaps. Ten, twenty, or even thirty feet with each jump, accompanied by a sound like “thoomb” from the robot and an “eek” from me as I triggered my jetbelt and soared out of the reach of even the tallest of robots.

  Or at least the tallest of robots that couldn’t fly. However, this was a cheater-bot, meaning that it zoomed into the air after me, so that we were in an aerial chase scene, but the cheater-bot was faster and seemingly able to predict my every move. If I went up, it was already cutting off my path, and the same for down, and for left and right, meaning that no matter which way I went . . . boom . . . there it was, closing in on me.

  “Piffle,” I said, because running was no good. There was nothing to do but abandon my escape attempts and move to Plan B.

  Attack.

  Luckily, my adventure training course has taught me to be excellent at hand-to-hand combat. There’s a section of my course with padd
ed wooden boards that I jump kick, and there’s a punching bag where Liz painted a picture of a penguin, on account of a traumatic incident at the zoo. Also, my training course is next to the back door of our house, so I can quickly run inside and watch a wide variety of kung-fu movies, such as Meteor Mustache Vs. Yeti Warriors, or my current favorite, Adorable Queen’s Martial Arts Adoption Agency. There is no better way to learn how to fight than by studying the moves of these masters, although it’s true that I have yet to encounter any yetis, or proven able to grow a mustache.

  “Attack mode!” I yelled, deciding on a flying kick as my best option, since I was currently flying. The huge robot didn’t try to avoid me or even ward off my incoming blow, obviously too awed by my incredible battle capabilities to do anything but hover in place.

  “Hah!” I said, as my foot struck home.

  “Huh?” I said, as my foot then sunk into that home. In fact, my foot sank all the way past my ankle, and then stuck there, so that I was dangling from the robot. Trapped.

  “Piffle,” I said.

  “Why did you do that?” the robot asked. It was Nate’s voice.

  “Nate?” I said, trying to look up, which is difficult when hanging upside down from a robot’s stomach.

  The robot turned see-through, revealing Nate and Bosper inside.

  “Oddly enough,” I told Nate, “I attacked because I didn’t recognize you, and thought you were attacking me.”

  “How could you not recognize me?” Nate asked. “My atomic structure is consistent.”

  “This is going to sound weird, but I don’t recognize my friends by their atomic structure. Mostly I go by . . . ​ do they look like my friends? So if my friends were to . . . ​and this is just a whimsical example . . . dress themselves with a giant rubber robot, I might not immediately recognize them, especially if I was terrified.”

  Nate said, “Oh, I suppose that makes sense,” in a tone of voice making it clear that he also supposed that it did not make sense.

  The robot’s hand plucked me from its stomach. Then, holding me, it whooshed to the floor and set me on my feet, at which point the robot’s stomach opened and Nate flew out, using his jetbelt. Bosper then appeared in the opening and sprang outward, yelling, “Bosper has a jetbelt!”

  He fell to the floor.

  “Bosper does not have a jetbelt!” he said, getting back to his feet. “The dog has forgotten.”

  Nate and I were just looking at each other.

  Just . . . looking.

  Finally, I said, “You went off without me.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I was worried.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded like he meant it, and I suppose he had to, on account of the honesty thing, where he was forced to tell the truth at all times.

  We went silent again.

  Just looking at each other.

  Then I stepped forward and hugged him, and he hugged back, and he said, “Delphine, I—”

  “DOUBLE PUNCH!” I yelled, hitting him with both fists, in a move I’d learned from Double Punch Pirates, a kung-fu movie about pirates who spent an incredible amount of their time punching.

  “Oww,” Nate said. “In fact . . . double oww.”

  “You big stupid!” I yelled. “Who said you could go off like that? Don’t you know how worried I was? Did you think I would just go, ‘Oh, sounds like Nate is doomed, I guess I’ll go eat cake’ or something stupid like that? That’s stupid, you stupid. Don’t be so stupid! You left me alone! I was scared!” I was pushing him in the chest, poking at him, and he wasn’t fighting back at all, because he’s so stupid, and he kept tripping over the fallen members of the Red Death Tea Society, the ones he’d apparently been smart enough to defeat, which was amazing because he was so stupid, and I felt like my stomach was flipping over and over, and I felt like my chest was breaking, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe at all, and I also felt like I was breathing too fast, and Bosper was barking and Nate was so . . . so . . . stupid!

  “Stupid!” I roared.

  He reached out and took my hand.

  And just held it.

  Bosper quit barking.

  I went red in the face.

  It wasn’t because of how Nate was holding my hand. Or how warm he felt after it had been so cold in the dark waters of the lake. It was the look in his eyes. Nate is . . . Nate is different. He always has equations in his head. Inventions in the making. Thoughts of atomic structures and the very fabric of the universe. Things like that. Because of all this, his amazing mind is amazingly distracted, so whenever he looks at me he’s also partially looking inside his own mind, caught up in mathematical concepts far past anyone else’s ability to understand, distracted by technological epiphanies and the secrets of the cosmos. His attention is always scattered. It’s always in a hundred different places, mulling over a thousand different concepts.

  Except right then.

  His eyes, his thoughts . . . I could tell they were only on one thing.

  Me.

  “Sorry,” he said again.

  I was blushing so hard.

  “Don’t do it again,” I whispered.

  “I won’t,” he whispered back. I wasn’t sure why we were whispering. Nate’s eyes were so focused on me, and the room was so warm and so . . . so full of something. I couldn’t tell what. It felt like the weird hum was getting louder and louder.

  “Should the dog be whispering?” Bosper asked. We ignored him. Nate took my other hand in his. His stupid hands felt stupid warm.

  “Bosper could make barkings,” the terrier said. We ignored him.

  The room seemed to be vibrating. It was the slightest tremble, the merest quiver. The crystal walls now had a soft green glow, reflecting off Nate’s glasses. He looked like he was glowing, too.

  “Rarr-rarrf,” Bosper said, and then, “Bosper has done a barking. The dog does a good job and is a good boy.”

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked Nate. For some reason I couldn’t look away from him. The way the soft green glow of the crystals was reflecting off his glasses, off his eyes . . . it was fascinating.

  “Oh,” Nate said, with his eyes locked on mine, not looking to the terrier at all. “I told Bosper that if another earthquake was going to be triggered, he should warn me. Bosper is very sensitive to the tectonic vibrations that are the warning signs of an earthquake, so he’s probably sensing that a big one is about to hit.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking at Nate.

  “Yeah,” he said. A stray breeze caught a bit of his hair and made it tremble, which was odd, because there weren’t any breezes, not down here in the weird crystal room hundreds of feet below the surface of the lake, the room that was getting brighter and brighter, the green glow intensifying, a strange hum being emitted by the walls, so the attractive fluttering of Nate’s hair couldn’t have been a breeze, it had to have been caused by the way the walls and the floor were starting to shake.

  Wait.

  What?

  “PIFFLE!” I said, looking to Bosper.

  “OH!” Nate yelled, looking to his dog. “Did you mean there’s about to be an earthquake?”

  “Here comes big shivers!” Bosper said, and the walls suddenly flashed a bright green, so that for one moment it was like the three of us were in a giant X-ray machine and I could see right through to Nate’s bones, and also to the incredible array of machines and devices he was storing in his shirt, and then the ground lurched this way and that way, and finally in all directions at once. There was rumbling and a roaring, and then Nate was picking me up and stuffing me inside a giant rubber robot, which is the first time that’s ever happened.

  It felt like he was pushing me into a giant blob of bread dough. Inside, it was hollow, and much roomier than I would’ve expected.

  “Here’s the dog!” Bosper yelled as he came through. Then, Nate’s hand appeared, and I grabbed it and pulled, and we were all inside.

  “Just in time,” Nate said. “The Eart
hquake Cavern was activating.”

  “Earthquake Cavern?”

  “A precisely shaped underground chamber lined with lonsdaleite crystals, each of them calibrated to a very specific vibration, with the accumulated vibration spreading through the surrounding geo-structure and activating tectonic faults, causing earthquakes.”

  “Bosper chews the wall!” the terrier said, clenching a part of the robot’s doughy interior in his teeth.

  “I think I get it,” I told Nate. “It’s like when you see those videos of tuning forks that shatter wineglasses, right?”

  “Right! Nice example. Luckily, I designed this exoskeleton out of rubber, so the vibrations will be nullified. We’re safe in here.”

  “But what can we do? I mean, how do we stop the earthquakes?” Together, we were crawling up the robot’s interior to a chair in the chest. The chair (also made of rubber, with racing stripes) was surrounded by odd bits of tech, with a wide variety of devices modified from cell phones, wristwatches, and microwave ovens and a video game console.

  “I was about to destroy the walls,” Nate said, pulling himself toward the chair. He hesitated and looked back to me. “Unless . . . you want to do it?”

  “Are you asking me if I want to sit in a giant robot’s control center and use its massive power for untold destruction?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I told him, leaping into the chair and buckling myself in. Nate took out his phone and his fingers went to work, tapping commands, and the robot became partially transparent, so that we could see right through it.

  “It’s like one-way glass,” Nate said. “We can see out, but nobody can see in.”

  “Privacy is important when you’re hiding inside a giant robot,” I agreed, then gestured to one of the modified cell phones and asked, “What’s this do?”

  “Laser beam.”

  “Ooo. How about this one?” I tapped on another customized cell phone, this one with glowing wires running into it.

  “Force blast.”