Rebels With a Cause Read online

  Lenard must’ve read the look in Max’s eyes. (She assumed the humanoid came equipped with the world’s most advanced biometric sensors.)

  “I’m so looking forward to collaborating with you and building the world’s best, fastest, most artificially intelligent quantum computer, Maxine,” it said. “It could become my new brain.…”

  Nobody called Max “Maxine.” Except, of course, a machine that learned everything from databases and public records.

  “Working with me is the next logical step on your intellectual journey,” Lenard continued, smirking broadly. “If you like, you can invite your Indian friend Vihaan to join us. I understand he has quite a grasp of quantum mechanics. He can be your assistant.” Another giggle.

  Max remembered something else Dr. Einstein once said: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

  She didn’t trust the high-tech nonhuman boy-bot. She didn’t like him much, either.

  And maybe who she was meant to be was who she was already being: the change she wished to see in the world.

  “Sorry,” she said to the phone. “The quantum computer can wait.”

  “But Dr. Zimm knows your birthday.…”

  “Sweet. But I have more important things to worry about than when I should blow out candles or eat ice cream and cake.”

  “Really?” sniggered Lenard. “What could possibly be more important than discovering who you really are?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Saving the world. Cleaning its water.”

  “Are you certain, Maxine?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Fine. We will attempt to convince you to be more reasonable by other means.”

  “What other means?”

  “You’ll see. In precisely fifteen minutes. And Maxine? The next time you attempt to clean and purify river water, you might want to make certain your intake pipe isn’t located downstream from a highly toxic copper smelting plant.”

  48

  Max tossed the phone back to Charl.

  “Any luck tracing the call?” Max asked.

  Charl shook his head. “It was being rerouted all over the globe. No dice.”

  “This is awesome!” cried Ms. James, who was zooming in on the murky river. “You can see the pollution clouding the water! It’s so swirly and orange, it looks like it’s on fire!”

  “That is not awesome!” Max shouted at the documentarian, who was starting to work her last nerve. She knew the damage pollution from a copper smelting plant could create. There’d be lead, arsenic, selenium in the water that would quickly contaminate the bodies of people living downstream. The air pollution from a copper smelter was enough to kill leaves and make them fall off trees. Just imagine what might happen if you drank the stuff.

  “What the Corp is doing is horrible!” Max screamed at the documentary maker.

  “Maybe,” said Ms. James. “But those swirls in the river make an awesome visual.”

  “I told you guys we should’ve moved on to some other project,” whined Toma. “This is too dangerous. Like deep-void-of-space dangerous.”

  Max ignored Toma and ran over to the water-cleaning unit where Klaus and Annika were manning the controls.

  “Shut it down,” Max hollered. “Stop distributing water.”

  “But we just turned it on like two minutes ago!” moaned Klaus.

  “It’s too risky, Klaus. Shut it down!”

  “Okay, okay…” Klaus flicked a series of switches.

  Max turned to the line snaking up to the spigot, which Keeto had just twisted shut.

  “Sorry, folks,” she told the weary locals. “No more water today. The copper smelter upstream just dumped a load of arsenic and lead into the river. That’s heavy duty, poisonous stuff.”

  “We know,” said one of the women. “We remember when the copper people polluted the air. Our throats burned.”

  “There was a choking fog,” added a man.

  Max wished she could promise these people that she could make things all better, the way other kids’ mothers comforted them when they scraped a knee on the playground.

  No one had ever made things all better for Max. She wondered if she could do it for Vihaan and everybody else who’d been counting on her.

  “We’ll fix this,” Annika assured Max. “But we’re going to need to run some serious tests to make one hundred percent certain those filters are doing their jobs and scrubbing the water clean!”

  “We’ll grab a sample,” said Klaus. “I wish Tisa was here to help with the chemistry.”

  “Yeah,” said Max, still lost in her thoughts. “Me, too.”

  “I can handle it,” said Hana. “We botanists are all about making sure our plants are drinking clean water.”

  “Thanks,” mumbled Max.

  Hana started collecting water samples in stoppered test tubes.

  Max finally looked to Vihaan. His shoulders were slumped. His eyes were moist with tears.

  “This is horrible,” he muttered sadly. “We have done nothing but make matters worse.”

  Max nodded. Vihaan was right. She was starting to question the whole mission of the Change Makers Institute. The only change they seemed to be making in Jitwan was to make things worse. Instead of helping clean up the water, their presence had made it even more poisonous.

  Max and her team finished shutting down their dissolved-air flotation and filtering unit, then covered it with a heavy tarp. To Max, it looked like they were tucking it in and putting it to bed. Forever.

  When they returned to the Royal Duke Hotel, there was an envelope waiting at the front desk.

  It was addressed to “The Young Do-Gooders.”

  “Let me open it,” said Charl, carefully inspecting the seams of the envelope for any trace of suspicious powder.

  He sliced the envelope open with the blade of his tactical knife.

  “What is it?” asked Max.

  “An ultimatum,” said Charl.

  “Is it from the Corp?” asked Klaus.

  Charl nodded. “Our old friend. Dr. Zacchaeus Zimm.”

  Max sighed. “What does it say?”

  Charl read what Dr. Zimm had written: “‘Give us Max Einstein. If you do, your most recent pollution problems upstream will disappear. The rest of you can continue to attempt to save the world—just do it somewhere else. Ireland. Africa. Argentina. Rest assured that the water needs of Jitwan will be taken care of by the Fresh & Pure packaged-water company, a recently acquired and fully owned subsidiary of the Corp, Inc.’”

  Nobody said much at dinner that night. Not even Keeto or Klaus.

  Annika did point out the logic flaw in the Corp’s argument. “How can we possibly continue to do good in the world if it means doing something so inherently evil? We can’t turn Max over to Dr. Zimm.”

  Later, as Max tried to drift off to sleep, a task that seemed impossible, she had another, very short, internal conversation with her idol, Albert Einstein.

  “I’m doing more harm here than good,” she said.

  “But remember, Max,” replied the gentle, grandfatherly voice in her head, “the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them doing evil without doing anything themselves.”

  “Or it’ll be destroyed by people like me,” thought Max stubbornly. “The ones who do something that makes the world worse off than it was before they did it.”

  Her imaginary Einstein wanted to reply, but Max shut him down.

  She’d made up her mind.

  She knew what she had to do.

  First thing in the morning, she’d call Ben. She’d tender her resignation as “the Chosen One.”

  She’d quit.

  49

  “Quit?” said Ben.

  “Yeah,” said Max. “I don’t want to, but I think I have to.”

  It was early morning in India. Max had brought her secure satellite phone out to the dining hall deck where the reception was better.

&nb
sp; “Look, Ben,” Max continued, “my very presence is jeopardizing everything you and your Change Makers Institute are trying to do. You guys would be better off without me. I don’t know why Dr. Zimm and the Corp want me so badly, but as long as I am leading the team, they will continue to sabotage your efforts.”

  “Because they’re a bunch of bloomin’ evil eejits!” cried a familiar voice.

  Siobhan. She and Tisa came strolling out to join Max on the hotel’s terrace.

  “Um, Ben?” Max said into the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Siobhan and Tisa just showed up.”

  “I know. They finished the job in Ireland. Now they have a more important task: talking sense into you! Listen to your friends, Max. And remember what Dr. Einstein said.”

  “You mean that thing about how the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything?”

  “Okay,” said Ben. “Sure. That one. Whatever works for you. Now, if you will excuse me, Klaus just sent a requisition for a ton of money so he can order all the parts you guys need to build more dissolved-air flotation and filtration units and clean even more water there in Jitwan.”

  Klaus should be in charge, Max thought. He wants to keep going. Then again, he doesn’t have Dr. Zimm and the Corp breathing down his neck.

  “So tell us, girl,” said Tisa, the instant Max hung up the phone. “What’s this we hear about you wanting to quit?”

  “I just think it might be for the best.…”

  “Max?” said Siobhan. “Usually I admire your thinking and even your flight-of-fancy thought experiments. Truly, I do. They’re usually very entertaining. But right now? You’re not thinking, girl. You’re pouting and feeling sorry for yourself.”

  Max didn’t have an answer. She knew Siobhan was right. That was the thing about friends. They sometimes knew you better than you knew yourself.

  “By the way,” said Tisa. “Hana shared her chemical analysis of the water post–pollution dump with me. Those noodle filters you guys came up with? They’re doing the job, big time. They’re brilliant, Max. The water is clean and potable.”

  “That means folks can drink it, right?” said Siobhan.

  “Exactly,” said Tisa with a nod.

  “Then, crikey, just say it’s ‘drinkable,’ not ‘potable.’ That makes it sound like you can carry it around.…”

  Vihaan came out to the deck to join the group.

  “The people of Jitwan are demanding that the local authorities deliver clean water,” he said. “It’s the people’s right and the government’s responsibility. We are going to stage a massive protest march and rally. We will shut down the copper smelter if we have to.”

  Max grinned. “You remind me of another brave Indian. Mahatma Gandhi. You’re going to march on the copper plant the way he led the salt march to the sea to protest British colonial rule!”

  Vihaan nodded. “Our personal heroes can teach us much, Max. Especially when we can emulate their actions and do like they did. However, we are not marching to the plant. We will take our civil disobedience to the municipal administrator’s office and present evidence to expose that the water packagers are bribing officials so they can have easy access to tap water—water that is meant to flow into homes. Dada will speak up and testify, even if it means losing his job as a key man. Even if it means losing his life. Children like me will lead the march, for this is our world. We want it back.”

  Max once again understood why Ben wanted nothing but children (with a few well-armed chaperones) in his Change Makers Institute. Kids had the most to lose if changes weren’t made, if big problems were ignored like adults had been doing for decades.

  Siobhan looked Max in the eye. “Still want to quit, lassie?”

  “No,” said Max. “I want to do what my hero, Albert Einstein, would do. I want to stick with this problem until we find its solution!”

  50

  “We need to end the Corp’s interference, once and for all,” Max told her teammates. “If we can eliminate that problem, we’ll be able to solve other problems much more easily all over the globe!”

  “Good idea,” said Siobhan. “But how exactly do you plan on defeating a nefarious, multinational organization with unlimited resources, not to mention a well-armed paramilitary force?”

  All eyes were on Max.

  “By giving them what they think they want, when, in fact, it might be exactly what we need.”

  The others just nodded. They had no idea what Max had in mind.

  “She’s doing that relativity thing again,” Siobhan whispered to Tisa. “Ain’t she? Where it all depends on how you look at something…”

  “Yep,” said Tisa. “Relativity to the max.”

  “I just hope whatever you are planning will stop the Corp from polluting the river or destroying our water filtration devices,” said Vihaan.

  “Oh, I think it will,” said Max, who had run a quick thought experiment through her brain and hatched a clever new plan. “We need Keeto.”

  “To do what?” asked Vihaan.

  To reconstruct a phone trace he did for us!”

  “Why?” asked Tisa.

  “So we can call Dr. Zacchaeus Zimm.”

  Keeto tapped keys on his laptop in rapid succession.

  “I’m back-tracing the steps I took when you guys were in Ireland,” he said. “The Corp had implanted a micro GPS tracking chip in Klaus’s phone. It sent its reports to this number.”

  Keeto explained how the chip transmitted tracking and navigation data as well as the phone’s communication activity.

  “They were listening in on all your calls, dude,” he told Klaus. “They were tracking your text and internet activity, too.”

  Klaus looked sick—like he’d just eaten a sausage made out of rancid tube socks.

  “Where did they transmit all that data?” asked Max.

  “To a number linked to an application installed on a controlling device,” said Keeto. “For instance, if you had an annoying humanoid robot…”

  “Lenard,” said Max. “He’s better than a bloodhound.”

  “Actually,” Klaus the robot expert explained, “Lenard is only as good as the information he receives. The thing operates on artificial intelligence. That means it, or, you know, he, only learns what the Corp wants it/him to learn. They fed my location information and communication details directly into its data stream because the Corp wanted Lenard to know everything he possibly could about me and us.”

  “Kind of creepy, huh?” said Keeto.

  “Definitely,” said Max.

  While Max, Klaus, and Keeto reverse engineered how the Corp had tracked the team in Ireland, the other Change Makers (including Charl and Isabl) had gone with Vihaan, who was leading the Jitwan protesters. Years of pent-up frustration had definitely energized the locals. It reminded Max of Newton’s third law: For every action (political corruption leading to lack of drinkable water) there is an equal and opposite reaction (rage: citizens taking to the streets).

  “We need to encourage the people of Jitwan to use the nonviolent resistance techniques of Mahatma Gandhi,” Vihaan had told the group. “We will do as Gandhi did. We will boycott the Fresh & Pure water company, the way Gandhi had the Indian people boycott British goods in their quest for independence. We will urge the people to practice ahimsa at all times.”

  “Ahimsa?” Toma had asked. “What’s that?”

  “It means to ‘not injure.’ To show compassion. There will be no riots in the streets. Just a powerful show of nonviolent resistance.”

  The resistance by Vihaan and the people of Jitwan was only one part of Max’s developing two-part plan.

  “So, Keeto,” she asked, “now that we know how to contact Lenard, can you hook me up with a spy cam of some sort?”

  “Sure. I have a bunch in my bag.”

  “Why?” asked Klaus.

  “Because, dude. Because. Here.” Keeto handed Max a tiny device. “Poke it
through a buttonhole on your shirt. Perfect.”

  “Thanks,” said Max, making sure the miniature camera lens looked like nothing more than a shiny button. “Now, let’s jump back into Lenard’s data stream. We need to re-establish contact with the humanoid.”

  “Sure,” said Keeto with a shrug. “It’d be easy.”

  “What are you thinking, Max?” asked Klaus.

  “That Keeto here is going to turn me over to the Corp.”

  “I am?” said Keeto. “Why?”

  “Because the Corp is a super-secret organization. Nobody really knows that they exist. Right now, they’re just some shadowy conspiracy theory.”

  “But,” said Klaus, slowly catching on, “if you can record them admitting stuff on camera, we send it to all the major news organizations and make the Corp show its ugly face to the public—there goes their invisibility cloak. You can’t be super-secret if everybody knows who you are.”

  “Exactly!” said Max.

  “Keeto?” said Max. “When you contact Lenard, pretend to be a spy ready to turn me over to the Corp because you’re jealous that you’re not in charge of the Change Makers team.”

  “Are you?” asked Klaus. “Because, to be honest, I used to feel that way, too.…”

  Max ignored Klaus. “Make the call, Keeto.”

  “On it.” Keeto put on his headset, tapped a series of numeric keys, and made the call.

  Suddenly, Max felt a rush of warm air.

  Someone had just stepped into the dining hall.

  Actually, several someones. Dr. Zimm, several paramilitary personnel in Corp tactical gear, and Lenard.

  “There’s no need for your friend to contact me, Maxine,” the humanoid said with a giggle. “Look! I’m already here.”

  51

  Max woke up in a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped cartons of water bottles.

  Through a wall of windows, she could see liquid being squirted into bottles on an assembly line. A machine plastered Fresh & Pure labels onto clear bottles containing what was, basically, tap water. Probably tap water that had been diverted from homes by key men under pressure from corrupt government officials.