House of Robots Read online

  And it gets worse. Much, much worse.

  E starts picking up steam. Literally. I see puffs of white smoke coming out of his earholes.

  It goes on like this through math, social studies, and even phys ed, where E creates this huge scene by using our gym teacher, Coach Stringer—who weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds—as his human dumbbell.

  The next, shall we say, “incident” takes place during lunch in the cafeteria.

  Bobby Hatfield throws a tangerine at Tom Heffernon. E, the genius robot, sees the flying object, notices that it is round, and “extrapolates” (his word for “thinks,” not mine) that we’re still in phys ed class—he figures we’ve just moved from the gym to a new location. Yes, E thinks food ball is a game—like dodgeball without the basketball court.

  So E starts lobbing Tater Tots at Bobby Hatfield.

  Tom Heffernon sees E tossing the potato wads and figures the robot is also the guy who nailed him with the tangerine. So Tom fires back. He uses his spoon like a catapult and launches a glob of mashed potatoes, which splatters on top of E’s head.

  Meanwhile, Bobby Hatfield, the kid E nailed with the Tots, sidearms a fistful of lima beans at E.

  Robots always sense, think, and act. So first E senses that he is wearing potato glop on top of his head and has lima beans splattered all down his front. Next, he does some quick computations. And finally, in reaction mode, he fires back by scooping up the fruit cup and burger off my tray—and flinging one at Heffernon, the other at Hatfield.

  Pretty soon everybody in the cafeteria joins in.

  Before long, the food is really flying. Chicken nuggets. Baked beans. Zucchini sticks. It’s a mess.

  But E saves the best (or worst) for last.

  When we’re studying science. Back in Mrs. Kunkel’s classroom.

  You’d think E, a creature of science, would show the subject the respect it deserves.

  You’d be wrong.

  E disagrees with everything Mrs. Kunkel and the science book are trying to teach us.

  “Arthropods are small animals with jointed feet and other appendages attached to their bodies,” says Mrs. Kunkel.

  “Does that make me an arthropod?” asks E, manipulating his hands and legs. Talk about double-jointed. E can rotate his left foot behind his right thigh—then spin the whole leg around like a corkscrew till the front of his foot is where the heel should be.

  So Mrs. Kunkel decides to move off arthropods and teach us about static electricity.

  “Let’s run a little experiment with a plastic comb and a small fluorescent lightbulb.”

  “I can spell fluorescent,” says E.

  “Thank you, E. But this is science, not spelling. Now then, static electricity—”

  “Correction,” says E. “Electricity is never static or motionless, because electrons are constantly circling the nucleus of an atom, which, by the way, is composed of protons and neutrons.…”

  And BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

  Mrs. Kunkel keeps trying to squeeze a word in edgewise, but the blabber-bot won’t let her. He keeps rattling off factoids.

  Worse, Error will not, cannot shut up. In fact, he starts yammering faster and faster, as if someone has a thumb on his fast-forward button. His already high-pitched voice speeds up and starts sounding like he’s been sucking helium out of birthday balloons.

  “Static electricity is an imbalance of electric charges within or on the surface of a material.”

  His silicon-chip brain is so hyperactive it starts generating more static electricity than all the plastic combs in the personal grooming aisle at Walmart.

  “The charge remains in place until it is able to move away by means of an electrical discharge, such as this one about to discharge inside my head.”

  ZAP! ZIZZ! ZLITZ!

  Sparks spew out of E’s ears.

  “Shall I spell Kyrgyzstan for you now?”

  BZZZNNT! FLOOF! SIZZLEFITZ!

  Smoke pours out of his eyes, ears, and armpits.

  You may have already guessed what happens next.

  Yep. One of those sparks lands in the paper-recycling bin.

  There are bells and sirens, and then the fire department shows up with all sorts of hoses and axes and these really long, pointy poles. One firefighter tosses a bucket of sand on E’s head. Another blasts him in the face with a foaming fire extinguisher.

  You guys already know where we go after that: the first-ever parent-teacher-student-robot conference in Mrs. Reyes’s office.

  The conclusion of E’s first day at Creekside? A happy ending—for me, anyway. Because the grownups come to what they call a “mutual decision.”

  E isn’t “quite ready” for school yet.

  Ha! I could’ve told them that first thing this morning.

  All righty, so here we are on our way home. I’m the one looking pretty happy.

  Mom and Dad? Not so much.

  As we pull out of the school driveway, Dad says to Mom, “Don’t worry, Liz. You’ll figure it out.”

  Mom mumbles something nobody can understand because she is already in The Zone. Whenever she stares off into space like that, I know her high-powered brain is hard at work, running off to infinity and beyond, noodling out a list of possible solutions to whatever’s wrong with E.

  She should ask me. I could tell her E’s number one problem: School is for kids, not robots.

  Me, not him.

  Robots should stay home and vacuum the floor, make breakfast, or answer the phone. If you want to see how they do outside the house, take them to an automobile factory and let them weld bumpers onto cars or play with the crash-test dummies. But whatever you do, keep the robots away from me and my school.

  E’s LED eyes don’t look as bright as they did this morning. His head is a little fried around the edges from where his circuit boards overloaded. And there’s still some fire extinguisher foam where his nose would be if he had one.

  E’s shoulders are sagging and he’s making a weird GLIT! GLORT! BLEEBLE! sound.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say Error was feeling sad.

  Well, I’m not going to let it get to me. I cross my arms over my chest and slump back in my seat.

  “Look, dude,” I whisper to E. “If you ever want to fit in with kids my age, you need to lighten up. Chill.”

  There’s a soft SUT! FLUT! FLIT! as E’s head pivots left to face me.

  “Thank you, Samuel. That is excellent input. I am very adaptive, especially when presented with the proper external stimuli.”

  “Dude. You’re doing it again.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re, you know, sounding all robot-ish.”

  “I see. Please excuse my error. I shall strive to do better.”

  “No worries. We’re cool.”

  “Is that what happens when you chill as you previously suggested?” asks E. “Do you become cool?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  Now E crosses his arms over his chest. “Cool,” he says. “Thank you, dude.”

  When E says that, I actually smile. Just a little.

  When we get home, Mom thumbs a remote that looks like a garage door opener. It’s the controller for Forkenstein—a headless robotic forklift she uses to haul heavy stuff around in her lab. Forkenstein is all arms and tank treads. Mom opens the door on E’s side of the hybrid. Then she toggles the dial on her remote. Forkenstein shoots out his lift arms and grabs hold of E.

  “You’re going back to the shop for a few minor repairs,” Mom says to E with a sigh. “Sorry about that.”

  “No worries, dude,” says E to Mom. “We’re cool.”

  Mom looks a little puzzled. She flips a switch on the bottom of his backpack. The robot’s bright blue eyeballs lose all their color. I hear a faint PLOIP!

  E’s head flops forward. Forkenstein hauls E’s limp body out of the car. His legs dangle. He sort of looks like he’s dead.

  Me?

  I sort of feel like crud.

/>   As I head inside, I’m also wondering why that SUV is parked at the end of our driveway.

  All righty, so let me tell you a little about my mom and dad, which maybe I should’ve done sooner, huh? I guess I really need to organize my stories better. Maybe I should outline before I start writing. That might be good.

  Where was I? Oh, right. At home. With a strange car parked at the end of our driveway. But it left as soon as E was tucked away inside Mom’s workshop, so I can’t tell you any more about that.

  So, let’s check out my mom and dad.

  First, I’ll admit they’re both mostly nice. Yes, every once in a while, Mom gets a dopey idea like, “Hey, let’s make Sammy a bionic brother and send them both to school!” But all in all, she and my dad are thoughtful and extremely intelligent people. They’re both in Mensa, this special club for geniuses with high IQs. I’m not exactly sure what they do at the Mensa clubhouse. Probably play chess a lot.

  Maddie and I are both super lucky that our parental units are so amazingly smart, especially with all they have to deal with at home. More about that later, too. Promise. (Don’t worry, it’s in my outline. Really.)

  But here’s the one humongous problem: Mom and Dad, even though they’re both, you know, kind of old (we’re talking over thirty), completely refuse to grow up.

  My dad is an award-winning illustrator/cartoonist. Other dads in the neighborhood have jobs in office buildings or factories. Dad? He stays home all day,wears T-shirts and sloppy shorts, draws ninja warrior robots, and has them say stuff like “Bzzzzt!” and “Fwoomp!” when they explode. He’s nice but kind of kooky. He once drew a purple-and-green fire-breathing dragon on roller skates that liked to drink chocolate milk shakes through its nose.

  My mom, on the other hand, is an absentminded professor of computer science who teaches in the College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Mom always helps organize ND’s National Robotics Week events at the Stepan Center. Last year, there was a robot that could tell jokes.

  My favorite part of Robotics Week was the mechatronic Blue-Gold robot football game featuring the Fighting iBots (instead of the Fighting Irish, which is what ND’s real football team is called). The players were all the size of desktop printers but could make all the right moves—passing, blocking, catching, punting.

  And, of course, after the game, half the team came home with Mom.

  One is still here. Blitzen, the middle linebacker. Now when he runs downfield, he also mows the lawn.

  If Mom ever makes me take another robot to school, I sort of hope it’s Blitzen.

  I’d love to see how he’d deal with Cooper Elliot!

  Here are some other things you should know about my mom and dad:

  They laugh a lot. I mean all the time. They’re unbelievably silly.

  Mom and Dad also hug a lot, too. Like they’re still dating.

  “Because we still are,” says my dad.

  (I just roll my eyes whenever he says that, which is constantly.)

  Their love of hugging also means tons of hugs for Maddie and me. That’s fine. But…

  Did Mom really need to program E to hug it out, too? Because that’s something else the crazy robot did on his very dumb, very bad first day of school.

  Yeah, I forgot to mention it. Actually, I was kind of trying to block it out of my memory. But seriously, did E have to bear-hug me like that when I came out of the boys’ room?

  “Did you remember to wash your hands, Samuel?” he asked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “I am so proud of you!”

  That’s when he hugged me. Just wrapped those powerful, multi-jointed arms around me, contracted his hydraulics, and squeezed tightly.

  Now, when a robot hugs you, your feet don’t stay on the floor very long. You also have a hard time breathing. Plus, everybody within fifty feet of the hugfest busts a gut laughing.

  Especially Cooper Elliot. “Aw! Sammy’s big bwudda wuvs him!”

  Here’s something else about my mom and dad: They totally love rock and roll. For fun, both my parents are in a band called Almost Pretty Bad. Because they are.

  Pretty bad.

  Almost. (Sometimes they’re closer to Totally Awful.)

  Dad plunks out the deep bass notes. Mom is the lead singer. Mrs. Reyes, the principal at Creekside, plays drums.

  The most talented member of the group is a robot named Jimi who plays electric guitar and flashes colorful lights in sync with the musical notes he’s plucking. I think Mom got the idea for Jimi when she saw a Guitar Hero game tossed in the neighbors’ trash about a month after Christmas. Jimi, the lead guitar, is actually Pretty Good, and that makes the rest of Almost Pretty Bad sound, well, Even Worse.

  Okay, I need to start a new page for this.

  My mom’s many robots.

  I’m not kidding—they’re everywhere in our house, and in our yard, and in the garage, and in Mom’s workshop. There’s even a robotic toilet paper dispenser in my bathroom that Mom made out of a recycled SaladShooter.

  My mother has so many robots in various stages of construction, we had to buy the house next door to ours and turn it into her workshop.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Wow. Living with all those robots? That must be really, really, really cool.”

  Well, it really, really, really isn’t.

  You would not like life in a house of robots. Trust me—I’ve lived in one my whole life!

  Robots—meet ’em and weep.

  Scrubmarine is a scum-sucking underwater robot who cleans swimming pools the way snails clean the slimy grime off aquarium glass. (By the way, we don’t have a swimming pool. Go figure.)

  Mr. Moppenshine cleans our house. His three feet are made out of spongy stuff, towel-y stuff, and buffer stuff so he can simultaneously mop, dry, and polish the floor wherever he rolls, leaving his hands free to dust, fluff pillows, and create amazing flower arrangements.

  McFetch is our robot dog. Drone Malone is a helicopter robot that sometimes does traffic reports for a local radio station. Brittney 13 is a girl robot Mom programmed to experience “adolescent human emotions.”

  Constantly.

  All of the time.

  We’re talking day and night, people.

  You do not want to be anywhere near Brittney 13 when the new issue of Tiger Beat magazine comes out, especially if One Direction is on the cover.

  Four is a robot that performs at the level of a four-year-old human. (Can somebody tell me what the point of that is?) He says “Why?” a lot, can count to ten, and enjoys telling people to “shut up.” He could also brush his own teeth if, you know, he had any.

  There are dozens of other robots, whizzing and whirring around our house and over in Mom’s lab—too many to mention here.

  Thankfully, none of them have ever claimed to be my brother. E’s the only one who ever tried that stunt.

  But he’s not really claiming (or saying) anything right now.

  He’s just hanging out in Mom’s robot workshop. Literally.

  Whenever I get a little nutzoid—the way I was after E’s big debut at my school—I go talk to my little sister, Maddie.

  Sometimes for hours.

  For starters, I fill her in on my day. She loves to hear every little detail. McFetch usually hangs out with us.

  The day E got suspended, I had loads to tell Maddie.

  “I sort of feel sorry for E,” says Maddie. “He was just trying to fit in.”

  “I guess,” I mumble.

  “I think that’s what I’d probably do, too.”

  Okay. Time out. I need to tell you some other stuff about Maddie. But I’m just going to report the facts because Maddie wouldn’t want this to sound like a big deal.

  “It totally isn’t for me” is what she always says whenever this particular subject comes up. “It just is what it is.”

  But sometimes I can tell it’s a much bigger deal for her than she’d ever let on.

  See, Maddie suffers from SCID.
I wish that stood for swirl cones in Disney World or something. It doesn’t. SCID is short for severe combined immunodeficiency. Basically, it means Maddie has a lot of trouble fighting off any kind of infection. If somebody sneezes in her general direction, Maddie could end up with pneumonia.

  So she hardly ever leaves the house. In fact, Maddie hardly ever leaves her own room. That’s why our family pet is a germ-free robot dog. Why Mr. Moppenshine is constantly cleaning and disinfecting everything.

  Once every three or four weeks, Maddie gets what’s called an IVIG—an intravenous immunoglobulin treatment. The IVIG gives Maddie the anti-bodies to fight off infection that her body can’t. A nice nurse named Ms. Ruocco comes to our house with the bags, tubes, and needles.

  I don’t know if I could stand someone poking my arm like that once a month, but Maddie always says it’s “no biggie.” Needles are one of my weird phobias, right up there with any kind of heights. But Maddie could probably get a shot on the edge of the Grand Canyon and be totally fine.

  By the way, about one in every two hundred thousand kids is born with SCID.

  I wonder if they’re all as amazing as Maddie.

  I know all this SCID stuff sounds pretty SAD—and it is sometimes—but Maddie refuses to be bummed out about it or anything else.

  That’s just one of the bazillion reasons why my sister is my number one best friend in the whole world. She’s always in a good mood. She even likes her annoying tut-bot, Tootles.

  That’s what she calls the automaton that Mom designed to homeschool her. The thing (one of Mom’s first talking robots) drones on in a dull, monotonous voice. He sounds like he’s talking out of his nose. Studying with Tootles is a little like playing Jeopardy! with your most boring uncle.