The Winter of the Robots (13 page)

“They do,” I told her. But the amount of functions that would go into folding laundry or washing dishes boggled my brain.

Oliver’s match was against Timothy, who had an R2-D2–style robot with an assortment of weapons. The R2 clone didn’t manage to use any of them before Oliver’s robot sped in and flattened it.

Viddy had a tougher battle, against a similar vehicle-robot that hurled tethered weights at its opponent. Viddy took a few dents, but once its chomping teeth bit through the tether wires, the other robot was defenseless.

Polly’s first match was against a guy named Nelson who hadn’t shown up. It was an automatic forfeit, so we advanced.

“Hooray!” Penny jumped up and down.

“It’s no fair,” said one of the girls who’d been defeated by Rolf’s egg.

“Sorry,” said Peter. “Those are the rules.”

They gave us a break before the next round to make any necessary repairs. In the meantime, the other robot contests were under way—eight- to twelve-year-olds with remote-controlled bots made from kits.

Mom bought us lunch at Bubba Gump’s. It was one of my favorite restaurants, but I couldn’t eat.

“Nervous?” Mom asked.

“A little.”

“Not me,” said Penny. “We have the smartest robot. Can I have your shrimp?”

We got lucky on the draw for the second round. Polly would have a rematch with Viddy, whom she’d already beaten. But first Robbie was going to take on that flying egg. The crowd hushed when Oliver and Rolf entered the ring. Everyone knew they were the two best in the competition, but also that Rolf’s robot was in a whole other league, stunning and mysterious, a piece of technology from the future. I knew that whatever happened, Oliver would let the battle proceed. We would see what else that egg could do.

The round began much as the first one had—Robbie went on attack while the egg thing bided its time, even taking a few punches until Robbie was off balance and tottering. The egg opened fast this time, its helicopter blade whirring loudly. Robbie lurched forward and landed a punch right on the flashing yolk at the center. The egg scooted aside, apparently unhurt, then went to work on Robbie’s feet from behind. Robbie turned and landed a cudgel on one of the blades.

The egg flipped, skidding toward the crowd. People hastened out of the way, but the egg got its bearings before it left the ring. Robbie tried to march after it, but the egg had cut his actuators—the cords between the brain and the legs. He just stood there.

If a robot can look panicked, Robbie sure did. The egg returned. Robbie turned at the waist to greet it, but was too slow, and the blade bit into his arm. After that it was like seeing the sharks eat their chum at the aquarium. The egg darted back and forth, neatly cutting all the wires until Robbie’s sensors were dull, his actuators inoperable. Oliver’s face was expressionless as his best robot was turned into scrap metal.

“I sure hope Polly wins,” he whispered to me. “Or the gator. Just not that thing.”

I started to get Polly ready for the next fight, when I saw Dmitri and Rocky talking to Peter. He tried to argue with them, but Dmitri was insistent.

“What’s going on?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m afraid that team number two has withdrawn from the competition,” Peter announced.

The crowd buzzed. Why would Dmitri and Rocky quit? They retreated into the crowd. I’d have to get an explanation later.

“This is so bogus!” the same girl from earlier complained. “That stupid spider is in the finals and it hasn’t even had to fight yet!”

“No fair!” the other girl said, starting a slow clap. A few other people joined in, but the protest didn’t last long. I felt sick to my stomach. If we lost, would we still get second place, even without winning a single contest?

“If both contestants are ready, we can proceed to the next round,” said Peter. He looked at Rolf, who nodded. He didn’t look at me. He knew Polly was ready, because she hadn’t even been in a fight yet today.

Rolf stepped forward to shake my hand, then shook Penny’s. “Your spider robot looks awesome,” he said.

“Thanks. Don’t be mad when it makes your egg into an omelet,” she said.

“Aha. Rivalry,” he said, as if he was observing something from a distance and barely recognized it.

The buzzer sounded to start the round. The egg waited for Polly to make the first move. Since Polly was programmed to do the same thing, there was a long, tense silence.

“Is either of them going to do anything?” someone in the crowd asked.

Another thirty seconds passed. It felt like longer. Penny scanned the crowd, maybe looking for a judge to tell us what to do. She saw somebody she knew and waved. I turned to see who it was.

The crowd started cheering. Polly was on the move! The robot took a tentative step, then another, creeping toward the egg. She lifted a leg and tapped the shell of the egg, then gave it a poke. I’d attached razor-sharp points to her two front legs. The blade slid on the egg’s hard surface.

Shocked into action, the egg went into the spin-and-lift mode. Polly halted. I prayed that her sensors would detect an airborne enemy, and they must have, because she dropped. The egg lowered and hummed around her in circles like a confused bee, looking for something to sting.

Polly leaped up at just the right time, her metal head catching a blade of the flying egg and sending the whole thing somersaulting. The crowd gasped as it dipped, one blade scraping the floor. Polly ran after it, spurting her fishing line, entangling the egg’s wings.

A hand settled on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Peter.

“Amazing work,” he whispered. “Very impressive.” He sounded weirdly somber.

I gulped. Was he upset that we’d used the polymer legs?
It looked like Rolf had also used some high-end materials you couldn’t buy at the hobby store.

A roar from the crowd got my attention back on the battle. Rolf’s egg had regained its bearings, shaken off the lines, and was now hurling toward Polly at lightning speed. Polly didn’t drop—the egg was too high to trigger her sensors. It dipped suddenly, and should have taken off enough of her legs to win the battle, but Polly dropped just in time. The underside of her bowl-shaped head caught the wing and sent the flying egg askew again.

Polly popped up and riddled the dead center of the egg with pokes of her razor-tipped front legs. One of her feet got stuck. The egg skipped along the floor, dragging Polly with it. By the time it got loose, both robots were badly damaged.

The buzzer sounded. Peter conferred with a couple of other officials, then came back to Penny and me.

“We need to talk,” he said.

He led us away from the rotunda into a side hallway, stopping by the restrooms. I had an uneasy feeling he wasn’t about to congratulate us as the winners.

We stopped by a door that read
STAFF ONLY
, where fewer people were streaming by.

“Did you have any remote controls for your robot, of any kind?” Peter asked me.

“No,” I answered. I looked to Penny, who was pursing her lips and looked ready to burst. “Penny?”

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” she wailed.

“Are you sure?” Peter asked.

“All I did was wave,” she said. “I didn’t use a remote control.”

The truth hit me. Penny had rigged the sensors the same way she did with Celeste. I’d seen Penny wave just before Polly went into action. I wasn’t looking at Penny when our robot had made two or three last-minute moves that saved her neck, but I guessed she’d done it then, too.

Penny held up her left hand, the one with the bracelet. “I had to catch just the right sensor with this. One wave for collapse. Two for jump back up.”

“Thanks for your honesty,” Peter told Penny. He looked at me. “I’m really disappointed in both of you.”

“I didn’t know,” I said weakly. “It was Penny’s idea. She didn’t even tell me.”

“Don’t make it worse by scapegoating your little sister,” he said.

“I’m not trying to scapegoat anyone.”

“It was my idea!” Penny protested. “I didn’t even tell Jim. Honest.”

“I know that you kids look out for each other. It’s almost sweet. Almost. But I’ll have to eliminate your robot from the competition and disqualify you from ever competing again.”

“I wasn’t going to enter again, anyway. I only even entered to pay you back,” I told him.

“You don’t owe it to
me
to cheat other kids out of the money. Kids who really labored on their projects.”

“We worked really hard on our project, too.” He had to kick us out of the competition. I understood that. But I wanted him to see that I’d made a real robot, one that could have beaten any other kid in the competition but his genius protégé. “Check the code. It works.”

“Sure it does,” he said. He started back to the rotunda. Penny looked at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

“Go find Mom,” I told her. I didn’t want to go back to the competition. I didn’t want to hear Peter’s announcement. I didn’t want to face Oliver or Rocky or Dmitri. I didn’t want to face the two girls who already had it in for me.

I didn’t want to go home, either. What I really wanted to do was go to the aquarium and leap into the shark tank.

“We have to go back.” Penny tugged on my hand.

“We’re disqualified.”

“I know, but we have to get Polly. She’s our robot.”

Mom found us. She was carrying the robot.

“The man back there said you were out of the competition?”

“Yeah. Something like that. Can we go?”

“I’m so sorry,” said Mom. “I know how hard you two worked on this. It must be a misunderstanding.” She tried to hug me, but I wasn’t feeling very huggy just then.

I was lying in bed on Sunday evening, feeling sorry for myself, when Celeste rolled in.

“Knock knock,” she said. She pronounced the Ks: “Kanock kanock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Robot.”

“Robot who?”

“Robot nothing. Robots don’t have last names,” she said. “Ha ha. Ha ha.” The robot didn’t actually laugh. It said “ha ha, ha ha” in its flat, emotionless voice, which made it sound sarcastic.

“That’s terrible, Pen—Celeste.”

“Kanock kanock,” she repeated.

“No, not again.”

“Ro-ro-ro-,” she stuttered.

“What, are you broken?”

“Ro-ro-ro- your bot, gently down the stream,” said the robot. “Ha ha. Ha ha.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Kanock kanock.”

“Please stop.”

“Bot.”

I sighed. “Bot who?”

“Bot you can’t wait to hear another kanock-kanock joke. Ha ha. Ha ha.” That robot thought she was hilarious.

Penny peeked in. “Sorry. I didn’t have time to make better jokes. I wanted to cheer you up.”

“You did. Thanks.” It was the first useful robot I’d seen that weekend. What would Rolf’s egg do against an all-out assault of knock-knock jokes? I wondered. Crack up, of course. I laughed out loud, and that made Penny join in, even though she didn’t know why I was laughing.

Rocky wasn’t at the bus stop Monday morning, which was for the best. I sat by myself, way up front, staring out the window so I didn’t have to make eye contact with Oliver when he boarded. I knew he saw me, but he didn’t say a word as he passed.

The bus was held up on Victory Drive, stuck in a long, slow-moving chain of cars that stretched back eight or nine blocks. Several kids stood up to get a better look, and the driver shouted at them to sit down again. The bus lurched forward a car length or two at a time.

As we got to First Street, we could see black-and-white police cars, a row of orange cones, and a single officer waving all of the traffic heading north on First Street onto the parkway. That was what was causing the slowdown. Through the treeless corner of the park we could see around the barricade to First Street. The sidewalk in front of Sidney’s was littered with shattered glass, the windows covered with cardboard and yellow police tape. I felt a chill go through me.

“Somebody shot up the Kangaroo Burger!” a kid shouted.

“It looks like another tornado ripped through!” another kid added.

The bus finally turned onto First Street, putting the scene behind us.

By the time we got to school, the restaurant was already forgotten. There were shootings and break-ins all the time in North Minneapolis, and for most kids, this was just more of the same. I got online during lunch and checked all the local news sites, but none of them had the story. Maybe broken windows in North Minneapolis weren’t newsworthy.

School was lonely. Oliver ignored me, and Rocky and Dmitri were in a little world of each other.

I tried to talk to Oliver on the bus ride home. He was in a seat by himself.

“Do you want to go check on Sid?”

He didn’t answer, and he didn’t move his bag so I could sit down.

“Really?” I asked him. “You’re going to be like this?”

He didn’t say anything, which I took as a yes. He was going to be like that. I sat a few seats behind him, watching the slushy streets through the window. Maybe Oliver had a right to be mad, but that was just a competition. This was serious.

I found Sid behind the restaurant, smoking a cigarette. He saw me, sucked in his breath, and exhaled plumes of smoke that were as dense as clouds in the cold air. “It’s you,” he said.