The Winter of the Robots (2 page)

“I don’t know. Something good.”

“I’ll watch that DVD with you, if you want,” I suggested. She’d gotten one for Christmas we’d already seen a hundred times. Something about a princess and her champion horse who was really a guy who’d been turned into a horse by a witch. I sat through it twice in a row on New Year’s Eve so she wouldn’t tell Mom and Dad I watched a horror movie on cable.

“Nah,” she said. “I’ll decide later.”

Penny had a hole in her heart when she was born, but they didn’t discover it until she was three. She didn’t have the energy toddlers were supposed to have, so a doctor ran some tests. He could tell that her heart was pumping some used-up blood back into her body before it got fresh oxygen. They did an X-ray and saw a tiny hole. Penny had to have surgery to patch it up. Mom and Dad and everybody else
kept saying everything would be OK, and it turned out they were right, but it didn’t feel OK at the time—not to me. I figured they were telling me that because I was an eight-year-old.

I didn’t see her at the hospital until after the operation. I spent the night with Aunt Ingrid, and we went to see Penny the next day. She looked so small and scared in the kid-sized bed. She had wires and tubes coming out of her. Until then I’d been jealous of her and annoyed by her and occasionally awed by her, but that was the first time I realized I
loved
her. I knew I was supposed to, but that was the first time I felt it. She’s fine now, but she gets checked up once a month to make sure her blood is getting enough oxygen and her heart is beating right. Anyway, that’s why I don’t mind letting her push me around. Besides, she only asks me to do stuff with her. It’s not like she asks me for money. It’s not like I had any to give her, if she did.

Oliver IM’d me that evening.

A second chat window popped up.

I waited for the explanation. “Rochelle is typing,” the status bar told me, but nothing came up. I checked the chat with Oliver in the meantime. He’d left a series of messages.

The last message told me he was now off-line. I closed the window and went back to the chat with Rocky.

There was another pause. I was about to fire off a “?” when she came clean.

It all made sense now. Why she lent me the snowblower. The way she eyed the storage shed.

I thought it over. I needed more friends in my life. Plus, I wanted to be equal partners with someone instead of taking orders from Oliver. On the other hand, there was no way Dad would let me use the cameras. On the other other hand, being seen with a girl would improve my status by about 8,000 percent. Plus, we’d hang out together. The thought made my heart pound.

Dad wouldn’t give me
permission
to use the cameras, but I could borrow them for a few days and put them back. He would never know they were gone.

“Your science project is to look at fuzzy little animals?” said Oliver. I’d waited until lunchtime to tell him that I was swapping partners.

“What’s wrong with studying animals?”

“It doesn’t sound very scientific.”

“We’re observing animals and studying their behavior. Scientists do that, you know. Ever heard of Jane Goodall?”

“Obviously,” he said, flicking the question away with his hand. “But it’s not a science project unless you’re trying to
prove
something.”

“Says you.”

“Says the rules,” he said. He dug through his backpack and found the handout Mr. Cole had given us. “ ‘Hypothesis,’ ” he said, pointing at the top of the project description. “That’s what you’re trying to prove. It says right here: ‘You should solve a problem or test a theory, not simply report information.’ ”

“So we’ll come up with a hypothesis,” I told him.

“How are you going to do it, anyway?” he asked. “Camp
on the riverbank? Wait until the otters accept you as one of their own?”

“Why are you being such a jerk about this?”

“Because now I don’t have a partner,” he grumbled.

“Ask someone else. They’d be happy for the easy A.”

“I don’t want to work with anyone else. Besides, they all have partners by now.”

“There are twenty kids in the class,” I reminded him. “Somebody needs a partner.”

“Great. Watch me get stuck with the dumbest kid in class.”

“Too late for that,” I said. “I have a partner, remember?”

“Ha.” He got up to leave, grabbing his tray. I grabbed my own and followed him to the garbage cans to dump the leftovers.

“So what’s your hypothesis?” I asked.

“That by incorporating a gyroscopic accelerometer, the robot will have better mobility and better balance than the robot from last year. That radially swinging hammers are more effective at combat than forward-thrusting fists. That a polyurethane chassis filled with fiberglass foam can withstand more damage than a hollow metallic chassis. That—”

“That you can come up with more hypotheses than anyone else. Got it.”

“It’s all wrapped around a simple, central hypothesis,” he said.

“That you can make a robot that will kick the butt of any other robot.”

“Exactly.”

Oliver didn’t get stuck with the dumbest kid in class. He got stuck with the scariest: Dmitri Volkov.

Dmitri was huge, shaved his head, and wore clomping boots all year round. His family was from Russia. He must have been our age, but he seemed to be ten years older. He moved silently through the halls, a shark among guppies. There were rumors about him: that his dad was in the Russian mafia, and that Dmitri himself had been in trouble with the law. That he should have gone to reform school, but his dad had pulled strings. He was in the advanced classes and made the honor roll every quarter. That made him scarier. He was not a mere hoodlum, but a true super-villain in the making.

He only ever said two words to me—he was walking by me when I was at my locker, and stepped on my toe. “Excuse me,” he’d said, but in such a flat way I still wasn’t sure if he’d meant it. It was the kind of thing a bully would do, but Dmitri didn’t have the reputation of being a bully. That seemed beneath him. He was into deeper and more dangerous things than pushing kids around.

When Mr. Cole asked who didn’t have a partner yet, the only two hands that went up were Oliver’s and Dmitri’s. I’d left Oliver hanging on to a rope that turned out to be tied around the neck of a grizzly bear.

Oliver tried to lower his hand, but it was too late.

“Oliver, do you want to work with Dmitri?” Mr. Cole asked.

“I guess,” he said. He wasn’t going to say otherwise right in front of Dmitri.

“Dmitri?” he asked.

“I don’t mind,” he said evenly.

“Great,” said Mr. Cole.

Oliver shot me a glance. It was a mixture of “help” and “you did this to me.”

“Maybe it won’t be that bad working with Dmitri,” I told Oliver on the bus ride home. “He is a smart guy.”

“I don’t know how he’s going to help, that’s all,” he said. “My machines are complicated.”

“He’s not going to make fake robots out of shoe boxes and tinfoil?”

“I don’t see him doing that,” said Oliver. The bus stopped, and we got off. “So where’s your girlfriend?” he asked.

“I don’t have one, but my science-fair partner usually takes the late bus. She has all kinds of activities.”

“Oh. I thought maybe she was already living with the otters.”

“Nobody’s living with the otters.”

“Whatever. Talk to you later. Some of us have robots to build.” He hurried off without his Igor. He didn’t need me
anymore. He had a Frankenstein monster waiting in the wings.

Dad was on a sales call, and Mom had taken Penny to her monthly doctor visit. I hadn’t completely made up my mind to borrow the cameras until that moment. It felt like fate was telling me it was OK. I went to the office and got the keys to the storage shed from the desk drawer. I also grabbed a Post-it pad and a pen.

I went out back and unlocked the shed. It was formidable, made of metal, with bars cinching it shut. I undid the lock and slid the door open, and quickly entered Penny’s birth date on the flashing, beeping panel on the inside to the left of the door. It stopped flashing and beeping.

There were shelves on either side of the shed, and a tight aisle between them. Everything was neatly numbered. I didn’t know how many security systems Dad installed in a week, but I knew business was slow. The holidays were behind us, and things hadn’t picked up again. I could tell he hadn’t been to the shed since the last snowfall, because there were no footprints.

There were eight boxes with the cameras I wanted. I took four from the back. I opened each box and removed the camera. They were about the size and shape of golf balls. I needed a code from inside the boxes, too, so I scribbled them on Post-it notes and stuck them to the cameras before I put them in my jacket pocket. I closed the empty boxes
and put them back on the shelf the way I’d found them. I re-entered the code to arm the alarm and locked up the shed, then went back inside and replaced the key in the desk drawer. The whole operation took only a few minutes.

I knew how the cameras worked. I’d watched Dad do the demo. Each had a lithium battery inside it that would last a year, and a 3G card that uploaded digital video to a cloud server. The cameras worked in extreme weather and were waterproof. They came in perfectly smooth plastic cases that were easy to clean. The point was to conceal them somewhere and watch the video over the Internet. The cameras weren’t the best Dad had to offer, but the 3G cards made them expensive.

I got on the computer in the office to set up an account on the camera company’s website. I made sure there was a way to
deactivate
them when I was done, then entered each of the codes from the sticky notes so I could access the video from those cameras. I deleted the browser history as Mom and Penny swung open the back door. I could hear them stomping the snow off their boots, Mom scolding Penny for throwing her coat on the floor. By the time Mom called up to me, I’d stowed the cameras in my sock drawer. A few minutes later I remembered the Post-it notes. I’d left them in a sticky stack by the computer, and Dad would probably recognize them in a second. I hurried in, scooped them up, and shoved them in my pocket. I shredded them and threw them in my wastebasket. I changed my mind, dug them out, and
shoved them in my backpack. I’d throw them away the next day at school.

I heard Dad’s car in the driveway and realized something: we have a detached garage, so he’d pass by the storage shed on his way from the garage to the house. He might notice fresh footprints in the snow and wonder why I’d been in the shed.

I got up and peeked out the window. It was snowing briskly. All traces of my activity were gone. Dad was on the back porch, stamping the snow off his shoes.

Fate again. Fate was on my side.

A chat window popped up later when I was doing my homework.

Oliver was letting Dmitri help him build the robot? He’d been my best friend since we were toddlers and wouldn’t let me
touch
last year’s robot.