Cats vs. Robots #2

by Margaret Stohl

For the second time during his stay on Binar, Obi followed Beeps into the Royal Elevator. The Royal Guard stared silently at the pair as the chrome elevator lurched upward once more, with the familiar rattle and groan.

  “Do you think SLAYAR will serenade us again?” Obi said, a hint of a humor in his voice.

  Beeps rolled his eye upward. “Sweet Maker, please let the answer be no.”

  The elevator slowed to a stop.

  “Moment of truth,” Obi said as the doors slid open.

  As they rolled into the hall, they could hear the sound of loud music, but the terrible grinding rock-and-racket had been replaced by something closer to an actual melody.

  “This actually sounds . . . good?” Obi cocked an ear, processing the music. “Similar to what I hear from the passing cars of humans, back on Earth.”

  “Carsongs?” Beeps looked mildly interested.

  Obi listened. “Is it possible that SLAYAR has mastered the art of rock and roll?”

  Beeps dipped his head slightly, which was the robot way of shrugging. “I wouldn’t know. All I can say is the tempo is much more consistent, and the volume almost . . . tolerable.”

  They reached the door and peered through it, curiosity overcoming their concern about SLAYAR’s temper.

  “Ah,” Obi said. “This makes more sense.”

  The Throne Room had been converted from an elaborate stage into an enormous theater. SLAYAR and his guards bounced in unison as they watched what appeared to be some sort of music video from Earth.

  A tall woman in shredded black clothing dominated the screen, growling what Obi and Beeps could only assume were human words. Her long wild hair whipped around in circles as she spun her head at impossible speeds. Behind her, band members with equally wild hair stood in tight formation, every member spinning their head as they played a frantic, loud, but somehow catchy heavy metal song.

  Above the wind farm of swirling hair, a logo flashed the band’s name: THE HEDBANGRZ.

  Beeps looked at Obi. “SLAYAR’s favorite band. After the episode with House, we established a limited data connection to Earth, and to my great dismay, SLAYAR discovered the HEDBANGRZ. Since then, he has used the entire the bandwidth of the connection to download pirated HEDBANGRZ videos. I believe he’s obsessed with their lead singer.”

  The band played on, louder, faster, guitars screaming, fingers a flying blur. Sparks leaped from the guitars, then burst into flames that grew larger, billowing, until the entire wall was filled with an ocean of fire, pulsing with the music.

  Obi raised a hopeful eye. “Maybe it will put him in a better mood?”

  Beeps shook his head. “One can hope.”

  “WOOOOOOO!”

  In the room, a guard launched itself up and over the crowd. Graspers up, they lugged the guard above their highest vertical sensor units—or, heads—as the guard robo-crowd-surfed to the opposite side of the room.

  The music grew louder and more intense—then with an abrupt screech, the song came to an echoing halt. The flames retreated, sucked through a swirling vortex into a glinting guitar pick held high by the lead singer. She brought the pick to her mouth like a smoking gun, winked, and blew out the smoke, and the screen turned black.

  The lights came on, and SLAYAR raised his graspers up. “YES! HEDBANGRZ RULE!” The guards enthusiastically agreed.

  Beeps turned to Obi, head shaking. “Let’s get this over with. Follow me,” he said, and entered the Throne Room, Obi close behind.

  SLAYAR went from guard to guard, jumping and ramming into them, an awkward Binar version of a chest bump.

  BONG! CLANG!

  He stopped when he saw Beeps and he rushed over. “Beeps! Did you see that? Weren’t they AMAZING?”

  Obi stepped out from behind Beeps, and SLAYAR jumped back, startled. “Aaaah!” he yelled, then turned to Beeps. “Hold on a microsecond.” His eyes narrowed. “What’s the cool cat doing here? I thought you ripped it apart to get me the chip.”

  The moment SLAYAR said the word, he remembered something else. “And oh yeah, where’s my CHIP?!”

  Beeps wobbled backward. “Almost there, Supreme Leader, just a few more tests, a few days at the most, but I have something really, uh, awesome, to tell you that I just know you’re going to love!” Beeps thought about the flames in the video, which reminded him about Slag Mountain, and spoke faster. “It’s called the Infinity Engine.”

  Beeps and Obi took a step back, unsure how SLAYAR would react.

  SLAYAR rolled forward but didn’t explode with anger. “Engine, you say? I like the sound of that.” Beeps blinked, shocked. “Engine, yes, sir. Very powerful. More powerful than a hundred chips.” Beeps had no idea if this was true.

  SLAYAR nodded knowingly. “So how many horses does this engine have the power of? A hundred? A thousand?”

  Beeps and Obi looked at each other, confused. They had no idea what SLAYAR was talking about.

  “Um,” Beeps began.

  “WHAT IS THE HORSEPOWER?!” SLAYAR shouted, though he didn’t really know what he meant either.

  He had heard the word engine from watching advertisements from his downloaded music videos for an Earth machine called a “truck.”

  SLAYAR loved trucks. Trucks had engines. Logically, it followed that SLAYAR loved engines. He also noticed that the most awesome trucks had engines with a lot of a mysterious element called horsepower.

  Whatever horsepower was, SLAYAR knew he wanted his engine to have a lot of it.

  Beeps looked at Obi, his eye pleading for help.

  “Horsepower? Why, Infinity, of course,” Obi offered, shrugging. “The power of Infinity horses.”

  SLAYAR’s eyes expanded to fill his entire screen. He shouted at full volume. “INFINITY HORSEPOWER?” He looked at Obi, eyes mocking. “You poor, pathetic creature. How unfortunate that you only have a puny, horseless chip while I will have an entire engine! With Infinity horsepower!”

  Obi kept up the performance and bowed down with his front leg. “I am sure I will be truly humbled by your future magnificence,” he said.

  “Don’t feel bad,” SLAYAR said with a wink. “You’re still pretty cool. We should hang out sometime, now that I don’t have to melt you down for your insignificant chip.” He turned to leave but quickly remembered he still didn’t have the engine. He stopped.

  “Hey,” he said, turning back. “Let’s all go get this engine!”

  Obi and Beeps were stunned silent.

  “All go?” Beeps squeaked out.

  “It will be EPIC! We can hang out, I don’t know, maybe jam, and, oh yeah, I can make sure you don’t BLOW IT again like you did last time.” SLAYAR glared at Beeps. “Prepare my ship immediately!” He spun around and left, talking to himself. “Maybe I’ll even go see the HEDBANGRZ while I’m there.”

  SLAYAR was gone, and the conversation over. Obi and Beeps trudged away from the Throne Room, confused as to what just happened.

  That happened a lot, in the Throne Room.

  12

  Dreams of Change

  The next weekend morning on Earth, Javi and the twins sat together to think about how to get the Felines and Binars to stop fighting.

  Javi had wisely piled a stack of treats and snacks in front of them as motivation.

  Max picked through the pile, looking for something sweet. “Javi, this is too hard. I’m not old enough to figure out these grown-up problems.”

  Javi reached for something salty. “Try to think about it in a simpler way.” They pointed at the snacks. “How do you motivate someone to do something they don’t feel like doing?”

  “Treats,” Min said.

  “Or punishments,” Max added. “But we can’t punish Meow and SLAYAR.” He pulled out a Nerds Rope. “I’d like to abolish homework, but I can’t ground my teachers to change their minds.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a punishment,” Javi said. “Convincing a leader or someone who has authority can also happen if enough people show how strongly they feel and how imp
ortant it is to them.”

  “Like voting for a new leader?” Min wondered out loud. “But Meow and SLAYAR don’t need our votes.”

  “Or going on strike?” Max offered, chewing on his rope. “But we don’t have jobs.”

  “What about protesting?” Javi offered.

  Max and Min both looked at each other and shrugged.

  Min looked at Javi. “Like chanting and holding signs?”

  “There are a lot of ways to protest, but they work because leaders pay attention to what people care about, even if they pretend not to,” Javi said. “Two things make a protest successful. First, you need to have enough people that want the change so the leaders can’t ignore them.”

  Max opened his second snack. “I guess nobody likes to feel unpopular. Not even bossy bosses like SLAYAR and Meow.”

  “Exactly. The second thing is to be persistent. Don’t give up. Be annoying even. Bug the leaders until they listen.”

  Min sat up, excited. “Like when I wanted a later bedtime! I kept asking and asking and asking, and finally I bugged Mom and Dad enough that they knew I would never stop asking, so they said yes!”

  “Now you get it.” Javi reached into their backpack and pulled a flyer for a Los Angeles teachers march. “It works here on Earth. Come on, let me show you.”

  “As long as we can bring the snacks,” Max said.

  The twins scooped up as much as they could carry and followed Javi to the door.

  They hopped in CAR, the family’s custom made not-quite-perfect-but-perfectly-safe autonomous car.

  “Hey, CAR, take us to city hall, please,” Javi said.

  “Okily-dokily, as soon as you’re all buckled in!” CAR said. CAR’s AI was designed to be cheerful, Dad said, because the experience of driving in Los Angeles was often the opposite of fun. It was a fair point, Max and Min knew.

  They all buckled in, and CAR coughed on the motor, slowly rumbling and lurching into drive. It would be a cautious, careful journey downtown . . . and not a fast one. CAR was safe and slow, just the way Max’s mom had designed it to be.

  “Where are we going?” Max asked.

  Javi showed him the flyer. “Public school teachers are marching to city hall to ask for better pay and funding for schools.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Min said. “I’d love to have a robotics lab, even a little one.”

  “And they just told us we won’t have art class next year!” Max complained.

  It was a big disappointment, and not just because it was an easy class. He really liked the teacher.

  “Right,” Javi said. “It’s a problem that affects you guys directly. And since, as you rightly said, you can’t vote, this is one way for you to tell the people making decisions that you care about schools getting enough money.”

  Max wasn’t sure. “How do we know it will do anything?”

  “Well, that’s hard to say, but we have some good examples from the past that are pretty encouraging. You know about Martin Luther King, right?”

  “Are you kidding?” Min rolled her eyes. “We had to memorize most of his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech last year, remember, Max?”

  Max cleared his throat. “I have a dream . . .” He recited his favorite part of the speech from memory—and Min even joined in on the last few lines.

  “I am impressed!” Javi beamed at the twins. “He gave the speech in 1963. Do you remember where?”

  “At . . . a march?” Max offered, guessing where Javi was headed. “Yes! At a march in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of thousands of people gathered to show their support for each other, and the idea that all people should all have the same rights and opportunities.”

  “I remember the pictures now,” Max said. “It was a good speech too. I don’t think I could give a speech to that many people. But I guess it’s good that he did.”

  Javi nodded. “One man delivered a speech that became a part of our history, that you memorized, because it inspired so many people to support the idea. He spoke to the hundreds of thousands of people there, but everyone around the country paid attention.”

  “Because so many people were there,” Min said.

  “Powerful words made more powerful by the number of people there. A year after the march, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Our country became a better place because all those people showed up,” Javi said. “Think about it. What if he never gave that speech? What if those hundreds of thousands of people decided to stay home that day?”

  “Hold that thought,” CAR said. “Because we’re here.”

  CAR slowed and rolled toward a barricade in the street.

  Max was already opening his door. “This is good, CAR. We’ll call you when we’re done.” They jumped out and saw a large group of people walking in the street.

  Max and Min looked around. “I thought a protest might be scarier, but this isn’t bad,” Min said. “Seems like it’s not just teachers here.”

  Families, kids, older folks, all kinds of people were walking together, holding signs that said things like “Save Our Schools!” and (Javi’s favorite) “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!” Even news cameras were filming it, and reporters were interviewing people.

  “Wow, they’re showing it on TV.” Max waved as they walked past the camera.

  They turned a corner, and Max saw his math teacher, Ms. Garcia, marching with a group of teachers from his school. His stomach dropped because he forgot to turn in a project at the end of the year. She hadn’t asked about it, and he was hoping she would forget too.

  Unfortunately, Min saw her and waved, smiling. Ms. Garcia was pushing her baby boy in a stroller with the sign “THANKS FOR HELPING ME, I CAN’T EVEN TALK YET.” She came over, beaming.

  “Oh, Min, Max, I’m so happy to see you here! I can’t tell you how much it means to see all this support.” Max was shocked. He couldn’t believe his math teacher could smile. And that she wasn’t mad at him!

  What is going on around here?

  “I did not see that coming,” he told Javi as Ms. Garcia waved good-bye and pushed her stroller back to her friends.

  “Something special happens when a group of people come together to show support for an idea. People can see they’re not alone. It gives hope to the ones who need it. But more than that, it shows leaders that this is an idea that their people care about, enough that they would leave home on a Saturday even. When leaders see something like this”—Javi gestured to the huge crowd—“they know they need to do something.”

  “That makes sense,” Min said, looking at all the people marching around her.

  “Just remember that nothing happens without persistence. Sometimes it takes years. The most important thing is that if there’s something wrong, something you believe can be better, you need to speak up and show up, or the world will never change.”

  By the time CAR was driving Javi and the twins home, everyone—Max in particular—was exhausted and overwhelmed.

  “I still don’t know how we do something like this to get SLAYAR to give us back Obi,” he said.

  “Or make them stop fighting,” Min added. “We can’t exactly march to their home worlds.”

  Through the window, Javi watched the marchers scatter, thinking.

  “We need a different way to do the same thing. We can’t protest ourselves, so we need a different way to make them feel like they need to listen and understand what they’re doing is hurting other people.”

  “If they weren’t on totally different planets, we might at least have a chance. We could at least meet them and talk,” Max said.

  Min reached up to grab a snack from the stash in CAR’s glove compartment and ripped it open. “Pounce said that Meow and SLAYAR were coming with them to Earth. I know that’s not good, but maybe when they get closer, we can find a way to talk to them. Hopefully before they start fighting and blowing things up.”

  Javi nodded. “That’s an excellent point, Min.” Javi pulled out a pen and scri
bbled down a note. (People who study law always had a pen to take notes; Max and Min didn’t know why.) “Let’s ask Meow about that next time he calls in.”

  “I hope this works,” Max said, getting sleepy, leaning to rest on Javi’s shoulder. “I miss Obi. It’s time for him to come home.”

  “I know, kiddo,” Javi said as Max closed his eyes. “I bet he knows too.”

  Max hoped he did.

  13

  Meow Learns About Infinity

  Pounce tap-tap-tapped with urgency to find Meow, feeling hopeful but confused.

  How can we trust any Binar, let alone Beeps, the meanest, rule-iest motto-hugger of them all?

  He had no choice but to trust Obi’s judgment, but how to handle Meow? As he approached the Throne Room, he decided his best chance for survival was to exploit Meow’s well-known curiosity and his galaxy-sized ego.

  You can do this, he said to himself, and slowed to a respectful walk.

  Tap . . .

  Tap . . .

  Tap . . .

  Meow heard Pounce’s approach and slowly sat upright. “Ah, finally, you’ve brought me the chip,” Meow said as Pounce entered, but immediately scowled when he saw Pounce enter alone. “Pounce,” he said with grim disappointment, “you arrive empty-pawed. Again.”

  Pounce stopped, dropped down, and rolled on his back, pleading for mercy. “You are right to be upset, Wise One, but before you banish me, O Fantastic Furness, I have intriguing news. In fact, you won’t believe the things I have discovered.”

  “Hmph,” Meow said, looking away. “Only I can decide what I will or won’t believe.” He gave a pained glance back at Pounce.

  Pounce pressed on. “Undoubtedly true. Still, I can think of five reasons you will be amazed by my news. Reason number four will shock you!”

  “Pounce, I . . .” Meow stopped. “Five reasons? My, that’s a rather large number,” he said. “And the fourth reason is truly shocking?”

  Meow couldn’t resist Pounce’s tantalizing bait; his curiosity overwhelmed him and he spun around.

  “Go ahead, then, spit it out! But unless you’ve got something incredible, consider these your last words.” Meow looked down. “Dazzle me.”