The two boys went to bed in a state that was close to terror. They didn’t understand what they had done wrong—or why everything had so suddenly changed.
How were they to know that, as he had left the house, their father had accidentally swung his briefcase into Robo-Nanny’s Severity Control, moving it immediately from level two to level five? That would have been bad enough, but during the first night, the control had gone into meltdown. Robo-Nanny had a safety mechanism to stop her from becoming too severe, but sadly this had failed. By breakfast time on the second day, the Severity Control had reached the equivalent of level nine—and it was still rising.
Sebastian and Cameron cleaned their teeth several times, brushed their hair until it looked as if it had been painted on, and came down to breakfast as quietly as they could—but that still wasn’t enough for Robo-Nanny.
“Aren’t you going to say good morning to me?” she asked.
“Good morning, Tamsin,” the boys chorused. They had decided to use her proper name.
“That’s better. Now, sit down!”
The boys sat. They ate what they were given without saying anything and didn’t even remark on the fact that the toast was a little burned and that the Bio-Rice Crispies were perhaps a little soggy. Their behavior was perfect right up to the last moment when Cameron set down his knife and fork. The two of them were about half an inch apart.
“When you finish your meal, you should put the knife and fork next to each other,” Robo-Nanny said. Picking up the knife, she jammed it into Cameron’s shoulder.
Cameron screamed.
“You should cover your mouth when you scream,” Robo-Nanny said, and, picking up the fork, she plunged that into him too.
“Stop!” Sebastian yelled. As the older brother, he knew he had to protect Cameron, but he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Shouting at the breakfast table?” Tamsin asked. She reached out for the saucepan, which was still hot, having just come off the stove, and swung it in a wide arc, catching Sebastian on the side of his head and throwing him off his feet.
“You wait until Mum and Dad get back,” Cameron wailed. He was crawling across the carpet, trying to get away.
“I didn’t hear you ask to leave the table,” Robo-Nanny said. She leaned down and picked him up. Cameron suddenly looked smaller than ever. He seemed to weigh nothing in her hands. Holding him by the shoulders, she swung him around and hurled him at the wall. He crashed into it, plaster and brickwork cascading around him, then slid to the floor next to his brother.
“You’re mad!” Sebastian shouted.
“What did you say?”
“You’re . . .” The words died in Sebastian’s throat.
Robo-Nanny’s eyes seemed to have widened. There was a soft light pulsing behind them. A moment later, she lunged forward and seized him, holding him in a vice-like grip. “How dare you call me that!” she responded. “How dare you be so rude! Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to teach you a lesson, Master Sebastian. I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap and water.” And, dragging him over to the sink, she did exactly that, forcing half a tube of detergent down the struggling boy’s throat and following it with a viciously rotating Pulsa-Brush that she had turned up to maximum strength. Sebastian tried to fight back—but he didn’t have a chance. Lying on the floor, Cameron heard the terrible screams and gargling sounds. Then, fortunately, after just a minute or two, his brother slipped into unconsciousness.
Terrified and whimpering, Cameron crawled out of the kitchen. Moving as quickly as he could, trying to ignore his many injuries, he made it to his room and barricaded the door. It was just a shame that he had forgotten to take his homework with him. Ten seconds later, the door was blown off its hinges and there was Robo-Nanny with a Burglar Blaster automatic handgun in one hand and a dozen of his schoolbooks in the other. “What is seventeen times seven?” she demanded.
“I don’t know!” Cameron wailed. Math had never been his best subject.
“Who was the first man on Mars?”
Cameron had forgotten the answer—but even if he’d remembered it, he wouldn’t have had time to spit it out. Robo-Nanny fell on him. First she emptied the remaining bullets into him. Then she slammed all twelve of the books down on his skull. Finally, she tore out some of the pages and tried to stuff them into his ears. With the last of his strength, Cameron managed to lash out. His fist caught her on the jaw.
“Well, really!” Robo-Nanny exclaimed, and tore off his arm.
“Stop it!” Sebastian groaned. The older brother had recovered from his encounter with the Pulsa-Brush and had somehow arrived at what was left of the bedroom door. Cameron noticed that he was missing several teeth. “I’ve microtexted Mum and Dad. They’re coming home.”
“You naughty, naughty boy!” Tamsin shrilled, hitting him repeatedly with his brother’s arm.
“They’ll deal with you!” Cameron whimpered.
“But not before I’ve dealt with you!” Tamsin replied. She reached into her pocket and took out the laser carving knife that she had brought up from the kitchen. “Now, which one of you is going to be the first to be punished . . . ?”
Sanjiv and Nicole Mahal got back that same night.
They knew at once that something was terribly wrong. The house was shrouded in darkness. The central computer had been deactivated and all the alarms and voice-activation systems were turned off. Everything was much too quiet. Dreading what they might find, they tiptoed into the hallway. Sanjiv reached out and pressed the manual override on the lights.
Robo-Nanny was sitting, giggling quietly, surrounded by what was left of Sebastian and Cameron. She had cut the boys into about fifty pieces each, and the Mahals knew at once that they would never even be able to tell which child was which. There were cogs, wires and bits of circuit board everywhere. One of the boys’ plastic hands was lying on the carpet, the fingers still twitching as the last beats of electricity flowed through it. A glass eyeball lay nearby. Sebastian’s arm, with its own control panel, was sitting on the hall table. They knew it was Sebastian’s because the serial number was still visible.
Fortunately, Cyber-Life agreed to provide Sanjiv and Nicole with two new robo-children, and a week later, the family was exactly as it had been when this all started. If anything, the two new boys were even more perfect than the old ones had been. They had been programmed with a slightly lower naughtiness level so that although they were occasionally mischievous and disobedient, nothing in the house ever got broken.
Tamsin herself was taken away, and the Mahals didn’t ask what had happened to her. The two of them did argue occasionally about whose idea it had been to employ her, and they never came to any agreement. But then again, they were human . . . so what do you expect?
BAD DREAM
When Eric Simpson went to bed,
Silk pillows lay beneath his head.
The sheets, a perfect shade of white,
Were freshly laundered every night.
His quilt was utterly deluxe.
No fewer than two hundred ducks
Had met their maker to provide
The feathers that had gone inside.
The mattress was so very soft
It didn’t lie so much as waft
Across the springs that held it up
Like froth above a coffee cup.
By now you will be well aware
That Eric was a millionaire—
At least his father was, for he
Had made a pile in property.
Show him a field and he would bawl,
“Why, that should be a shopping mall!”
An ancient woodland, in his mind,
Should be cut down and redesigned
And turned into a cul-de-sac
With fifty houses back to back.
In short, he took a real pride
In wiping out the countryside.
Young Eric really can’t be blamed
For being similarly framed;
And tremble for at least a week,
And even flowers had the trick
Of making him feel rather sick.
The city was his habitat.
His father had a penthouse flat
With views of concrete all around,
And that’s where Eric would be found
Dreaming of the day when he
Might also work in property.
We join him now . . . it’s half past ten.
He cleans his teeth (and flosses), then
He goes to bed, turns out the light
And settles down to spend the night
In total peace and comfort, which
Attend upon the super-rich.
But even as his eyelids close,
A sudden gust of something blows
Into his room. The curtains leap
But Eric’s gone—he’s fast asleep
And in that moment he is hurled
Straight into another world.
He’s running through a moonlit wood.
The trees are close. This isn’t good.
Why is he here? He stops to think,
And at that moment starts to sink
Into a bog. He feels it rise
Above his feet, his calves, his thighs,
And soon he finds—what rotten luck—
That he’s become completely stuck.
He punches down. The wet mud splotches.
All around him, Nature watches:
It looks as if this boy from town
Will very soon begin to drown.
But Eric knows it’s just a dream,
He wants to wake up, tries to scream,
But not a word escapes his lips
As inch by inch the cold mud grips.
He feels it clinging to his skin
And whimpers as it pulls him in.
He twists and turns. A single jerk
Might pull him free. It doesn’t work.
Instead the movement’s a disaster—
Now he’s sinking even faster.
The swamp’s already ’round his chest.
He has just minutes more at best.
A living thing, the horrid slime
Continues its relentless climb.
He puts his arms out, tries to float;
The mud has closed around his throat.
His lips draw back. His teeth are bare
As desperately he sucks the air
And strains his neck and lifts his chin
To stop the slime from rushing in.
His eyes are bulging, open wide,
As if he’s been electrified.
Are things as dreadful as they seem?
They can’t be. This is just a dream!
“A dream!” he manages to shout—
The words at last come bursting out.
At once the swamp climbs ever higher
As if to prove the boy a liar.
It fills his mouth and then his nose
As down and down and down he goes.
It’s in his eyes. It’s in his ears.
And finally he disappears,
Apart from one hand; in despair,
It stretches out to feel the air.
The fingers twitch just one more time
Then stop and sink into the slime.
The next day Eric slept in late.
The maid came in at ten past eight
With breakfast carried on a tray
And found to her intense dismay
The boy flat out upon the bed,
Facedown, hands out and stone-cold dead.
The maid (who had to be sedated)
Was told that he had suffocated.
“It can’t be true!” she cried. “I fear
That something dreadful happened here.”
And what was it that froze her blood?
Quite simply this: the smell of mud.
MY BLOODY FRENCH EXCHANGE
I might as well say it straightaway. The French exchange was my dad’s idea. As usual, he was thinking of what would be best for me without really wondering whether it would be something I would actually like. As far as I was concerned, the whole thing was unnecessary. Yes, my French wasn’t up to much. But my SATs were still a whole year away and I was pretty sure that by then I’d be able to scrape through without spending two weeks being forcefed Camembert and French conversation.
But that’s my dad for you. An overachiever. It isn’t enough that he’s a farmer with about a million acres of land in the Cotswolds. He has a whole load of businesses too. So one day he’s in Wellington boots, the next it’s a pinstripe suit. And he expects everyone in the family to be the same. That’s how I ended up with a twin sister who was top in just about every class in school and a crosscountry champion too. A mum who was brilliant at everything. Even a dog that probably knew how to read.
And I hadn’t done too badly myself. A’s all the way down my school report. Captain of football. Captain of cricket. School leader. And in case by now you’re thinking I must have been a complete jerk, I actually had friends too. We even got into trouble from time to time. I could tell you about the great Peeing-Out-of-the-Window incident, for example. But that’s another story. And one that’s a lot less horrible than this one.
My bloody French exchange.
I had just finished my second year at St. Edward’s, a private school not far from Stratford. As the teachers kept on telling me, the third year was going to be tough because, of course, it finished with that delightful experience known as my SATs. My end-of-term report was pretty upbeat. Everyone agreed that I was going to have no trouble in math, history, geography, English and all the rest of it, but it was true that I was a little dodgy when it came to French. This was probably the result of having an extremely dodgy teacher. If you ask me, Mr. O’Reilly must have been the only language teacher in the entire private school system who spoke with a stammer. Not his fault, but it did make vocabulary tricky. We all assumed that every word was eighteen letters long.
My dad wasn’t taking any chances. The summer break was nine weeks long, and before it had even started, he’d decided I’d devote two weeks of it to a stay in France. On my own.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” That was what I said when he told me. Or words like that, anyway.
“No, Jack. You’ll have a great time. And it’ll give you a real head start next term.”
“But Dad . . . !”
“Let’s not argue about it, old chap. I did a French exchange when I was your age and it did me a world of good. And you know perfectly well that the breaks are far too long. You usually end up being bored stiff.”
This was true. But I didn’t see why it would be any better being bored stiff in France. Not that it mattered. As usual, my arguments went nowhere. Or rather, they went to the Côte d’Azur, the south coast of France where some friends of friends knew a family who would love to have an English boy to stay with them for two weeks after which their own son, Adrien, would perhaps spend two weeks with the English family? Just what I needed! By the time Adrien was out of my life, almost half the break would be gone.
Normally, I like going abroad. But I felt gloomy as I packed my case, sneaking in a couple of paperbacks and my Nintendo DS so at least I would have something English in the days ahead. The Duclarcs lived just outside Nice. I had seen photographs of them, an ordinary-looking family sitting by the pool, and I had exchanged a couple of e-mails with Adrien. “I look much forward to meet with you.” It seemed his English wasn’t a lot better than my French. My dad drove me to the airport. It would be only the second time that I had flown alone, and at least this time I wasn’t going to be made to wear a “junior traveler” label around my neck.
Nice was only about an hour and a half away, but it felt a lot longer. As I watched the gray ribbon of the English Channel slide behind me, it was almost as if I had somehow fallen off the edge of the world. Nothing was going to be the sa
me on the other side. I had to remind myself that it was only two weeks, that I’d be able to telephone and e-mail every day, that hundreds of other kids did French exchanges and managed to survive. If the worse came to the worst, I’d just sit there and count the days. Lundi. Mardi. Mercredi. And whatever it was that came next . . .
Nathalie Duclarc was waiting for me at the airport with Adrien. She was holding a sign with my name—JACK METCALFE—written in bold letters. Not that she needed it, as I was surely the only fifteen-year-old coming out of customs on his own. My first impression was of a small woman with very dark hair, rather pale skin and strangely colored eyes—somewhere between gray and green. It was easy to tell that Adrien was her son. He was the spitting image of her with the addition of a mustache, or at least the very beginnings of one. He was only fourteen, a few months younger than me, but it’s something I’ve noticed about French kids. They like their facial hair and they try to grow it as early as they can, even if they can only manage a vague shadow along their upper lip.
“Hello, Jack. I hope you had a good flight,” she said, folding the sign away. She spoke French. From now on, everything would be in French. But to be fair to her, she spoke slowly and clearly, and with a sense of relief, I realized that I could understand.
“I am Adrien. Welcome to my country.” Her son nodded at me and smiled, and it occurred to me that he had probably been looking forward to meeting me as little as I had been looking forward to coming. Maybe this was going to be all right.
“Please, come this way. The car is not far.”
Wheeling my suitcase behind me, I followed Nathalie to a parking lot on the other side of the airport, and of course we all had a good laugh when I tried to get into the driver’s seat. It would take me a day or two before I remembered that the French drove on the right. It was eight o’clock in the evening and the sun had just set, but it was still baking hot, with no breeze in the night air. We drove for about twenty minutes, skirting the city and passing through a desolate industrial zone before finally turning off and climbing up a steep, narrow lane that was full of ruts and potholes, hemmed in on both sides by thick woodland. I was quite surprised. After all, we weren’t far from the center of a major French city. And yet from the moment we left the main road, we could have been miles away, lost in the middle of the countryside. Somehow it felt darker than it had any right to be, though when I looked up, I was amazed to see the sky absolutely crammed with stars.
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