Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon

by Richard Roberts

  I poked it with my fork. Yes, it had a crust just like drying glue. My fork broke through, and the meat inside felt spongy.

  The right thing to do would be to try it. I cut a slice off, and the inside did look like wet sponge, cream-colored and with a hint of pink. Mmm, appetizing. I took a bite.

  Aaaand winced. Yuck. Not the worst thing I’d ever eaten. My dad’s experiments trying to apply his superpower to cooking came to mind. Dad’s power was strictly Garbage In, Garbage Out. One less than expert cookbook, and we got okra with a mystery ingredient he never identified, even when I twisted his arm. Literally.

  That thought got me through the chewing, and I swallowed. Not bad enough to make me nauseous, but ugh. It actually tasted like fish and plastic. Was this stuff even safe to eat?

  I looked at my local expert, Remmy Fawkes, and pointed my fork at the meatish substance. “What is this?”

  She gave the mass on her fork an extra sniff. “I’d say ice scraper. Probably spiny ice scraper. They’re little bitty, and you can tell when the meat’s been compacted. Fresh, not salted. We must have just missed a fishing barge back at Europa.”

  Ray put his bowl down, empty. He’d eaten the so-called fish. He’d eaten the fruit. He’d eaten his bread. He looked around hungrily, and I reached out and turned my bowl over, dropping my meat into his.

  Remmy grimaced, and reached both her hands over to grab mine. “Don’t let the automatons see you do that!”

  “What, nobody gets seconds here?” Come to think of it, there wasn’t an overweight kid in the room. They didn’t all look healthy, but none of them were fat.

  That got me checking for danger. The nearest automaton rattled away on the far side of two boys and the girl at the next table, and hadn’t seen us.

  The kids, however, took my glance as an invitation. They were all from Dorm M, and I recognized them because they were three of the kids with goggles.

  They had those goggles hanging around their necks right now.

  The trio sat down at our table, and I waited for Claire to do her thing. Instead, all three kids looked straight at me.

  “Are you really from Earth?” asked the girl.

  “Are you really a mechanic?” asked a boy, rather more emphatically.

  I shrank down a little, feeling on the spot, then straightened up and let hot pride bubble through me. “Is a mechanic someone who builds things she shouldn’t know how to? We call those ‘mad scientists’ on Earth, and I am the best there is.”

  The other three goggled kids drifted up to our table. Remmy grimaced, sliding her hands back over her pigtails and giving them a tug. “I wish she wasn’t, but she’s right.”

  One of the boys who’d just arrived leaned over with his hands on the table to give us a skeptical look. “Says the girl who failed her mechanics test.” His tone wasn’t as nasty as his words, just suspicious. I still considered popping him one.

  Remmy bristled, and who could blame her? “I hooked that automaton up to a typewriter and a radio. It worked!”

  “But you didn’t fix it,” the girl next to me pointed out. All six mechanics were smiling now, and Remmy looked mad, but not as mad as she should have been.

  “So? I had the lights turning on and off on the whole station at the touch of a button. Could you do that?”

  Someone behind me barked a laugh. An older girl stepped up between me and Claire. “What a gas that was. I was working on the pneumos, and the whole place goes dark, then lights up again!”

  “I heard you shriek all the way from the laundry elevator,” said an even older boy crowding in across the table.

  I shook my head, and held up my hands. “I wouldn’t have been able to fix one, either. My power only builds new things.”

  “Such as?” Pounced the girl who’d sat down next to me first.

  Everyone else went quiet. A lot of everyone elses. Every goggles wearing kid in the room must have gathered around our table, and everybody else sat nearby, listening.

  Evil joy tickled me, until I couldn’t restrain a manic grin. They wanted to know what I could build?

  My belt with its pouches hung over the lower edge of the corset. Now that I looked, most of the mechanic kids had some kind of pack added to their dress or suit, although none of them had as many tools as Remmy. The only tool I needed was the Machine wrapped around my wrist. No, in my pouches I had a more impressive toy.

  Pulling out Vera, I laid her on the table and gave her a tap. Ceramic slid off her crystal ball head in strips, fanning out behind her to form her detached fairy body. She floated up, single pink eye roaming around.

  A girl in the crowd started to shriek, but someone wrapped their hands over her mouth. A couple more kids cut off their own screams. Several others just squeaked.

  HA!

  Remmy dove across the table, pushing Vera down with both hands and whispering, “Putitawayputitawayputitaway!”

  “Sorry, Vera.” I gave her a tap, and she folded back into an inert crystal ball wrapped in ceramic.

  The boy who’d given Remmy a hard time stared owl-eyed, not focusing on anything. “You can’t make a Conqueror drone!” He was plainly trying to be skeptical, and not succeeding.

  “You can’t control a Conqueror drone,” said the girl between me and Claire.

  Remmy stuck out her jaw. “My Dad could turn them off.”

  Nobody argued with her. Nobody seemed ready either to admit I’d made Vera or declare I hadn’t.

  Ray broke the silence. “How about this?” He looked completely natural in the dark purple and red suit the automatons had given him, and reached into an inside jacket pocket, pulling out a pair of gloves.

  Those gloves hadn’t come with his suit. They had flat gems in the center of each palm. Ray had hung onto his own gloves when they took his clothing!

  Slipping them on, he clapped his hands together, soft and quiet. Then he pulled, just far enough for a marble-sized ball of pink and purple light to form between his hands. It span and spat sparks as the colonist kids stared, mesmerized.

  Ray pressed his palms together, forcing the energy ball to shrink and disappear. Everybody let out their breath.

  “I’m Gertrude.” The girl sitting next to me offered her hand. I shook it.

  “Maria, Dorm K,” said the girl between me and Claire. I shook her hand too, which crossed both my arms over each other.

  “Donovan,” said the skeptical boy.

  “Jacob. Dorm H.”

  I didn’t have enough hands!

  My morphological crisis ended when a bell rang, and every kid in the room groaned simultaneously.

  I knew that sound.

  School.

  he edge of being bored of school had worn off. Besides, I was surrounded by other mad scientists my age. They didn’t make up the whole class, sure, but I only had to look in any direction to see a pair of goggles.

  I also only had to look in any direction to see something funny, or at least cute. A dozen classrooms sat in a row along this corridor, all decorated like a one-room schoolhouse. Either the wooden boards in the paneling were pre-aged, or kids had worn them down until they looked dusty and the edges poked out. A human skeleton hung on wires. Preserved fish floated in jars of alcohol, although up until now the only fish I’d ever seen with one big eye was my Red Herring. Instead of a blackboard, big pieces of paper had been pinned up behind the teacher’s desk. Chess sets had their own shelf next to the textbooks. Maybe Chess was a subject?

  My third favorite curiosity was the apple Ray had taken from our food bag and put on Miss Punchcard’s desk. She’d patted him on the head when he put it down, then stared at it for half a minute. She’d ignored it since. Someone had programmed the automaton to recognize giving apples to teachers, but it had no idea what to do with the apple.

  My second favorite curiosity was the corner of the room devoted to a giant globe of Jupiter, with moons set to spin around it in their proper orbits. The major moons all had little space stations that orbited t
hem. One of the smallest moons had not only been painted bright red, but so had the wire arm that held it out. A sign glued to that wire read ‘KALYKE ORBIT FORBIDDEN.’ Someone less formal had hung a scrawled note. ‘Here There Be Puppeteers.’

  My favorite curiosity was the giant map of Earth on the wall. I kind of liked maps to begin with, but this was the best ever because it was out of date. Way out of date. Like, it showed ‘Russian Empire’ and ‘Persia’ and ‘East Indies.’

  I stared at that thing forever while Miss Punchcard drew skeletons on the paper ‘blackboard.’ A few I recognized. She did a pretty good human, cat, and bird. Most of the others were truly weird, with no spine and skulls followed by a tube of boney rings. Most of the skulls had one big central hole for an eye. Wildlife of Europa, all of it aquatic.

  Learning about alien fish itself was pretty cool, but it only held half my attention because I was too late to the game to have more than the vaguest idea what was going on.

  “Now, who can tell me what this is?” Miss Punchcard would ask. Some kid held up his hand, and the automaton teacher pointed her pencil-tipped stick at him. “Master Fontaine.”

  “It’s a Moore’s Vacuum Shark, Ma’am. Its jaws are fused into a scraping surface, and it has the flattened body of a surface feeder.”

  That kind of thing.

  After awhile, they finished with fish and recited a table of elements much shorter than the one I knew. I was getting a hint that Miss Punchcard was more interested in their memorizing every tiny detail than knowing what an electron orbit did.

  Still, that didn’t take long before we moved on to History. I cracked a grin as everyone pulled copies of the Illiad out of their desks.

  Miss Punchcard had her own book open, but didn’t even pretend to read it. Instead, she lectured in a rather defective, fluttery voice, “Before we resume, children, it may seem unrealistic that Agamemnon’s fleet would take so long to reach Troy, but traversing an ocean with the technology of the antiquities is very different from traveling the aetherial gulfs. The trireme traveled a mere eight miles per hour. Even if Troy was a real place as Heinrich Schliemann―”

  I stuck my hand way up, and the automaton stopped. She didn’t have any expression. Only her eyes and mouth opened and closed, and open and close was all they could do. I still swear she looked surprised. “Yes, Miss Bad Penny?”

  “Miss Punchcard, on Earth we’ve learned a bit more since then. Troy was real. Schliemann was on the right track, but the city is so old, he dug up the top layer, and there are the ruins of nine cities all stacked on top of each other.” As I talked, all the kids in class turned to watch me. Ray grinned downright maniacally, and Claire’s cheeks puffed, restraining a giggle.

  The automaton didn’t know what to do. She didn’t say anything; she just stood and stared. So, hey, I kept going! “What’s cool is that it looks like the Illiad really is history, or pretty close to it. The Mycenaen Empire was completely real. We found the city and everything, and they ruled most of Greece. This was before 1000BC, and they built Athens and started the Acropolis. Troy was real too, exactly where Schliemann thought it was.”

  I got up from my desk, and walked over to the ancient map, pointing at the corner of ‘The Ottoman Empire’ where the Black Sea met the Aegean. “So, Troy was here, and the war was serious. The whole Mycenaean civilization crumbled. It was centuries before Greece recovered, and then Alexander the Great came along and conquered them anyway, right? But like I said, the cool thing is, so many of these legends turned out to be real. The Colossus of Rhodes? Real. The Minoan Civilization, with the Minotaur and the Labyrinth? Real. It was here on Crete. The Labyrinth itself was real. The capitol sat on top of a twisting underground network of tunnels. The Minotaur probably wasn’t real, but they found a whole lot of paintings of topless priestesses performing rituals with bulls, so it’s easy to see…”

  I was having so much fun, I must have kept talking for an hour. I knew I’d never be a teacher. I wandered all over the place. Miss Punchcard stood still while I lectured for that whole time.

  It did come to an end. I was saying, “So, check it out, they found a grave at Troy with a mummy who had bulletproof skin and bones, but his left foot cut off. That had to be Achilles. He wasn’t even the only superhuman body―”

  All at once, Miss Punchcard came to life. “Miss Bad Penny, take your seat. It is time for Algebra.” Then she turned and started writing on the paperboard. (3x2 + 4x + 9) – (2x2 + 10x + 1) = 0. The answer to the first half was x2 -6x +8, obviously. -6 would be -2 + -4, and -2 x -4 is 8, so this was really (x - 2)(x - 4) = 0. X was either 2 or 4. I could do that problem in my head, and just had. It was still advanced stuff for this age group, especially since I might be the oldest student in the room. Jupiter kids were smart.

  Tesla’s Nonexistent Cousin, just think about it. There were ten other mad scientist kids besides me in this room. What a huge percentage of the population! I guess if mad scientists founded a society, genetics would keep happening. Regular people sure hadn’t colonized Jupiter.

  This still wasn’t advanced enough for me. If I could pick up where I’d left off in Geometry, that might even be fun. I had other things to do, like steal a vat of charged aetherial fluid.

  I stood up, and clapped both hands on the desk, getting Ray, Remmy, and Claire’s attention. Everyone’s, really, but I only cared about Ray and Remmy and Claire. “That’s enough sightseeing. Miss Punchcard, it’s time for me to go take my mechanic’s test.”

  The automaton stood there clicking for a few seconds, then answered, “Miss Bad Penny, you do not have a mechanic’s test scheduled. Lying to a teacher has cost you lunch privileges. Attempting to skip class has cost you dinner privileges. Sit back down immediately, or there will be further punishments.”

  All the Jupiter kids shrank down in their seats, not even looking directly at me. Ray and Claire didn’t care, of course, but it was Remmy who stood up first. “I know what the trouble is, Miss Punchcard. You wouldn’t have gotten the message through the normal system, because she’s from Earth. I’ll show you the schedule request.”

  Remmy’s hand went to the biggest pocket of her pants, and as she walked up to the automaton teacher she pulled out her oversized wrench. It didn’t see the obvious threat coming, and instead watched Remmy take a wadded up sheet of paper out of a different pocket.

  Hooking the wrench into the back of Miss Punchcard’s head, Remmy levered the casing off. It had time to say, “Miss Remi―” before Remmy yanked a lever out of the churning mass of gears inside.

  All of that spinning inside the automaton’s head stopped. It stood there, completely motionless. I gave Remmy a few admiring claps, then announced with considerable satisfaction, “Inscrutable Machine? We’re out of here.”

  And just for the fun of it, I walked over to the door, turned to look at the rest of the kids, and told them all, “Class dismissed.”

  The reaction was all I could have hoped for. Kids erupted from their chairs, a dozen talking at once so that I couldn’t make out anything they said. I’d meant to walk out the door, but the first kids to do anything were the mechanics, and they descended on the disabled automaton like vultures. I had to watch that!

  I knew a couple of names now, at least. Donovan, who was nearly as skinny as Ray and had messy hair the same mouse brown color as mine, said, “They may have noticed she’s not responding already. We’ll get a service request any minute.”

  Gertrude, who was actually kind of pretty except for her blue-white pale skin, responded, “Then it’s a good thing we took initiative and tried to repair her ourselves, right?” She had brown hair, too. A lot of kids had just this same shade of brown hair. In Gertrude’s case, she kept hers tied up in a spiral on the back of her head.

  The other mechanic girl from Dorm M pulled out a tiny screwdriver, and the others all grinned at once―evil, wild grins. This girl… Aggie? Was that her name? Aggie said, “Miss Punchcard stopped moving in the middle of a transmission. O
bviously, her telegraph arms jammed on the drum. I’ll take a look.” Her itty-bitty screwdriver unfastened four itty-bitty screws, and she lifted out half of the back of the automaton’s head, putting it in the hands of the boy next to her.

  The mass of gears caught my eye. It was like looking inside the Machine. No, not quite. The Machine’s innards made no sense. They were much simpler, but did much more complex things. Even from several feet away, I got an itchy feeling like with a dozen years of study I could actually figure out how these automatons worked. Just at a glance, I could see how those hair-thin wires between the gears were the secret to their AI complexity. This mass of gears rearranged itself. The tiniest change altered how the whole thing worked, like the famous butterfly altering storm patterns.

  Aaaaaand that was it. That was all I got. Maybe I’d inherited some of Dad’s smarts after all, or maybe my superpower leaked. With years of study, the machine in front of me might really make sense. Right now, I was a monkey who’d figured out pushing the button led to a banana.

  The boy holding what looked like a mass of clockwork brains laid it on the table and pulled out his own screwdriver. Pulling his goggles down, he peered at it and started to twist a section loose from the others. “I disagree. I heard no sounds of jamming, and she stopped suddenly. It had to be something in the primary process engine.” He gave his screwdriver a particularly rough jerk, and suddenly gears sprayed all over the teacher’s desk and onto the floor.

  He looked up the other mechanics. They all had the tight faces of people trying to hold back laughs. “Oops.”

  They lost it. Nine middle-schoolers in goggles laughed hysterically, lurching around, bending over the desk, and clapping each other on the back. I had to at least grin. Remmy’s sabotage would never be discovered in that mess.