“No more recharging?” Drags lit up. He was always looking for more juice.
“No more maintenance?” Cy hated powering off; it went against something the Mom had called the Notion of Motion when she built his many spinning parts.
“No more falling asleep on patrol?” For Tipsy, falling asleep literally meant falling over, usually damaging something. “Oh wow.”
“Copy that, Tipsy.” Even Joan liked the sound of this upgrade. “Could be useful. Where exactly in our lab is this thing again?”
“I don’t know, unfortunately,” House said with a sigh. “My monitor in this room is poorly positioned. That said, I suspect the upgrade will be stored in a safe container of some kind.”
“Of course it would.” Drags nodded.
Cy nodded. “S-s-smart.”
Joan said nothing. She just watched the screen and listened.
House kept talking. “The Upgrade is not large, probably cube-shaped, a couple centimeters high, and it could be stored anywhere.”
“Any-where!” Tipsy sang.
Joan shushed her. She was still trying to figure out what was really going on.
“That’s all I know,” House said. “Find the container, open it up, and secure the Upgrade.”
He said the words like they were a command, which the Protos knew was impossible.
Their kind didn’t give commands; they received them.
Maybe House has a point, Joan thought. Maybe the Fours and the Twos really don’t care about us.
“That’s it?” Drags asked.
“Tell me when you find it. I’ll have further instructions,” House said. Then the screen went dark, and the AI vanished again.
“What’s your gut say, Commander?” Drags rolled his treads toward Joan. “The Upgrade mission? Are we taking it?”
“Sounds simple enough,” Joan said. “Cy?”
“I’m in if you are,” Cy said. For once, his voice didn’t even wobble.
“I’m innnnnnnnn!” Tipsy yelled.
“Copy that,” Joan said. “I guess it’s—”
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!
The massive PC atop the desk erupted with noise.
An alarm.
The alarm, the loudest of them all . . .
Drags straightened. “It’s Wednesday, Commander. We have maintenance this morning.”
Cy groaned. “Aw, man. I thought it was Tuesday.” He said the same thing every week; Cy hated maintenance more than any of the Protos . . .
Not that any of them loved it.
Once a week, the Protos connected to the network to get any modifications to their code that the Dad or the Mom might have developed during the week.
It was not a ritual they were allowed to miss—and the Protos snapped to attention at even the thought of maintenance. Just as they were doing now.
Joan nodded. “First things first. We tune up, then we fall out . . . and recover this so-called Upgrade.”
Cy hooted. Drags revved a motor. Tipsy spun.
Joan flew slowly over to her charging station . . .
One by one, the Protos maneuvered into place.
One by one, they began to power down.
One by one, their consciousness fled.
As the darkness crept toward Joan, she thought of the four-leggers and Max and Min. The Furless family, the missing Furless parents. She thought of House and the Upgrade and the OB’s draining battery life . . .
The universe suddenly seemed so much bigger and so much more dangerous than the one they had woken up to last Wednesday. How could that be possible?
And if it were—how could it have taken us so long to find ou—
The darkness set in before Joan got to finish the thought.
25
Stu and Scout on the Hunt
Scout bounded through the front door and back into the Inside, clawing and climbing her way up to the top cushions of the nearest couch for the best view. She didn’t know why she liked to be up high on things; she just had this need to be there.
Stu watched from the hall. He was operating more slowly after his last skirmish with the DirtSlurper and Tipsy. He peeked carefully around the corner, still thinking about their last encounter.
Fortunately, the DirtSlurper had cleared all the stray strands of cat hair on the floor and was now nowhere to be seen.
Phew. Not that I couldn’t have taken him. I so could have taken him—
Whether or not that was true, Stu was proceeding with caution, especially when it came to the Inside. He’d learned his lesson: when you saw one of those metal things, you ran.
Same with the JoJos or whatever. The metal-heads around this place—
“Did you understand a thing the old man said?” Scout called down from the couch to her brother.
Stu scrunched up his nose. “Not until he got to the part about the treat. The sparkle . . . thingy . . .”
“Duh.” Scout bit her own tail. “The SparkleTreat!”
“Yeah, well. I don’t care what you call it. I just want to find it. So come down off that thing and get looking. It’s in here somewhere, right? The Inside?”
Scout came flying down off the cushions and skidding across the well-polished floor, scratching at the wood with her nails to try to stop before she hit the . . .
KRKKKKKKKKKKKKK!
Wall.
After what felt like a lifetime later (twelve whole minutes!) both kittens felt like giving up. The hall was boring. The living room was empty. There was one good juicy cord hanging beneath a table, ripe for chewing, with a bonus paper tag hanging off it.
Aside from that . . . nothing.
“Let’s try over here.” Stu wagged his head, padding down the hall.
Scout followed his butt—then froze.
The doorway to the nearest room was cracked open.
“You seeing this, Stu?”
He joined her at the crack, coaching her as she wedged the door open with one paw. “Easy . . . easy now . . .”
The door swung open.
The first things the kittens saw were the lights—tiny and glowing and blinking—and way, way more than they could count.
But the next things they noticed were the sounds.
“Do you hear that?” Stu whispered. “What are they? They’re incredible.”
“Shhh,” Scout said.
The noises inside were . . . hard to describe. Like a kind of melody where everything clashes with everything else, especially to finely tuned Feline ears.
And it isn’t really music, Stu thought. At least not any kind of music I’ve heard before.
What there was, was a lot of this:
WHRRRRRRRRRRR!
And some of this:
HMMMMMMMMM!
And way, way too much of this:
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
“What is this place?” Stu backed away from the door, then looked at Scout, worried.
“I guess we better find out,” Scout said.
“Great, have fun in there,” Stu said. Then he looked at his sister and sighed, taking off through the door first . . .
Stu peered into the dim lab, instantly mesmerized. Everywhere he looked, he saw something he wanted to bat, boop, or pounce on.
On the walls were shelves—floor to ceiling, except for the few that were busted into ramps—loaded with all kinds of junky, wiry, plasticky, dusty, glowing, beeping, flashing, magnetic, fragile, big, and small treasures.
SNIFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!
Stu breathed it all in.
He moved beneath a table dangling with clusters of tantalizing wires—flowing waterfalls made of cords and cables and connectors—just begging to be clawed at and batted and grabbed.
There were plugs to chew. Stacks of papers to roll on. Keyboards to use for butt massages. Warm laptops to nap on. Sharp edges of metal sheeting for cheek scratches. Stiff wires for head scritches . . .
“Stu,” Scout whispered. “You okay?”
“Are you kidding me? You gotta see this f
or yourself,” Stu whispered back.
Scout slipped inside.
Lights shone on the floor, reflecting across what looked to be a slick and slippery surface, the kind that ached for a good claw-scrabbling chase, followed by a few butt slides . . .
“WHHHHOOOOAAA.” Scout was so stunned, it was the only sound she could make.
Stu smiled. “OH YEAH, WHHOOOOOAAAA!”
And so the kittens stared, frozen in place, victims of sensory overload. They immediately forgot why they were there . . . and did what any cat would have done . . .
They started hunting.
In silence, with a good low crouch, cautious tails, and cocked ears.
Stu kept his eye on a dangling fluffy ball, swaying hypnotically from the air-conditioning vent below.
Scout crouched . . . then attacked a workbench, knocking over a tray of shiny screws, bolts, wires, and . . . “Hold on—what is this magical thing?”
The kitten carefully picked her way over the circuit boards and battery packs toward a pulsing, glowing keyboard. “What the—?”
Stu wasn’t listening. Stu ran up a broken shelf—springing nimbly up to a second and a third and a fourth—until he’d scaled the entire bookcase on his quest to reach the tempting, teasing puff ball. The one that he only managed to bat further away every time he pawed at it.
But this was about something bigger than even a puff ball. It was about the climb. Each shelf he ran down felt great and was chock-full of interesting things to bat and sniff and kick over. Plus, he liked the way they sounded when they clattered to the floor . . .
KRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!
A box of screwdrivers went flying . . .
CRASSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH!
The soldering iron toppled free . . .
“This place is THE BEST!” Stu yelled over to Scout.
“I KNOW!” Scout yelled back from her perch on the shiny keyboard that sat in the center of the desk.
Now she settled in, wiggling bits of tummy and fur down into the spaces between the keys. “Ohhhhh, this feels good! Nice and waaaaarm . . .” Behind her, a monitor lit up and characters started flashing across the screen.
Stu laughed at his sister and went back to picking his way across the third-from-highest shelf.
As he kept climbing, though, he started to feel . . . uncomfortable. He looked down at his sister, trying not to panic.
“Um, Scout, you know, I gotta go, like real bad.”
“So find a freaking box . . . you know the rules.” Scout stretched out her left paw to hit a few more keys. Then her right paw. The monitor behind her shot out more and more glowing characters as she moved . . .
Stu sent a stack of DVDs flying. “But what do I do now? The box is . . . where’s the box again?” He couldn’t think.
Scout rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. Somewhere Inside. You know, one of those places with . . . the walls . . . and the floor.”
“Not helping,” Stu called from the shelf.
Scout rolled her eyes again. “Come on, Stu. This is you we’re talking about. You always have to go. You should be a professional box finder by now.”
Great. Thanks, sis.
Stu turned around, looking for a way down . . .
But what he found was something better. It was a box—a big one.
I mean, a weird one, Stu thought, but yeah, a big one.
It had four arm-type things sticking out from the sides, but there was also a big open space inside the box, just the right size for a blobby gray pudge of a kitten like Stu.
Besides, everything was so weird and wired up in that freaking room, why wouldn’t the box be weird and wired up too?
“I guess this counts,” Stu said to himself as he sniffed his way in.
“Stu?” Scout was watching him now. “What are you doing?”
“Obi said whiz in the box, so I’m whizzing in the box,” Stu said as the small puddle formed inside the box.
“Wait, what?” Scout stared.
The puddle was bigger and bigger. It splashed on his paws and his fur—but he was already feeling much better. He looked over at his sister, who was still gawking. “Come on. You just told me to find a box. What’s the problem?”
Now the puddle was getting almost too big. Stu looked around for some sand to claw over it . . . but there was nothing there.
Huh.
Weird box.
Scout twitched her ears with concern. “Yeah, you know . . . I don’t think that’s a box, Stu.”
Stu snorted. “What, are you crazy? It’s a box, of course it’s a box. I know what a box looks like, Scout.” Except he didn’t.
The box wasn’t a box. The not-box was Min’s pride and joy. Elmer sat stoically, slowly dripping, unaware that he had been turned into a port-a-potty.
“Aaahh, much better,” Stu said, scrambling out of Elmer’s storage compartment. He was eyeing his next sniff target when a loud buzzing noise erupted in the lab. Scout shot up in the air when she saw Joan coming to life on the nearby shelf.
“Stu! It’s that creepy flying bot! We gotta get out of here!” As Joan’s propellers spun faster and the buzzing grew louder, Scout and Stu scrabbled and flailed wildly, slipping on the smooth surfaces of the lab as they sprinted toward the exit as fast as their little legs could carry them.
26
Kittens Vs. Protos
Joan’s update finished downloading and her systems came back online one after another. As she regained consciousness, Joan was grateful. She never told her team, but she found shutting down for her weekly update to be a rather terrifying prospect. Waking up afterward was always a cause for a small celebration.
Today, she cheerfully spun her props up, preparing to take off for a quick test flight.
The moment she was in the air, she heard it. A sudden crash, the sound of precious equipment falling to the floor.
Joan spun around, panicked. Two furry balls of terror, obviously startled at her appearance, scrambled rapidly to the ground into what Joan could only assume was an attack formation.
Serpentine? Phalanx? This was no tactic she recognized, which only made her more concerned.
Joan fluttered, stunned. Get a grip, Joan, you can handle this!
She watched as the four-leggers (she identified them from her attack and their previous excursion) ran into each other and almost everything else in the lab as they sprinted toward the door.
Tipsy was the first of Joan’s squad to wake up. “Rise and shiiiiiiiine, everybody!” Her tinny speaker played a squeaky version of a bugle, waking her teammates. Drags’s eyes lit up and he raised his arms, energized. “Ready for action, Joan!” Drags looked up and saw Joan’s strange flight pattern. He knew in his circuits there was danger. He sped down to investigate.
A mass of fur and bones ricocheted off him and kept running toward the door. “INTRUDER ALERT! Protos assemble! Defensive posture!” Drags pulled back behind a chair as the four-leggers scrabbled through the door around the corner.
“OOOWEEEEOOOOOWEEEEE!” Tipsy bumped into spilled gear, sounding the alert siren. Cy finished his update last and rolled down the ramp to help.
Joan flew lower. “Okay, Protos, this is bad. The four-leggers have not only entered the house, they have breached the lab! While we were updating!”
“Have they no honor?” Drags said, indignant that an enemy would attack during an update.
“I feel dirty,” Cy said as he spun around, cat hair flying.
“Wake up, L-mer!” Tipsy bumped into Elmer, rolling through the edges of the puddle beneath him. Elmer sat silently, oblivious to the whirlwind surrounding him.
“Elmer is on a different update schedule,” Joan said somberly. “It’s up to us to chase those four-leggers back into the hole they came from.”
“Leave it to me!” Drags rolled bravely through the door, arms forward, ready to deflect the most vicious of attacks.
“I’ll provide air support.” Joan followed.
“I’ll provide . . . moral supp
ort!” Tipsy volunteered, which was really the best (and only) kind of support the wobbly bot could offer.
“I-I-I will guard the flank?” Cy spun around, making sure there were no other unpleasant surprises lurking in the lab.
Stu and Scout rushed breathlessly out of the lab and huddled together under a couch in the living room.
“Where did those things come from?” Stu whispered.
Scout needed a moment to catch her breath. “They were there the whole time, waiting to ambush us!”
“Seems like cheating to me,” Stu muttered.
“We have to get back downstairs. I can see the door. Let’s make a break for it.”
Scout crept and slithered out from under the couch. “Wait!” Stu hissed, but it was too late.
Drags appeared in the lab doorway, graspers at the ready. The Proto jerked to a stop and turned toward Scout, red lights flashing, graspers clacking menacingly.
Scout, still oblivious, turned back to Stu. “Come on, slowpoke!” Scout jumped when the loud buzz of Joan’s propellers flooded the room. Tipsy wobbled close behind, and Scout hissed, claws out.
“We’re outnumbered! What do we do?” Scout was paralyzed with fear.
Drags started inching forward toward Scout. Tipsy, already bored of the alarm and concerned about team morale, decided to change things up and added a melody, turning it into a cheerful sort of song. “WeeeOoooo! WeeeeOoooo! OoooooWeeeeee!” She smiled as she sang.
Stu looked around frantically, trying to come up with a plan. The robots were getting closer, and before long they would be blocking their escape route to the downstairs.
“Hold on, Scout, I have an idea!”
Stu backed out from under the couch and bounded up onto the kitchen table. “Hey dumb-bots, I got a question for you: What has no legs and can’t climb?”
They all turned toward Stu and quickly moved to surround the table, trapping Stu.
“Now run, Scout! Save yourself!”
Scout hesitated, then sprinted toward the open door. Safe inside, she peeked out sadly to watch as Stu met his tragic, untimely end.
Stu crouched on the kitchen table warily. He never took his eyes off Joan, watching carefully as she flew in circles around him. His tail was flicking wildly, and his butt began to wiggle. Joan came around again and Stu leaped into the air, flailing wildly.
Cats vs. Robots, Volume 1 Page 11