Dot Robot

by Jason Bradbury

  ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you guys,’ said Brooke. ‘What’s with the Master and Miss? Y’all go by any other names?’

  ‘Yes. We just no use them,’ replied Miss Kojima. Her brother tugged on her arm and they whispered for a moment before she turned back to the webcam.

  ‘If you want … we tell you.’

  Brooke thought for a second before she said, ‘D’you know what? Come to think about it, I reckon I’d prefer you kept ’em mysterious.’

  Jackson agreed.

  ‘We have question also … for Jackson,’ said Miss Kojima. ‘Have you met … the Queen?’

  Brooke laughed. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask the same thing.’

  Jackson considered the question before answering. ‘Yes, of course. Her Majesty lives near me, here in Peckham. We see her all the time.’ It wasn’t all lies, not completely. He had once been in a crowd, waving a Union Jack, when a car containing the Queen sped past. ‘In fact my bedroom window is directly opposite Buckingham Palace. I can see it from where I’m sitting.’ Now he was flat-out fibbing.

  ‘Shoot – you’re kidding, right?’ said Brooke.

  ‘No, really, I can,’ said Jackson, swivelling his webcam round towards his bedroom window.

  It was dark outside, but because the Farleys’ flat was so high up there was a good view of the city.

  Brooke and Miss Kojima waited for the image from Jackson’s webcam to clear as the pixels settled. Soon the feed from the camera showed a latticework of dimly lit windows.

  ‘Omigod!’ said the young American. ‘Is that really Queen Elizabeth’s house?’

  The Kojimas were both visibly excited by the blotchy image they were being fed.

  ‘Yes … the whole penthouse is her bedroom,’ said Jackson, using his finger to point out a row of four glowing squares on the top floor of what was actually the block of flats directly opposite his.

  ‘I’m kidding, by the way,’ Jackson added.

  ‘We know you are,’ said Brooke nonchalantly.

  ‘Yes. British humour … world famous,’ said Miss Kojima.

  The four of them laughed.

  ‘My brother just got screen-shot of your … fake … Buckingham Palace,’ Miss Kojima continued. ‘We show father. He will think our new English gamer friend is

  … royal prince.’

  The four of them burst out laughing again.

  ‘So that’s how you’re able to keep up with MeX commitments?’ asked Jackson, thinking about the movie invitation he’d just turned down from his dad.

  ‘Yes. Father think it good we meet and play with international gamers.’

  The young Japanese girl explained how her father had plans to send her and her brother on a world game-playing tour. And while Jackson still found the lives of his new superstar gaming friends amazing, he didn’t envy them. Eventually the twins’ attention was taken by the presence of what Jackson guessed was their father in the room. He heard a few staccato Japanese phrases off-camera and then the twins bowed politely and Miss Kojima said goodbye. Her brother winked at the camera, leaned forward and disconnected.

  ‘Gee, I don’t envy those two,’ said Brooke.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Jackson replied. ‘But I’d still rather be doing what they’re doing than be stuck in some dead-end school.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you’re talking from experience.’ Jackson hesitated. Though it had never been a great experience, thanks to the likes of Tyler Hughes, Jackson realized even the classes he’d previously enjoyed had taken a backseat to his MeX missions. ‘Maybe,’ he replied.

  ‘I figured you’d get to go to a special school, what with you being a genius and all.’

  ‘Genius?’ Jackson stuttered. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Your blog!’

  Jackson had set up math-fu.com on a whim, as a way of testing his web-coding skills. But it had developed into a regular meeting post for the mathematically curious. Mostly it consisted of random comments and questions that visitors would bat back and forth for weeks; things like ‘How much would it cost to cover the Earth in chocolate spread?’ (Most answers hovered around the figure £;216,080,000,000,000 and were based on an agreed price of £;1.46 per square metre and a total land surface of 148,327,070 square kilometres.) Jackson had also posted examples of his favourite ‘workings-out’ and a few photographs of mathematical origami models, including his first-ever model, a stack of three Columbus Cubes – a simple variation of the basic paper cube with a dent in one corner that meant several could be stacked on top of each other. He was most proud of his Photoshopped profile picture – a barely recognizable Jackson, dressed as a ninja.

  ‘GallifreyGirl thinks you’re a genius,’ said Brooke. Her face was illuminated as she brought up Jackson’s page on her monitor.

  The fellow Dr Who fan had bestowed the compliment on Jackson when he’d answered a question she’d posted about Happy Prime Numbers. He was familiar with the episode that had GallifreyGirl stumped, in which the Timelord had to guess the next number in a sequence of Happy Primes in order to unlock a door. The Doctor had gone on to give a rather garbled explanation of Happy Prime Numbers to his crew – an explanation that had left GallifreyGirl most vexed.

  ‘How to tell if your prime number is HAPPY!!!’ began Jackson’s reply.

  Choose your prime number (any number which is only divisible by 1 and itself), say 23. To find out if it’s ‘happy’ or not, all you do is break it down to its digits – so 2 and 3. Now it’s just a matter of squaring and adding until you arrive at a single digit. If you can get to the magic number 1 – then the 23 you started with is happy! Get it?

  Let’s see if the prime number 23 is happy or not:

  First up – separate the digits: 2 & 3

  Square each digit and find the sum of the results:

  2×2 + 3×3

  That makes 4 + 9 = 13

  Just keep separating the digits, then ‘squaring and adding’:

  1×1 + 3×3 (that’s 1 + 9) = 10

  1×1 + 0×0 = 1

  So 23 is a Happy Prime (just like ‘379’ which the good Doctor used to open the door!!!)

  P.S. My favourite prime number (271097) is both happy and sad. Happy because it’s my birthday (27 October 1997)! Sad because it’s not a ‘happy prime’ – if that makes any sense :-/

  ‘See, your birthday’s a prime number! That could only happen to a genius,’ said Brooke, wrestling with a spoon and a gargantuan tub of ice cream. ‘Oh … and I dig the poetics, by the way,’ she blurted through a mouthful. She’d spotted the Pi poem, which Jackson had placed at the top of his page. It could have been treated like a sacred artefact, hidden in the bottom of a drawer or framed and gathering dust, but that’s not what his mum would have wanted. She was the outgoing member of the family, the one who Jackson and his dad pretended was embarrassing at parties, and so it was only fitting that Jackson put her poem on the Web where everyone and anyone could read it. Whether they’d understand it was another matter.

  Brooke listened, spellbound as Jackson revealed the secret behind his mother’s six-line legacy. He failed to mention anything about the car crash that had taken her away. He found it impossible to talk about that even now and – thankfully – Brooke was too polite to ask.

  ‘Gee, my mom couldn’t write a shopping list! But then she can strip out a gear box in a minute flat.’

  ‘Is that why you’re so useful with a spanner?’

  ‘Poppa’s the brains; Momma’s the muscle.’

  ‘What is it precisely that you do? Is it true you’ve already graduated from uni?’

  ‘Straight As at the age of eleven … although it’s gotta help when your dad is head of faculty. Not that we’ve seen much of the campus of late – we’re working flat out on Poppa’s latest project, see.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Asteroid robotics.’

  ‘No two ways about it, the mining of near-Earth asteroids is where it’s at,’ said Brooke, re
ferring to an artist’s impression of a bright yellow robot clinging to the side of a pockmarked chunk of space rock which she’d file-transferred over to Jackson. ‘Nickel, iron, platinum … they’ve got ’em by the bucketload. There’s a cosmic gold rush out there just waiting for some robot roughnecks to come and dig up the booty and haul it back home.’

  ‘And this is what you’re building?’ Jackson asked, looking at the comic-book-style mining droid, whose spindly little robot hands were having trouble holding on to the asteroid as it hurtled through space.

  ‘Heck, no!’ said Brooke, poking at keys. ‘Try this …’

  A file-transfer request appeared on Jackson’s monitor. The image that eventually loaded was of something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a medieval knights’ weapons cache. It was a perfectly round silver ball, made up of several rectangular sections of metal that were roughly riveted and welded together. Jackson could tell it was the size of a large beach ball because Brooke was leaning into the shot – grinning.

  ‘We’ve got a few designs, but this is my favourite,’ said Brooke. ‘I call him Punk.’

  ‘OK …’

  ‘Oh, come on … you’re a Brit! Don’t tell me you don’t see haircuts like his every day on the streets of London?’

  ‘Oh … er … sure I do,’ said Jackson, not wanting to disappoint. Now he came to think of it, before Amisha Patel had gone exclusively goth, she had been through a punk-rock stage, during which she’d come to school with a series of geometrically perfect cones kept in gravity-defying gelled suspension all over her head. Amisha’s crusty structures were indeed very similar to the sinister-looking spikes all over Punk’s surface.

  ‘And your dad’s gonna send … Punk … into space?’ ‘Yes and no. Right now we’re working with demo rigs, designed to be sent up into low Earth orbit – about three hundred kilometres up – then back down to work on terrestrial desert rocks.’

  ‘And where do you come in?’

  ‘Chief Engineer and Test Pilot,’ she said, saluting the webcam. ‘Pops likes to keep things in the family. The bots are mainly automated, but I get hands-on if something flash needs doin’.’

  ‘So there’s more besides … Punk?’

  ‘You betcha … when you’re trying to get a Chinese CEO to part with a hundred million bucks – it pays to keep the pantry well stocked!’

  The American’s life was a world apart from Jackson’s own humdrum existence. Flying space robots? He was lucky if his dad let him borrow his racing bike to get groceries, he was so stingy with his stuff.

  ‘This is my real baby, though,’ said Brooke, interrupting Jackson’s thoughts and scooping up her webcam to point it, hand-held, into the room behind her. The slightly wonky view Jackson was offered showed a substantial workroom, with a deep ruby-red Hummer off-roader parked in the middle.

  ‘Hold on – you keep a Hummer in your bedroom?’ Jackson couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  ‘Nope.’ Brooke didn’t even bat an eyelid. ‘I keep a bed in my garage.’

  *

  ‘So the car drives itself?’ Jackson asked eagerly.

  ‘In theory … yes,’ replied Brooke. She had spent the last ten minutes explaining all about the X-Challenge desert race and the robotic car she’d spent every morsel of her precious little spare time building. She’d even shown him a video that she and her dad had put together and uploaded on to YouTube.

  It opened with a silhouette hunched in the centre of a fountain of sparks from a welding torch. As the sparks subsided, the welder pulled up her visor and it became clear it was the eccentric pink-haired American. ‘Hi, I’m Brooke English,’ she said, the shot widening to reveal the Hummer H3R beside her. ‘And this is Tin Lizzie, my entry for the X-Challenge.’ The film cut to a series of shots of the outlandish vehicle, looking like a warthog with exotic devices protruding from its roof. It raced across desert and dirt tracks and performed a series of impressive jumps and skids, all without a driver onboard, concluding with a nimble 180 that threw a cloud of dirt over an unfazed Brooke.

  ‘Sorry ’bout the music,’ said Brooke, referring to the film’s out-of-place soundtrack. ‘Pops insisted on playin’ along with his darned organ. You can rev her up if you like.’

  Jackson wasn’t sure which revelation was the most unexpected – the fact that a world-renowned robotics professor with his own space program could play the organ quite so badly – or that Brooke had just offered to let him rev a car that was in a garage 8,000 kilometres away.

  ‘How’s it work then?’ asked a very excited Jackson.

  ‘TCP/IP, baby!’

  Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP was the shared language of the Internet – the way in which all web-connected devices talk to each other. As far as Jackson was concerned, it was basic computer-class stuff. But using the Net to remotely control a two-tonne monster-truck – that was something he didn’t get to do in class.

  ‘When the Challenge goes down, Lizzie will do all the driving herself, but while we iron out some of the quirks of her personality, it’s safer if I’m at the controls,’ said Brooke, back to punching keys. ‘We had real problems with our radio signals in certain parts of the desert, but our cell phones always seemed to work. So I suggested we use one of them as an Internet data link!’

  A hyperlink arrived in Jackson’s Messenger window, which led to a web page on which a number of rudimentary computer graphics were laid over a large video feed from behind the Hummer’s steering wheel.

  ‘Here … I’ll send you the keys!’ said Brooke. ‘GeekSugar’ and ‘UWillNev3rGuess’ appeared in his Messenger mail and Jackson dutifully copied them into the page’s username and password fields. As he stabbed the ENTER key, the view juddered and he could hear the throaty snarl of an engine starting up.

  ‘Feel free to gun the throttle slider!’ said Brooke, raising her voice as the dark red vehicle purred away behind her.

  Jackson moved his mouse pointer over a cluster of graphical readouts: a gear-shifter showing DRIVE, REVERSE, NEUTRAL, FIRST and SECOND, a large red button labelled AUTO-DRIVE and a THROTTLE slider. He nudged the slider upwards until it read ‘80%’. Even over his tinny headphones the noise was impressive.

  ‘Would ya … listen to that?’ yelled Brooke, the roar from the SUV threatening to swallow her words. ‘Six cylinders of road-hoggin’ robot!’

  Jackson grinned. He could have listened to the sound all night.

  CHAPTER 17

  Jackson received the call at 5 a.m., three hours after he and Brooke had punched out. Two hours after he’d managed to lull his head, jam-packed with asteroids and full-sized remote-control cars, to sleep. He was sitting by his computer, which was showing some information about General Dragos he’d managed to dredge up himself from the Web while the MeX lens in his right eye was telling him he had just three minutes to go before touchdown. It stung. That was something he hadn’t got used to. Everything else – the repetition of the mission-briefing material in his mind, the nervous way he twisted and flicked the MeX fountain pen in his hand in anticipation of the moment when it would become a finely tuned robot control stick – they were all familiar by now.

  A screen popped up over the words projected into his retina. It read ‘Incoming Video Message’. A moment later Jackson was looking at the face of Devlin Lear.

  ‘Hello, team,’ Lear began. ‘Your performance on the missions so far has been outstanding. Today should be a walk in the park. I’m interested in anything you can film, photograph and otherwise record of this wretched thief, Dragos. And that’s it.’ Lear flicked his flaxen hair to one side and moved closer to the camera that was recording him. ‘Remember,’ he continued, his voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Be the eyes and ears, my friends, but not the mouth – for the mouth doth betray itself.’ And with that, the video transmission ended.

  Lear’s performance put Jackson in mind of an old hammy actor. It might have been a little theatrical, but he admired what Lear stood for.
Here was a billionaire, with a string of international businesses to run, and yet he cared so much about putting a stop to the villainous actions of men like General Dragos that he had willed MeX into being and was intimately connected with every mission. Jackson hoped that Lear could see that he felt the same. He certainly intended to do everything in his power today to help put Dragos behind bars.

  ‘Touchdown in 5, 4, 3, 2 …’ The voice of MeXnet announced his machine’s arrival and seconds later the four dot.robots were hugging the contours of the weather-beaten Ukrainian countryside.

  ‘Nap of the Earth, sugar!’ said Brooke. ‘It’s the only way to fly.’

  The four small robots flew low, keeping the pines and the lakes and the quaint little hamlets and tumbledown farmhouses within arm’s reach, veiling themselves in the valleys and the bristle of thickets just enough to keep them safe from detection by radar. Jackson guided the team along the belly of a gully strewn with drizzle-kissed claystone boulders that glistened like snake scales, then out over miles of flatland where they stalked the copses that dotted the landscape, leaving a flurry of copper-coloured leaves in their wake. It was as if the whole country was asleep under a thick blanket, the shrouded fans on the four machines picking at the mist in wisps.

  While none of the young MeX pilots knew exactly what to expect when they neared the blinking waypoint on their displays, Jackson secretly hoped it would involve catching the rogue general with the oil-black hair red-handed. But as they slowed the dot.robots to a hover at the edge of a slim cluster of beech trees, his mind was on something else. It was a feeling that had dogged him for most of the journey, the feeling that someone – or something – was following them.

  It was an eerie sensation, that through all the hardware, the noughts and ones that networked their way across his skin, the silicon and radio waves and the fibre-optic jungle of the Internet, he could still sense they were being shadowed.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Jackson’s senses were on high alert.

  ‘What?’ replied Brooke.