by M. E. Castle
“And as if your ‘leadership,’ or lack of it, wasn’t enough cause for concern,” she went on, “I’m also dealing with a wombat gone wild. He’ll be fine for a while, and then boom! He shoots to the window and starts drooling all over the glass like there’s somebody blowing a wombat whistle in the front yard. Do you know how hard it is to clean wombat drool off of glass?”
“Look, Amanda,” Fisher said, “about your history class …”
“Wait, wait,” she said, “I know what you’re gonna say. And I completely understand. My reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo needs to be full contact. I’ll work on that for tomorrow.”
“Uh … uh …,” Fisher stuttered as Amanda spun on her heel and stormed away.
“I … don’t think she even made eye contact with me,” Alex said, looking defeated.
“It’s all right,” Fisher said. “We’ll figure out how this affliction works and we’ll cure her. But I’d better go clean these bites,” he went on, sighing. “Good luck with the mice.”
“Thanks,” Alex said. “I think I may just drill some air holes in a safe.”
Fisher stopped by the nurse’s office. Ben Gomez, an eighth grader with dreams of being a doctor, had enthusiastically taken on the job. He was looking at another student’s eye when Fisher came in to wash and bandage his thumbs.
“It’s been bothering me since yesterday,” the patient said.
“Easy,” said Ben as the kid flinched. “You’ve got a speck of gravy in there. Trying to pick it out will just push it around and make it worse. Come over to the sink and we’ll flush it out.”
Fisher straightened up suddenly, as if an electric shock had gone through him. Ben’s words rang in his ears. Slowly, a smile spread on his face.
That was it. That was it! Three had expected Fisher and Alex to go on the hunt for him. He had orchestrated his whole plan based on that idea.
So Fisher and Alex had to change the game. Maybe, just maybe, they could make Three come to them. They didn’t have to find him. They had to flush him out.
Welcome to my class. Drop and do twenty push-ups.
No, I’m just kidding. I like to start with a joke.
Drop and do thirty push-ups.
—Supreme General Glorious Khan Cantrell
“Did you hear everyone talking about the latest Family Feudalism episode?” Alex said as they walked home.
“No,” Fisher said. “I spent most of the day in the principal’s office. And waiting to teach a class that never showed up. And making sure that the Vikings didn’t invent a new blood sport.”
“Dr. X walked off,” said Alex. “After a bomb he put together out of a goat stomach bag and horse manure failed to blow up his brother.”
Fisher really didn’t want to think about the specific workings of the bomb, so he changed the subject quickly.
“Did you ever get to talk to Amanda?”
“Nope,” Alex said. “Didn’t even see her leave. I think it’s safe to say she’s not going to be in a conversing mood anytime soon.”
“I think I have an idea of how to deal with Three,” Fisher said. “He anticipated our search for him. He manipulated us at every turn. We have to flip the script. We have to make him come to us.”
“That could work,” Alex said. They had just reached the Liquid Door. “Can we talk about it over Cheetos? Keeping lunatics in line all day makes me hungry.”
“Welcome home, you two!” said Mrs. Bas as soon as Fisher and Alex walked in the front door. “How was school?”
“Uh … the usual,” Fisher said. “What about you? Good day?”
“Very good,” she said, dusting some kind of nutrient powder from her lab gloves. “I got us a new TV for the living room. Why don’t you sit down and relax?” Fisher and Alex exchanged a look, wide eyed. Their mom never suggested they watch TV. As if sensing what they were thinking, she laughed. “With all the craziness of the past few days, I think we could all use a little downtime.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Alex said, flopping onto the couch.
Fisher sat next to him in front of the gleaming new flat screen. “Did Mom really just suggest that we watch TV … because it would be good for us?” he said, after Mrs. Bas had gone into the kitchen.
Alex shrugged. “Don’t jinx it.”
“I hope you two had a marvelous day!” Mrs. Bas said from the kitchen.
Fisher mouthed, Marvelous? to Alex. Alex shook his head.
“Maybe she still feels bad about her fight with Dad?” he suggested.
“Maybe …,” Fisher said. “But that was days ago.” He couldn’t shake a weird feeling that his mother was keeping a secret, or trying to hide something.
Alex turned on the TV with a remote control that looked like it could direct space station docking operations. A lot of channels had “technical difficulties” messages up, but plenty were still going.
“There is one conclusion I think we can come to about this whole phenomenon,” Alex said, flicking between stations that worked and ones that didn’t. “We aren’t the only ones unaffected. Ms. Snapper seems normal, and some of the students do, too.”
“So maybe the fact that we’re unaffected isn’t specific to us,” Fisher said. “Maybe it’s not part of the plan, and we just got lucky somehow, like the other people who are still acting normal.”
“I guess it’s a question of what we have in common with them,” Alex said.
“I think Family Feudalism is coming on soon!” came their mom’s voice from the kitchen again. “Today’s episode has a moat-digging challenge.”
A faint squeal followed by a heavy thump announced FP’s arrival downstairs. He trotted into the room, a sweatshirt from the laundry pile he’d crashed in hooked on his ears.
“Hello, boy,” Alex said, patting the couch next to him. FP looked up at him for a moment before shaking the shirt loose and jumping up, curling into a little ball next to him. Fisher smiled. At first, the relationship between FP and the clone had been tense at best. With time, they’d begun to get along, especially after FP had gotten over the confusion of having two Fishers when there had once been one.
“I made something for you,” Mrs. Bas said, returning to the living room. “Quintuple layer cookies! Chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies sandwiched between marshmallow, with crunchy potato chips on the outside.”
The weird feeling Fisher had been fighting since he’d come home began firing off like a rocket. Their mother would never, ever, in a hundred billion years, make them something like that. She wouldn’t allow it to come within twenty feet of the house. Alex edged toward Fisher.
“You were right,” he whispered. “Something’s wrong. She must still be affected. How did she get the oven to cooperate, anyway?”
“Here you go, boys,” their mother said, setting the tray of treats on the coffee table. FP stirred from his nap and whined very faintly. As Mrs. Bas pulled her arm away, a drop of something fell from it, hitting the tray and sizzling. It was oil.
And not cooking oil, either. Machine oil.
She started humming as she walked back to the kitchen, and Fisher swore that, underneath the humming, he heard the sounds of tiny servomotors. He felt an army of spiders tiptoeing across his skin, and his pulse started to drum like a runaway jackhammer.
“She’s a robot!” whispered Alex and Fisher at the same time.
“So where are our real parents?” Panic was rising up in Fisher’s throat.
“We won’t know until we deal with her … it,” Alex corrected himself. Fisher nodded, feeling sick. Alex put a hand on his shoulder and Fisher sucked in a deep breath. He could do this.
“Hey, Mom!” Fisher said in his neediest little-kid voice. “Could we have some water, please?”
“Of course, sweetie,” the robot said, in a perfect replication of their mother’s voice. “I’ll be right in.”
Alex slid his hand under the snack tray as the mom-bot walked in with two glasses of water. When mom-bot walked around the couch to the far s
ide of the coffee table and leaned over to set the glasses down, Alex moved. He flipped the tray directly into the robot’s face.
As mom-bot recoiled, howling, clawing smashed cookie from its eyes, Fisher jumped up, seized both glasses from its hands and doused it with water. FP scurried away as sparks showered over the living room.
Alex dove to the floor and wrapped his arms around the robot’s legs and Fisher leapt from the couch, vaulted off the coffee table, and put his full weight into the robot’s midsection. With Alex holding its legs still, it toppled backward.
“Relax! Relax! Relax!” the robot shrieked in a terrifyingly cheerful tone as it thrashed around on the floor. After Fisher found the access panel behind its neck, opened it, and yanked its control wiring, the robot’s hand rocketed out of its arm, punching a hole right through the middle of the new TV.
With the robot disabled, they searched the house to see if their real parents were tied up somewhere. But there was no sign of them. Fisher was just beginning to fear that something unspeakable had happened to them when he turned up a note on the kitchen counter in his father’s handwriting, saying they’d gone to try and stock up on nonperishable provisions, since the fridge was still on strike.
Fisher and Alex decided to hide the broken new TV in the best place to camouflage it—under the pile of other TVs that was still in the yard. The mom-bot, they needed to study. Dragging the robot parent up the stairs into Fisher’s closet was a challenging task, but cleaning up the trail of cookie crumbs it left in its wake made it almost worth it, especially for FP.
Almost as soon as they’d managed to stuff the mom-bot in Fisher’s closet, they heard the front door opening. They hustled the closet closed, left Fisher’s room, and headed downstairs.
Their parents walked in wearily, their clothes rumpled, each carrying a pitifully small grocery bag.
“Not a lot of luck,” Mr. Bas said. “The place had been looted earlier in the day.” Fisher and Alex followed the parents into the kitchen and saw the sorry returns of the expedition: a can of sliced beets, an orange, two boxes of cereal, and a box of frozen chicken wings.
“We’ll have to eat these tonight,” Mrs. Bas said, holding the wings. “But with no oven or microwave …” Everyone’s eyes drifted to Lord Burnside, whose own eye spots looked back with what Fisher supposed was a toaster’s equivalent of disgust and fear.
“Well,” said Lord Burnside, “I—I … suppose, if there are no alternatives, I shall do my best to serve.…”
“Maybe I can rig up some lab equipment to cook with,” said Fisher.
“A very good idea,” said Mrs. Bas. “I’ve been so busy trying to get work done in the middle of this mess that it didn’t occur to me. If you could put together a cooking apparatus, I’ll get some of that giant rice from the garden.”
“Yeah, what have you been working on, Mom?” Fisher asked.
Mrs. Bas began to chop vegetables, “Fisher, you know I cannot disclose my work. Would you mind putting some bread in the coaster? I mean, toaster,” she said with a wink.
“I’ll go see if I can do something with one of my specimen coolers,” said Mr. Bas, giving Mrs. Bas a look.
“I’ll help,” said Alex.
When the other three had departed, Fisher walked up to the toaster, inspecting Lord Burnside closely. He wondered what his mom meant as he dropped in a slice of sourdough, and gave the toaster a pat.
“Oh, thank you, Master Fisher,” Lord Burnside said, relief billowing from him in the form of pleasant-smelling sourdough scents. “You are a just and kind fellow, as I always knew.”
“Just trying to do something nice,” Fisher said. “You’re the only member of our kitchen who’s stayed loyal recently, and I think you earned it.”
“And ever loyal shall I remain, dear boy,” said Lord Burnside. “Thank you again.”
* * *
After dinner, Fisher and Alex sat in Fisher’s room as FP snoozed on the floor, a fleck of buffalo sauce on his lower lip. The mom-bot lay, mostly disassembled, between them. Underneath the incredibly realistic superficial resemblance to Fisher’s mom, it was like many of the bots they’d fought in TechX and in LA.
“This is interesting,” said Fisher, finishing an exam of its cranium. “There’s no transceiver.”
“It can’t send or receive a radio signal?” Alex said. “That seems … primitive.”
“Not primitive,” Fisher said. “Paranoid. If it’s captured, you can’t trace it back to its controller. There’s no signal to follow.”
“And that means,” Alex said, looking up at Fisher with excitement glinting in his eyes, “it would have to get its orders and report back in person.”
“This is exactly the kind of wild card we need,” Fisher said slowly. “I’m not much of a programmer, but I’ve reset TechX robots before. Three doesn’t know that. He can’t. With luck, if I can reset this one, its first action will be to report to its controller for orders.” He took a deep breath. “Three will walk into our trap.”
Only use yourself as bait if you’re prepared to be eaten.
—Vic Daring, Issue #201
Alex tiptoed into Fisher’s room late that night, wearing all black and carrying an overfull backpack on his shoulder. Fisher was just slipping the last item into his own bag, a tiny pouch of his instant shrub seeds. It was the next step up from the Shrub-in-a-Backpack, allowing his backpack to be used for actually carrying things. FP was walking in excited little circles around Fisher as he packed.
The mom-bot lay on the floor, reassembled, wrapped in a big black bag secured on each side with a rope. The bag was normally used to haul large pieces of lab equipment out into the field. Fisher kept irrationally imagining that the robot would suddenly sit bolt upright, like a vampire awakening in its coffin.
They would take the deactivated robot outside, reset it, and follow it, hopefully to Three’s compound. Fisher wished they had a plan for how they would proceed once they got there, but without knowing where Three’s base was, how big it was, or what it contained, that was impossible.
Alex looked warily at FP. “What if the pig tries to follow us?”
“I’ve got something that should do the trick,” said Fisher, zipping up a new dark green fleece. “Are you ready?”
“As ready as it’s possible to be, I think,” said Alex. “I’ve got a lot of stuff in here. Something’s got to work.”
“Hope so,” Fisher said.
“Okay,” said Alex. “I’m going to extend the ladder.”
Fisher went and stood by the door as Alex pressed the button to extend the ladder from Fisher’s window out over the yard and the wall. The boys had decided it was a useful gadget, even though Alex’s existence was no longer a secret.
Fisher raised a thimble-sized object to his ear, meant to enhance his hearing by 175 percent. He listened to make sure that the ladder’s muffled squeaks hadn’t awoken their parents.
All he heard was a pair of snores, one high and one low, sawing in tandem. That, and Lord Burnside humming English folk tunes to himself.
“It’s out,” said Alex. “So how about FP? What’ve you got to keep him out of our hair?”
Fisher opened his closet door. Inside was a wheeled contraption, which he pulled into the middle of the room. It was assembled around his old popcorn gun. The original had been lost during his infiltration of TechX, but this new model was polished and ready to go.
FP’s ears began twitching excitedly.
The new and improved popcorn gun was set into a rolling frame that pointed it straight up in the air. A metal coil wrapped around its trigger and was connected to a series of gears and cogs, and on the outside of the frame was a simple analog timer dial. Fisher turned the dial to its maximum setting.
With creaks and pops, the gears started to turn. After fifteen seconds, the machine’s coil briefly tightened around the trigger and a few pieces of popcorn spat from the gun, falling to the floor. FP’s eyes locked on to them and he dove like a hawk
onto the nearest kernel. He munched for a few seconds, looking happily up at Fisher, before trotting to the next.
“This will spit out a few kernels every fifteen seconds for at least a couple of hours,” Fisher said. “It’ll keep him occupied.”
A few more kernels popped, and FP leap-glided to try and catch them, opening his mouth in anticipation. The kernels bounced squarely off his snout, and FP tumbled to the ground and rolled a somersault. He scrunched up his eyes and shook his head in surprise, sniffling as the kernels fell around him. He grabbed them up from the floor and awaited the next round.
With FP staring at the popcorn gun machine as if it were a sorcerous fountain pouring forth the elixir of eternal life, Fisher led the way down and across the ladder, holding the mom-bot by one end. Alex took the other end and gently lowered it out the window. It was heavy, and after only a few minutes, Fisher’s arms were shaking. They stopped frequently to catch their breaths as they passed slowly over the garden, toward the wall that divided the Bas property from the street.
The only things Fisher could hear as he inched his way along the downward-sloping ladder were the faint creak of the metal and plastic beneath him, and Alex’s careful breathing just behind him.
There was only one benefit, as far as he could see, to the crazy pox. Ordinarily, Fisher and Alex had to be extremely careful traveling along the ladder so as not to alert any of the security robots that patrolled the yard. But since the kitchen appliances had started acting up, Fisher’s parents had disabled almost all of their robotic equipment. Even if the times were getting more dangerous, it was better to have no security against burglars than a security system that had already broken down your door and stuck you to the wall with instant plaster by the time the burglars arrived.
They reached the end of the ladder at last, and Fisher crouched on top of the wall, looking down the street one way and then the other.
“Okay,” he whispered back. “We’re clear. Now push!”
Alex pushed as Fisher pulled, and together they shoved the mom-bot over the wall. It landed on the sidewalk below, its impact muffled by the thick, padded bag. Fisher dropped next to it, and Alex landed softly a moment later.