It was a perfect excuse for me, Claire, and Ray to huddle together. Plus, we had the measurements and calculations of each experiment finished in half the time anybody else did and didn’t even have to concentrate. It gave us time to talk.
And we had a much more interesting scientific conundrum on our hands. On my wrist.
“You still don’t remember what it does?” Claire asked as she scribbled down the calculated force of our slingshot.
“No! It’s not a blank. I remember putting it together, but I can’t make sense of it. I didn’t know any words for what I was doing,” I whispered.
“You may not remember long. Memories you don’t have words for disappear quickly,” Ray suggested as he smacked a toy car against a wall.
I measured the distance it traveled back. “There has to be some superhuman dexterity thrown in. These levers and gears are beyond tiny.” I peered into one of the open panels at the bracelet’s intricate guts, my heart burning with pride.
“I hope you can take it off,” Claire pointed out. We were all feeling pretty whimsical.
I was sure I could, but I wasn’t going to experiment while performing a lab experiment. It would have to wait until I had real freedom, during lunch!
I only had the patience to go through the cafeteria line because I knew I’d regret not eating big time by the time I got home. We get a lot of Bel Air kids whose parents don’t go for the private school thing, but the food is still bland. So bland that I picked up a couple of pieces of cafeteria pizza without enthusiasm. It’s all just different colors of cardboard.
Claire had to be developing superhuman lateness superpowers. Ray watched me and my machine approach the table like a hawk ready to pounce, but Claire was nowhere to be seen—
until the instant I sat down she walked in the door and made an impatient beeline to settle beside me.
“It can’t just be a bracelet. Look at all that machinery. And we saw it move!” Claire cooed over the machine. It was rapidly becoming The Machine in my head, the mystery device my life now orbited around.
Ray leaned over the table, adjusting his glasses like magnifying lenses as he squinted into one of the open panels. “The internals are purely mechanical. I noticed that while you were building. It doesn’t run on electricity. Your first doomsday machine is a malevolent, inscrutable wristwatch.” I left my right arm stretched out over the table for them to study while I ate limp brown cardboard with gooey yellow cardboard on top of it. I wasn’t going to ask for my hand back from Ray, nope. Not even after the “doomsday machine” crack.
“Does it run at all, now? It moved before. How do you trigger it?” Claire asked.
I washed the “pizza” down with milk. At least milk is milk. I minded more that having to eat something had kept me from my own investigations. Wiping my hand on a napkin to get less grease on The Machine, I made my first attempt to slide it off my wrist. That didn’t work. I was pretty sure the segments clenched tighter together when I pulled.
“It’s not stuck there, is it? Like, forever?” Claire asked, suddenly anxious.
I breezed that question aside. “Worst comes to worst, my Dad can get it off. I knew what I was making when I made it, even if I didn’t have words. I’m positive it wasn’t meant to hurt me.”
“We can mark off ‘malevolent,’ but we’re still left with ‘inscrutable.’“ Ray chuckled.
“Maybe your powers don’t have to do with inventing in general, but with this—” Claire started to suggest, but she suddenly stopped. Half the conversations in the cafeteria stopped when some adults opened the doors.
Not just any adults. My Mom and Dad. Brian “Brainy” Akk and The Audit didn’t have much of a secret identity, so a lot of the kids knew on sight that these were my parents.
I ought to have been mortified and terrified, but instead I had trouble keeping my expression solemn and apologetic like itought to be. I stood up, grabbed my book bag, and walked around to the door to meet them. Nobody in the crowd said anything mean. Maybe they knew, in some secret mob psychology way, that this was my moment of triumph rather than shame.
Ray and Claire fell in behind me. I wanted to tell them not to. As much as I no longer cared, there might be serious trouble on the way. I’d like to have kept Ray and Claire out of that, but that would be taking away their chance to share my triumph.
No teachers waited with my folks out in the hallway. Superheroes had to be trustworthy, right? Mom and Dad were trying to look noncommittal. They didn’t know what was going on, yet. Mom’s poker face is amazing, but Dad looked worried. “Penny, we got a call from the Principal’s Office. You told them you missed math class because of some kind of nervous collapse.” My heart thumped in my chest. He had the most serious expression in the world, and the sharply planed face for it. I had the best parents.
I couldn’t leave them in suspense. As solemnly and respectfully I could, I explained, “It’s true. I’ve been going crazy with stress, but I think that was a side effect. I had to get a little crazy to make this.” I held up my wrist and grinned. I couldn’t hold it in anymore. They’d understand, now.
They knew what it meant, but they didn’t want to just leap to the obvious conclusion. “You built this yourself? What does it do?” asked my Dad, taking my hand and holding my wrist up high so he could peek in at the machinery.
He ought to have turned around and told me what it did. That he didn’t got my Mom’s notice. “Even if it’s just jewelry, Brian, that’s not middle-school level craftsmanship. That’s not even prodigy-level craftsmanship.” Her eyes turned on me with her professional look. Yikes, now I knew why criminals sometimes surrendered without a fight. I felt like I’d been disassembled and weighed and every part tagged. “What tools did you use, and how long did it take?”
“I had power tools from the shop, and about half an hour?” I glanced at Ray and Claire for confirmation, and they nodded.
“Less than forty-five minutes, Mrs. Akk. We got Claire back to class before the bell,” Ray agreed.
“Even if it’s junk…” Mom began. She didn’t get to finish.
“Stop fighting the obvious, Beebee. Your daughter’s powers have arrived! Congratulations, darling!” Claire’s Mom squealed. I was suddenly engulfed in platinum blonde hair and strong, slender arms. Only Mom had seen her coming. Well, only Mom didn’t look surprised.
“We don’t know anything for sure yet, Misty,” Mom argued. Even she was starting to crack a smile. This argument was lost before it started.
“Can you think of any explanation that does not involve Penny having super powers?” The Minx shot back. She set me down, but gave me another quick hug. “This is the proudest moment of your life so far, Penny. Throw caution to the wind and enjoy it.”
“As for you two…” Claire’s Mom went on, rounding on Claire and Ray. She gave both of them a playful hair ruffle, and praised, “You two are such good friends. You’re not in any trouble at all, Claire. Skipping class to help a friend you’re worried about? Getting to see that shining moment when her power comes out for the first time? I’m proud of you. Both of you.”
That last came with a wink at Ray, who looked stunned. I could tell Dad was staring, just less obviously. Rather than having to work to use it, Claire’s Mom had to work not to use her powers. Her control must be slipping today. I hope I look that good when I’m nearing forty, but she had to be using superpowers to keep a boy as young as Ray mesmerized.
I was one of those people with super powers now!
My Dad had more self-control than Ray. He pulled his attention back to The Machine on my wrist. “What does it do?” he asked. The million-dollar question, right there.
“I don’t actually know,” I admitted.
“We’ll take you home and analyze it, Princess. We ought to do that anyway,” Dad assured me, placing his hand on my backpack to start me moving.
“Mom?” I asked. She understood what I meant and nodded. There’d be five more bucks in the Princess jar when
we got home.
“You two are finishing the school day. Sorry, kids!” Claire’s Mom told Claire and Ray as I walked away from them.
Being sent home from school early never felt so much like a victory parade.
Keeping my hands off of The Machine during the ride home was a labor of Hercules. Keeping from bouncing off the ceiling of the car was a labor of Hercules.
“Go over the process of building it for me, Pumpkin,” Dad urged from the front seat.
“Mom?”
“One Princess, one Pumpkin,” she acknowledged.
“The question stands,” my father insisted.
“There’s not much to go over. I’ve been getting more and more stressed out, and I felt like building that power-revealing device would fix it. This morning, it got so bad I cut class to try to build it. It was the only thing I could think about. Then I got some tools, and, when I figured out they weren’t enough, I got an idea of how to fix that. Then I ran out of words. That’s why I don’t know what it does. I knew what I was making, but I don’t know what that knowledge meant. I was really wrapped up in it. Totally obsessed, lost track of the world.” That was pretty much all I knew.
“That’s not my power,” Dad mused.
“It might be an early stage. She has the comprehension skill you do, but she doesn’t know enough science yet to communicate that comprehension with her language centers,” Mom countered. I ought to have felt incensed that I’d been brushed off with “doesn’t know enough science,” but compared to Dad? No, I didn’t know enough science.
We pulled into the driveway. Dad set a speed record getting out of the car.
“To my workroom, young lady. We’re going to find out what you built, and what you can do,” he ordered.
Maybe a “young lady” jar next to the other two?
I beat Dad to the lab. Workroom, laboratory, whatever you want to call it. Me, I’m getting a lab. Since Dad’s specialty is applying other people’s theories rather than research, it was actually a fancier version of the school’s shop class. Much, much fancier.
I had to wait, hands clasped and grinning like a mad scientist, while he unlocked the door. I felt like I’d float right up to the ceiling. The master was going to take a look at my handiwork and tell me what it did! Eagerness scampered up and down my spine. Come on, door!
Dad was in a hurry too, but not enough. It must have taken him thirty seconds to unlock the door, turn on the lights, and ask me, “Okay, Pumpkin. Can you take off your creation safely so I can have a look at it?”
Good question. “I don’t know. I think so? Let me try.”
So I tried. The bracelet was too tight to slide over the wider bones of my wrist. In fact, the segments squeezed together, getting tighter, when I tried. Not a great sign, that. Pulling it back the other way didn’t help. I twisted it, and the segments turned against each other with a grinding resistance.
Oh, right, that’s how I got it moving the first time! I grabbed the band and rolled my fist around. The Machine began to writhe on my wrist. The head unbuckled, the tiny legs came out, and it crawled sluggishly around my arm. Sluggishly? It picked up steam, spiraling up my arm like the crazy metal bug it vaguely resembled.
“Hey, stop that!” It stopped. “Sit on my hand, not my face!” I yelled. The Machine scuttled forward again, now twining down my arm with purpose and crawling up on my hand.
“Voice commands?” asked my mother from the doorway.
“She’s thirteen,” my father threw back skeptically.
“Sit up!” I ordered The Machine. HA! It reared up on my palm like a snake!
“Voice commands,” my mother repeated. She sounded amused, and her folded arms and lazy posture as she leaned against the doorjamb shouted her sarcastic amusement at my Dad’s cautious attitude.
“Unless you think she found a voice recognition unit in her middle-school shop class, she built one in less than half an hour. We’re well into superhuman territory here already,” she added.
HA! I resisted my urge to stamp my feet and laugh. HA!
“It is an advanced-placement middle school,” Dad tried. Neither Mom nor I dignified that with a response. He hadn’t been serious anyway.
“May I examine it?” Dad asked when we’d been silent at him long enough.
“Sit still, and don’t do anything,” I ordered The Machine. It didn’t respond, which was good, right? I picked it off my hand with two fingers—kind of heavy to carry that way—and put it in Dad’s hands. It stayed in its reared up posture like a statue.
Good enough!
He unlocked his computer, laid The Machine on his scanner, closed the lid, and started tapping buttons. “An interior layout will tell us the most. We’ll try scans all across the wavelengths, but we’ll begin with a simple x-ray.”
The giant virtual screen he built just to prove that it could be done lit up. There was The Machine, a white cylinder with little legs sticking off of it. Solid white. Dad magnified one of its segments. The straight edges weren’t straight, they were blobby in this representation. The interior was solid, unvarying white. Plain white.
“It’s made of metal, so I guess x-rays were never going to penetrate too well,” I said.
“At the intensity I bombarded it, I should get at least a blurry interior picture,” Dad countered. I watched him adjust the wavelengths. I watched nothing whatsoever change on the picture. Okay.
He switched to magnetic imaging. Same thing. “Well, it eats a very broad range of energy types. I might be able to overload that effect, but if I succeeded I’d only damage the device,” he observed.
“Please don’t.” This was my first invention as a superhero. Even if it did nothing we hadn’t seen already, or stopped working in ten minutes, I wanted to keep it to show my grandchildren one day!
“We’ll try passive mapping systems,” Dad assured me. He clicked a few menus. There, that was the passive magnetic scan.
Well, I guess it worked. “All I can tell is that it’s full of junk,” I said. It looked like a regular medical x-ray, all cloudy bits inside solid shell.
“You really packed in the gears, Pumpkin,” he told me. Complimented me, I guess. I held up a finger, and Mom nodded. I was cleaning up on the Pumpkin jar this week!
“What’s the bright rectangle?” I pointed at the one shape that stood out in the body.
“I think it’s a 9-volt battery. It’s mostly drained. I’m not seeing signs of electrical current,” Dad answered. Then he sighed, clicked off the scanning program, unsealed the scanner and heaved up the lid. “Eyeball examination will have to do.”
He picked up The Machine, and, on an impulse, I ordered, “Straighten out.” It did, extending into a straight line maybe a foot long. Less, really. So it was still active!
Watching Dad put it in a vise and pick up his screwdriver made my heart seize up, but I just had to be cool. He wouldn’t risk breaking it. Not something this valuable. His glasses rearranged to magnify as he peered into the many gaps in The Machine’s plates.
Right now, his own super power was working, trying to connect what he knew about science with the thing in front of him, analyze the pattern, and distill it into a practical result. “Your guess is as good as mine as to what it does. I’d swear it’s purely mechanical. I can’t find a power source at all,” came the answer.
Wow, I’d outfoxed Dad’s super power. Go, Penny!
“Superhumans with creative powers traditionally create artificial life or perpetual motion the first time their powers emerge. Looks like our Penny pulled off both at the same time,” Mom told Dad. She sounded proud, but…
“There’s no such thing as perpetual motion, even for us,” I argued. “Us.” HA! I get to say “us” from now on!
“Photosynthesis looks like perpetual motion if you don’t know anything about chemistry. How could shining sunlight on chemicals keep reactions going forever? There’s always a price, always entropy being made and fuel being consumed. We still call something l
ike this a perpetual motion machine because it looks like it’s ignoring those rules. Like your Mom said, they’re the first thing most mad scientists make.” Dad leaned back in his chair and put his elbows on the desk as he explained all this to me. His glasses whizzed and clicked, rearranging to their normal configuration.
“Mad scientists are villains, Dad. I’m not a mad scientist,” I scolded him.
“I’m not sure you’re anything, yet,” he countered. Wait, what? I looked back at Mom. She wasn’t correcting him.
When I went back to staring at him, he explained, “It’s normal for superhuman powers to go off without—”
I cut him off, throwing up both hands. “I know, I know! You don’t have to give me the super- powered Birds And The Bees speech!” Criminy, he was probably right. I’d worked completely on instinct. Maybe my powers hadn’t emerged yet, after all.
“Can I have my Machine back?” I asked immediately. I knew I sounded like a begging baby, but when Dad pulled it out of his vice and set it in my hands, when I tried to bend it around my wrist and it got the hint and locked up like a bracelet again, I felt so much safer. This was my proof. I’d done something no regular human could possibly do.
“It’s fine, Penny—” my Mom started, her voice gentle.
I interrupted her. “I really don’t want the super-powered Birds and Bees speech, Mom!” Being patronized would make this worse.
“I was saying, it’s easy to check,” she corrected me. “Brian, you don’t mind if she uses your work room for this, right?”
“Go right ahead, Pumpkin. Make another. Make anything,” Dad urged me, sliding out of his chair and stepping over by Mom.
Eek. Okay, pressure time. Big, big pressure time, Penny. I looked around. Dad’s machines made even less sense than the ones in the shop. Well, no, that wasn’t true. Everything here was nicely labeled, and, even if I didn’t know how to work it, that machine over there stamped microchips, and there was his micro water knife, and… well, I sort of understood everything I saw.
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