The EngiNerds Strike Back

by Jarrett Lerner

  “Chill,” he says.

  Which, it seems to me, is basically like telling someone who’s just caught fire to relax.

  Edsley puffs out his chest, all proud of himself, and says, “I fully reprogrammed Klaus. He’s as obedient as a dog.”

  Just then, Klaus says:

  “STOP, CAY-nine. SIT. SIT. SIT.”

  Kitty, of course, just keeps on barking and circling him.

  Edsley deflates a bit.

  “Well…,” he says. “He’s obedient as, like, a really obedient dog.”

  35.

  IT’S BEEN MORE THAN A minute since we found Edsley and Klaus, and the bot still hasn’t fired off a single fart or tried to claw off any of our faces. So, for the time being, I decide to entertain the possibility that in rebuilding and reprogramming the guy, Edsley hasn’t made a colossally stupid mistake. Maybe just, you know, a regular-size stupid mistake.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, Mike,” I say, “but we don’t have time for it.”

  “Gimme five minutes,” he says.

  “No.”

  “Two.”

  “No.”

  “One?”

  I glance up at the sky. Because, sure, Kermin and Muckle really seemed to believe me—or, I guess, believe Kitty—but what if they’ve reconsidered, decided to come right back down and recommence their systematic decimation of our planet?

  Not seeing any UFO-shaped cumulonimbus clouds sinking out of the sky, I look back down at Mike.

  I sigh.

  “Fine,” I tell him. “Sixty seconds. Show us what he can do so we can get this over with.”

  Edsley grins. This, it’s clear, is what he came over to do. To show off, brag, preen like a peacock.

  I head over to my porch, crouch down near the steps, and reach beneath the bottom one. After feeling around for a second, I find one of the emergency rocks I keep stashed there.

  “Kitty!” I call, waving the thing around over my head.

  Kitty stops barking and circling the bot.

  I toss the rock on the lawn, and the pooch darts for it, giving Edsley and Klaus plenty of room to do whatever they’re going to do.

  “All right, Klaus,” Mike says. “Let’s show ’em what you’ve got.”

  36.

  IT’S LIKE WE’RE AT A science fair, and we’re the judges and Edsley’s presenting. He throws questions and commands at Klaus, starting off nice and simple, but getting increasingly complex.

  “What’s your name, bot?” he says.

  Klaus replies:

  “MY naaame is KLAUS. HOW-ev-errr, I have ALL-so been PRO-graaamed to RE-spond to ‘DUDE,’ ‘brooo,’ ‘bruuuh,’ ‘BUD,’ and ‘tuuurd GOB-lin.’ ”

  “Really, Mike?” Mikaela says.

  “That doesn’t seem necessary,” adds John Henry Knox.

  Edsley ignores them and goes on.

  “Klaus,” he says. “What’s the longest word in the English language?”

  “The LONG-est wooord in the EN-glish LANG-uage is PNEUM-o-NOUL-traaa-mic-ro-SCOP-ic-SIL-ic-o-VOL-cane-ooo-CO-nee-os-IS. The wooord CON-tains FOUR-teee-FIVE let-terrrs.”

  “Klaus,” Edsley says, “perform the following calculation: 24.978 plus 7,082 times 39 divided by 3.14159265359.”

  “The AN-sweeer is EIGHT sev-EN NINE FOUR one poooint FIVE threee one NINE FOUR FOUR one EIGHT FOUR EIGHT twooo NINE sev-EN threee SIX.”

  “Klaus,” says Mike, “say, ‘Excuse me, Mister. It appears your butt has fallen off. Would you like a grapefruit?’ ”

  “EX-cuuuse ME, Mis-TER. It APP-ears your buuutt has FALL-en OFF. Would YOU like a GRAPE-fruuuit?”

  “Now say, ‘Dang it. I have a terrible itch in my kneepit.’ ”

  “Daaang IT. I HAVE a terr-IB-ull ITCH in my kneee-PIT.”

  “Now say—”

  “Okay, okay, Mike,” I say, before he can make the bot say anything else. “We really don’t have time for show-and-tell. If you want to stick around and help us try to save the planet, you’re welcome to.”

  “Wait,” says Edsley. He turns to Dan, and all of a sudden he seems nervous. Shy. “What do you think, man?”

  He probably wants Dan’s opinion since Dan’s the one who designed and built and first programmed the bots.

  And after a second of thinking about it, Dan says, “Good work, Mike. I’m impressed.”

  Edsley beams.

  And I use the same line on him that Kermin, the alien, used on me:

  “It is conceivable,” I say, “that you are not as stupid and useless as you seem to be, human. Now can we please get back to—”

  And that’s when it hits me.

  Hits me as hard as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit the Yucatán Peninsula down in Mexico sixty-six million years ago.

  I think I’ve got it.

  I think I’ve figured it out.

  I think I know what we can do to try to keep the Plerpians from wiping us out.

  37.

  “OH MY GOD. OH MY God. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

  “Ken?” says Dan, hurrying over to my side.

  “Is he having a heart attack?” asks John Henry Knox. “It appears he’s having a heart attack.”

  Edsley, being Edsley, assumes that my flipping out is all about his feat of robotic reprogramming.

  “Hold up, Ken,” he says. “I know it’s crazy amazing, but you can’t die yet. I haven’t even shown you the coolest thing I programmed Klaus to do.”

  “He’s not having a heart attack,” Mikaela assures everyone.

  She comes closer to me, her eyes narrowed and trained on mine the entire time.

  “You’ve realized something, haven’t you?” she says. “You’ve got an idea. About how we can save the planet.”

  I run it through my head again, just to make sure.

  Then, confidently, I nod.

  38.

  WE DECIDE TO HEAD INSIDE, since the rest of my neighborhood’s going to start waking up any second and us standing around on my lawn with a walking, talking—but thankfully not farting—robot is a really great way to attract attention.

  Which, at the moment, we don’t want.

  We’ve got work to do.

  A whole lot of it.

  “Bot,” Edsley tells Klaus, “we’re gonna go hang out in this nincompoop’s house for a bit. Why don’t you go and, uh…” He scans the area. “How about you go hide behind that tree?”

  The bot doesn’t hesitate. He spins around and hobbles off in the direction Edsley’s pointing. And once he reaches the designated tree, he crouches down and contorts his limbs (including those that are actually clothes hangers and a broomstick) in a way that makes him almost completely concealed behind the tree’s trunk.

  For a second, I wonder whether we should bring the bot into my house and stash him somewhere safer.

  But I’m way too eager to share with the others what’s whirling around in my mind.

  So I grab hold of Kitty, who grabs hold of the rock I gave him, and drag him toward the house.

  “Come on,” I tell my friends. “We’ve got a planet to save.”

  39.

  INSIDE, WE FIND DAD IN the kitchen.

  Fortunately, he’s put on some more clothes since we last saw him.

  Unfortunately, he decides to be decidedly awkward about the whole underwear incident.

  “Oh, um, hey, kids,” he says. “Didn’t expect you to be back so soon. Though, ah, as you can see”—he shuffles his feet, like he’s getting ready to do some kind of dance—“I’ve got on pants. Because, I mean, I usually do. I didn’t expect you all to be here earlier, so that’s why I, you know, didn’t. But whenever I know we’ll be having company over, that’s one of the first things I do. I say, ‘Make sure you have your pants on, Kal. No one wants to see you in your boxer shorts.’ Though when you think about it, boxer shorts are basically just like swim trunks. So—”

  Mikaela clears her throat, interrupting my dad and, therefore, doing him a HUGE favor.r />
  “Um, Ken’s dad?” she says. “Maybe you should just, like, stop talking now.”

  “Know what?” he tells her. “That’s a fantastic idea.”

  He raises his cup of coffee to thank Mikaela, then heads for the living room.

  “I’ll be in here if you need me!” he calls back.

  I turn to Mikaela.

  “Thanks,” I tell her.

  “No prob,” she says.

  We take seats around the table.

  But seconds after we do:

  Beep-beep BOOP.

  Dan pulls out Bem’s communication device.

  “Whoa,” Edsley says. “What’s that thing?”

  Dan ignores him for the moment and says, “This one’s really from Bem.” He reads: “ ‘Demo moved up, but then delayed. Tomorrow at noon. After a dog meeting?’ ”

  Edsley’s waving his hands, trying to get us to slow down.

  “Bem?” he says. “Dog meeting?”

  The minutes are ticking by, but we do need to catch Mike up on what’s going on, otherwise he really won’t be able to help us.

  Dan goes first, giving Edsley a quick rundown of all he learned during his ride on the spaceship.

  And Edsley’s reaction to all that information?

  “Dang. I gotta try some of these beans. They must be, like, SOOO good.”

  I go next, telling Mike all about Kermin and Muckle, their zap-cannons, and how I used their unexpected reverence toward dogs in order to buy us a bit more time to figure out how to save the planet.

  Edsley says:

  “What was the aliens’ underwear like? Like ours? Or, like, super advanced?”

  “Mike,” I say. “I didn’t really have a chance to thoroughly investigate the aliens’ underwear. And even if I did, I don’t think I would’ve taken it.”

  “Dude. The underwear industry’s been due for a revolution for years now. If those aliens have something crazy going on, we should totally copy whatever they’re doing and take over the undies game.”

  “Okay,” I say, just to shut him up. “We’ll do that. Right after we save the world.”

  “Speaking of which…,” says Dan.

  And then all my friends are staring at me, ready to see if I’ve actually come up with an idea that can get us out of this mess.

  Not to mention our entire planet.

  And the rest of the 7.6 billion people living on it.

  And the millions of animal species.

  And the hundreds of thousands of plant species.

  “So?” says John Henry Knox, fiddling with the cover of the Plerpian Protocols of Planetary Demolition.

  Mikaela says, “Lay it on us.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “Okay. What we have to do,” I say, “is convince the Plerpians—especially those who want to turn our planet into a ginormongous billboard—that it’s conceivable that humanity is not as stupid and useless as it seems to be.”

  40.

  DON’T WORRY.

  There’s a bit more to my plan than that.

  “The Plerpians think we’re a bunch of idiots,” I say. “Selfish, destructive, careless idiots.”

  “They’re wrong, though,” Mikaela says.

  “Exactly!” I cry.

  “I mean,” she goes on, “the only thing I’ve ever really destroyed is my mom’s computer, back when I was nine years old. But then I rebuilt it and made it twenty times faster and sixty-seven times more powerful, so.”

  I say it again:

  “Exactly!”

  Then Dan sweeps a hand around the table, indicating all of us.

  “And we care about the planet. And I know we can’t be the only ones out there who do.”

  I say it one more time:

  “Exactly!”

  “And we are certainly not idiots,” adds John Henry Knox.

  I hesitate before saying exactly again, my eyes sliding over to Edsley. True to form, he says:

  “Yeah. Would a bunch of idiots be thinking about how to revolutionize the underwear industry? I think not.”

  To that, I’m really not sure what to say.

  So I just ignore it.

  As do Dan, Mikaela, and John Henry Knox.

  After which they all start nodding.

  And smiling.

  And seeing this, I’m feeling good.

  No.

  I’m feeling great.

  Full of energy.

  Full of confidence.

  Full of that feeling that lets me know that I, with the help of my friends, can accomplish literally ANYTHING.

  It’s the feeling I get whenever the EngiNerds tackle a problem together.

  Like we could gather up a bunch of our parents’ vacuum cleaners and build a hovercraft—which, yeah, is something we actually did.

  Or hole ourselves up in my basement for a weekend and construct an automated, two-in-one, snowball/sno-cone maker—again, something we actually did (in addition to finding out just how many sno-cones you have to eat in a single afternoon before you never want to see one of the things again).

  Or even, you know, save our planet from being turned into a bunch of dust and replaced by a bean billboard.

  I’m so pumped up, I can’t even sit down any longer.

  I leap to my feet.

  I slam the butt of my fist down on the table.

  “Let’s do this!” I cry.

  “YES,” says Dan.

  And just from his eyes, I can tell he’s full of the same nerdy, we-can-accomplish-literally-anything energy that I am.

  As is Mikaela.

  And John Henry Knox.

  (And Edsley, even if some of his energy is busy thinking about underwear.)

  And they’re just looking at me.

  And looking at me.

  And looking at me some more.

  Finally, John Henry Knox tosses the Plerpian Protocols of Planetary Demolition onto the table and blurts out:

  “SO HOW ARE WE GONNA DO IT?!”

  I gulp.

  Then sit back down in my chair.

  Quietly, I admit:

  “I, uh, haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  41.

  I TRY TO KEEP THAT nerdy, we-can-accomplish-literally-anything energy alive.

  But I can feel it draining from my friends, a little more every second.

  We need to figure something out—a next step, at the very least, if not enough steps to make up a whole plan—otherwise the same thing’s going to happen as happened last week when I was trying to get all the rest of the EngiNerds to keep helping me look for Klaus. When you bang your head up against a problem long enough, you can get discouraged, and then dispirited, and then desperate to just switch gears and do something even a tiny bit easier. But what we’re facing here—this is the ultimate problem. We can’t afford to lose focus. We can’t afford to fail.

  “Maybe…,” I try.

  “What if we…,” says Dan.

  “We could…,” Mikaela says, scratching her head.

  “How about…,” adds John Henry Knox.

  And then Edsley chimes in with, “I’m pretty sure they call farts parps.”

  I look over and see that he’s reading from the Plerpian Protocols of Planetary Demolition.

  Before I can remind him that I said he could stay at my house only if he actually helped us, my dad shouts to us from the living room.

  “Ken! Get in here! You’ve gotta see what’s on the news!”

  I don’t answer. Because I’m not interested in the news right now. Because, if we don’t solve this problem of ours soon, there are going to be a couple of aliens zap-cannoning their way through town on the news.

  But Dad doesn’t quit.

  “Seriously, Ken! Hurry up! Remember those robots last week? There’s another one!”

  That gets our attention.

  A beat later, we’re all on our feet and rushing to get a look at the TV.

  42.

  WE MAKE IT TO THE living room just in time to hea
r John Castle, field reporter for the Channel 5 News Team, whisper, “Is this robot somehow related to those that recently menaced our town with their furiously fast farts?”

  John is whispering because he’s crouched behind a bush, clearly quite traumatized from his previous encounter with the flatulent machines.

  The camera pans to show the robot—it’s Klaus, of course. I can tell right away thanks to the broomstick leg and ropes circling his torso. But the bot doesn’t appear to be doing anything too menacing at the moment. He’s hobbling up the street, pausing every few feet and angling his body so that he can reach down to the pavement. Using the arm that hasn’t been replaced by a bunch of twisted clothes hangers, he plucks up what looks like an old, dirty napkin. He carries the thing over to the curb, and thanks to a well-timed zoom-in from the camera, we can see the bot place the grimy square of paper atop a small pile of leaves, twigs, and other bits of litter.

  The camera pulls out and refocuses on John Castle.

  “It would seem,” the reporter says, ditching his whisper now that Klaus has put some more distance between them, “that the robot is engaged in some sort of pre-fart ritual. The Channel 5 News Team is committed to monitoring this situation in the event that—”

  The camera spins and twists as if whoever’s holding the thing just randomly decided to do a backflip.

  A beat later, there’s a shriek.

  And the next thing the camera shows is John Castle dashing down the street as fast as his fancy dress shoes allow, the cord of his microphone trailing behind him like a long, twitchy snake.

  My stomach drops.

  “Um, Dad?” I say. “We’re gonna head out again. Something just came up.”

  I take a step toward the kitchen.

  But none of my friends follow me.

  Their eyes are glued to the chaotic scene unfolding on the screen.

  I give each of their shirts a tug to snag their attention, then herd them into the kitchen and toward the door.

  “Be careful!” my dad calls after us. “Don’t get, ah, farted at!”

  43.

  OUTSIDE, I HURRY TOWARD THE tree that Klaus had been tucked behind just a few minutes ago. Scanning the ground right around it, I find a handful of small depressions—little craters the same size and shape as the butt end of a broomstick. I follow a path of these evenly spaced indentations across my lawn, all the way to the curb. Then: nothing. Obviously. Even if Klaus weighed a thousand pounds, his broomstick leg couldn’t put a divot in the pavement of the street.