Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  “It’s incredifying,” he said, meaning it was both incredible and terrifying.

  They unloaded everything into the dorm room they had been assigned and spent the night making sure that everything still worked. At first, it didn’t. They pushed one of the beds onto its side and planted Stinky on the floor. When they turned the power on, the thrusters refused to reverse. Then, when they let go of the joysticks, the robot whirred into action. It seemed as if a ghost were operating it.

  “It’s got voodoo,” Lorenzo said.

  It was the last thing they needed on the eve of the competition: a robot that wouldn’t even respond to their commands. But after an hour, the controls mysteriously started working again. It was as if the desert heat they’d driven through had tweaked Stinky’s brain. They were relieved that they didn’t have to dismantle, diagnose, and rebuild the robot. It had been a long day of travel, and this last scare made them feel a little tweaked too. The ocean was within walking distance. There were beautiful beaches to explore, but they all went to sleep early.

  * * *

  Around nine the next morning, the Carl Hayden team rolled Stinky into a UCSB pool reserved for practice. Other teams were scattered around the perimeter and glanced at the newcomers. The robots on display looked like works of art to the Carl Hayden kids. The competitors appeared to have all the things they didn’t: glass syntactic foam, machined metal, elaborate control panels, and cool matching outfits. Cristian was proud of his robot, but he could see that it looked like a Geo Metro compared with the Lexuses and BMWs around the pool. He had thought that Lorenzo’s paint job was nice. Now it just looked clownish.

  Despite appearances, the other teams had struggled to build robots capable of completing the mission. MIT fielded a team of twelve undergraduates and had landed a ten-thousand-dollar grant from ExxonMobil, the world’s largest corporation at the time. The team was comprised of seven ocean-engineering majors, three mechanical-engineering students, and two computer science majors. But two weeks before the competition, their control system had overheated and melted, emitting a plume of blue smoke. Thaddeus Stefanov-Wagner, a team member who had competed in the 2003 MATE event as a high schooler, scrambled to rebuild the controls and managed to do it in a week.

  MIT’s problems didn’t end there: their ROV was damaged during shipping. It arrived in Santa Barbara in a wooden crate that had been partially crushed. But within minutes of its removal from the box, everybody on the team had their hands on it, each addressing their area of responsibility. For sophomore Jordan Stanway, the team leader, it was the best moment of the entire school year: a highly trained, highly functioning team working in perfect coordination. He had come to MIT to study ocean engineering and was proud to be part of a team as skilled as this one.

  The boys from Carl Hayden shuffled to an unclaimed portion of pool perimeter. “Damn,” Lorenzo muttered as he caught a glimpse of the MIT team. Their robot featured a large EXXONMOBIL sticker and was the smallest, most densely instrumented robot at the competition. The group wore matching blue shirts emblazoned with the words MIT ROV TEAM. They were white and most had brownish-blond hair.

  To Lorenzo, they looked like the embodiment of power. “I’ve never seen so many white people in one place,” he marveled.

  “Let’s focus,” Oscar ordered. They were scheduled to appear for their engineering review that afternoon, which meant they only had a few hours to practice in the pool. Every second counted now.

  Luis gently lowered Stinky into the water and grunted that the robot was ready. Oscar and Cristian motored Stinky forward and down, but the robot started turning.

  “Go straight,” Fredi shouted.

  “I am going straight,” Oscar responded.

  “No, you’re not, you’re going left,” Fredi said.

  “Let me try,” Cristian said, taking the horizontal controls from Oscar. He tried to get the robot to bank right, but it wasn’t working. “Pull it out!” Cristian shouted to Luis.

  Luis speedily pulled Stinky to the surface and lifted the robot out of the water. Fredi, Allan, and the kids gathered around the dripping, brightly colored frame. Lorenzo opened the briefcase top and looked inside.

  “It’s got to be the programming,” Fredi said.

  “It’s not the programming,” Allan snapped.

  “It’s the water,” Lorenzo said. Everybody looked at him. “There’s water inside the briefcase.” He pointed, and the others could see a tablespoon of water on the bottom of the briefcase.

  “Why didn’t it just short out?” Cristian asked.

  He gently tapped the PWM wires connecting the joysticks to the control board. The robot’s propellers whirred to life. At first, it seemed like good news. The robot was still working. In reality, it meant they had two problems: the cables needed to be resoldered and there was a leak.

  BACK IN THEIR dorm room, Fredi and Allan were worried. The robot wasn’t working, and the kids were scheduled to go in front of the NASA and Navy experts within hours. Stinky was turning out to be a failure from the outset. The kids felt defeated before the competition had even begun.

  Oscar wasn’t ready to give up. “Let’s take it apart now,” he argued. “We can fix it.”

  Fredi didn’t want the kids preoccupied when they presented themselves to the experts. They had to be mentally ready for what would likely be an intense grilling. “Look, don’t worry about the robot right now,” he said. “We’ve got all night to fix it.”

  “It’s more important to get ready for the review,” Allan said. The kids had limited experience talking in front of imposing professionals. Raising money and competing in the FIRST program had helped, but talking to an audience was still a novel experience. That, coupled with their shaken confidence, could undermine everything they’d accomplished so far. They might leave Santa Barbara convinced that the whole thing was a mistake, that it wasn’t their lot to be ambitious.

  They needed to be jolted into a better frame of mind, so Allan decided on a gamble. “Everybody come with me,” he commanded.

  The team followed him out of the dorm to a bridge. Though it was summertime, there was still a steady flow of pedestrians.

  “I want you guys to hang out here and talk to anybody who comes by,” Allan said.

  “What do you want us to talk about?” Oscar asked.

  “Say, ‘Hi, would you like to hear about our thrusters?’” Allan prompted.

  Lorenzo snickered. “I don’t think nobody is going to talk to us if we say that.”

  “Tell them you built a robot,” Allan persevered. “They’ll want to hear about it.”

  Fredi and Allan walked off and watched from a distance. The locals might ignore the kids or think that they were panhandling. That could further undermine their already fragile state of mind. Allan was hoping that wouldn’t happen. He was banking on the kindness of strangers.

  The kids were bashful at first and let a handful of people walk by. Oscar gripped a white, plastic, three-ring binder that contained drawings of Stinky’s innovations.

  Finally Lorenzo mustered up the courage to talk to a man who looked like a professor. “Hi, we’re high school students from Phoenix, and we’re here to compete in an underwater-robotics contest. Do you want to hear about it?”

  The man laughed. “Okay. What does your robot do?”

  Oscar stepped forward with his three-ring binder and flipped to the first page, which displayed a photo of Stinky. “It’s an ROV. That means ‘remotely operated vehicle.’” He explained that Stinky was designed to retrieve underwater objects, record video, sample fluid, measure distances, and locate sounds.

  “It can do all that?” the man said.

  “When it’s working, yeah,” Oscar said. “Right now it’s kind of messed up.”

  “Well, I’ll be rooting for you,” the man said, and, after wishing them luck, headed away.

  After that, the team stopped a variety of people and explained why their robot was so cool, even if it was on life suppo
rt. Cristian talked about applying the index of refraction to their laser range findings, and Lorenzo bragged about his “ghetto” liquid sampling tool. The people they talked to seemed impressed by the ragtag group of teens, and the reaction they got gave them a boost. It reminded them that they were doing something they had never done before. In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.

  IN THE HALLWAY outside the review room, Allan and Fredi waited anxiously for the kids. They knew that the panel was comprised of some impressive judges. There was Tom Swean, the gruff fifty-eight-year-old who ran the Navy’s Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems program. Lisa Spence, the flight lead at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, was also in there grilling the kids. Teachers had the option of joining in the review, but Allan and Fredi decided to let their kids go solo. It was a vote of confidence, but it also meant the two teachers had nothing to do but worry.

  “How do you think they’re doing?” Allan asked.

  “The other teams were in for at least forty-five minutes,” Fredi said. “If they come out before then, I think it’s a bad sign.”

  After twenty-five minutes, the door opened and the Carl Hayden kids streamed out. Allan glanced at Fredi. It was a bad sign.

  “How’d you do, guys?” Allan said enthusiastically, trying to mask his disappointment.

  “We did great!” Oscar enthused.

  Allan thought the kids might be shaken, but all four were smiling. They were convinced that they had answered the judges’ questions perfectly. It was obvious to Allan and Fredi that the kids were overconfident. They couldn’t have done that well.

  Either way, it was over. Now the team had to repair their robot before its scheduled competition in the morning. They had less than twenty-four hours to fix both the leak and the loose wiring. Allan knew exactly what they needed to do first: go to Sizzler. Nobody was going to solve anything on an empty stomach.

  * * *

  On the short van ride to the restaurant, Oscar led a brainstorming session: “There’s no way we can buy a new briefcase and get everything rewired in time. We need to come up with something quick and easy.”

  “You need a desiccant,” Fredi said. “Something that will soak up the moisture.”

  “But it’s got to fit inside the case,” Cristian pointed out. “It’s got to be small and superabsorbent.”

  An image from television flashed through Lorenzo’s mind. “Absorbent? Like a tampon?”

  Oscar, Cristian, and Luis laughed. It sounded ridiculous to them.

  “Actually, that’s a perfect idea,” Fredi said.

  * * *

  After ordering the all-you-can-eat dinner and downing more shrimp than he’d consumed in his life, Lorenzo found himself standing in the parking lot of a Ralphs grocery store near the UCSB campus. Behind him, in the van, his teammates egged him on.

  “Go on,” Oscar said. “It was your idea.”

  “So why do I have to get them? Somebody else should have to.”

  “Go,” Oscar ordered.

  “I don’t know which ones to get.”

  “So ask someone.”

  Lorenzo headed for the store. It was done up to look like a hacienda, complete with a red-tile roof, white walls, and freshly planted palms. He walked inside and wandered past the organic-produce section, trying to build up his courage. He passed an elderly lady examining eggplant—he was too embarrassed to ask her. Next, he saw a young woman in jeans shopping for shampoo.

  “Excuse me, madam.” He wasn’t used to approaching women by himself, let alone well-dressed white women. He saw apprehension flash across her face. Maybe she thought he was trying to sell magazines or candy bars, but he steeled himself. He explained that he was building a robot for an underwater contest sponsored by NASA, and his robot was leaking. He wanted to soak up the water with tampons but didn’t know which ones to buy. “Could you help me buy the most best tampons?”

  The woman broke into a big smile and led him to feminine hygiene. She handed him a box of o.b. ultra-absorbency. “These don’t have an applicator, so they’ll be easier to fit inside your robot.”

  He stared at the ground, mumbled his thanks, and headed quickly for the checkout.

  “I hope you win,” she called out, laughing.

  THEY GOT BACK to the dorm room and circled up around Stinky. A bunch of the joystick wires were clearly disconnected from the controller, and there was no way to simply resolder the few that had popped loose. They had to pull all sixty-four wires and start over. It would take hours and they were already tired from the tension of the morning’s failed practice session and the engineering review. Plus, they were full of steak and shrimp. Everybody just wanted to go to sleep, but they had only until dawn to get the robot working.

  “I’ll stay up and do it,” Oscar volunteered.

  “I’ll do it with you,” Lorenzo offered.

  Over the past nine months, Oscar hadn’t taken Lorenzo seriously. Oscar judged others by his own level of commitment, and Lorenzo always seemed to come up short. Lorenzo cracked jokes and spouted strange (though often innovative) ideas. Throughout the year, Oscar had been half prepared for Lorenzo to drop off the team and never show up again. But in this moment, Oscar realized that Lorenzo was intensely committed. Good engineering solutions had value. But, to Oscar, doing things that no one else wanted to do, toughing it out and being a soldier, that’s what counted. For the first time, he felt real respect for his teammate.

  “All right, let’s do it,” Oscar said.

  Luis and Cristian went to sleep in another room. Allan took a bed in the corner, and Fredi fell asleep on the floor with all the lights on. Stinky sat where the other bed used to be—the teens had flipped it up and propped it against the wall. Oscar and Lorenzo hunched over the electronics on the carpet. Sixty-four wires the size of a single hair needed to be meticulously fitted into individual, small holes and then topped with a dash of solder.

  Lorenzo positioned the wires in the holes, while Oscar melted the solder with the soldering iron. With each drop of solder, a small puff of gray smoke trellised into the air. They barely talked during the delicate, nerve-racking work. If Oscar hit the wire with the soldering iron, the wire would instantly melt and disappear, forcing them to pull out everything they’d done, restrip all the wires, and start over.

  By the time they had done fifty wires, it was roughly two in the morning. Their eyes hurt after hours of staring at tiny wires. The stakes were higher now too. A mistake now would mean ripping out the completed connections. If that happened, they wouldn’t have enough time to resolder everything before the competition. Every connection needed to be perfect now.

  “Let’s take a break for a second,” Oscar said.

  They sat back and rubbed their eyes. The room was filled with an acrid, burnt smell. Everybody else was asleep.

  “Thanks for staying up with me,” Oscar said.

  “You think I’m going let you do this by yourself?” Lorenzo said. Oscar thought Lorenzo meant that they were all in this together until Lorenzo added, “You’d probably screw it up if I wasn’t watching you.”

  Lorenzo grinned at him with a big, crooked-tooth goofy smile. Oscar chuckled. He never would have been friends with a kid like Lorenzo, but now he was glad they were teammates.

  “Shut up,” Oscar said, picking up the solder gun. “Let’s get this done.” They had fourteen left. Oscar moved carefully and slowly while Lorenzo positioned the fifty-first wire.

  Lorenzo said a silent prayer to the Virgin Mary, and they worked through the final batch of wires, connecting the last one around 2:30 a.m. They turned the power on and tested the joysticks. The machine worked.

  THE BANNER ABOVE the pool declared WELCOME TO THE 2004 NATIONAL ROV COMPETITION. A set of high-powered fans blew across the surface, obscuring the view below. Teams could make out the vague outl
ine of a large black structure but nothing more. A loudspeaker blared Hawaiian music. This was the main event: the underwater portion of the Explorer-class competition had begun.

  Monterey Peninsula College was called to the pool. Their fifteen-person team deployed three vehicles: two ROVs—dubbed Romulus and Remus—and a third craft, the Sea Wolf, which served as their eyes in the sky. It floated on the surface with a camera system to guide the operation. Romulus was a heavy-lift submersible and ran off three car batteries in the command tent. Remus was a smaller, more agile bot designed to explore the interior of the mocked-up submarine. Even with all that robotic firepower, Monterey only picked up 30 out of 110 points. The mission tasks were proving to be even more difficult than anticipated.

  Cape Fear Community College managed a slightly more successful run. Their robot had a beautiful extruded-aluminum frame with a shiny blue fiberglass-covered foam top. They called it the Sea Devil 3. Its shell gleamed so nicely in the morning sun that Allan took to calling the bot a piece of “underwater jewelry.” One of its most impressive features was a chamber at the top that was connected to a scuba tank in the command tent. It allowed the operators to add to or remove air from the chamber to fine-tune buoyancy on the fly. When the robot picked up a heavy object and had trouble surfacing, they sent a blast of air down a tube and the ROV came right up. It was a good idea with solid engineering behind it, and yet they managed to post only 40 points by the end of their thirty-minute run.

  There were eleven teams in the Explorer division, and all of them had chosen to measure themselves against a higher standard. As a result, most of the teams were more confident and accomplished, and all of them posted at least 5 points. Nonetheless, some experienced catastrophic failures early in their missions. Their robots simply sank to the bottom of the pool and sat there, unresponsive. After a few minutes of fruitless troubleshooting, the teams had to ignominiously haul their robots out of the water by the tether. One stranded robot emitted a giant air bubble from the depths.