Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove

by Bob Pflugfelder

  “No!” Uncle Newt replied indignantly.

  He thought it over a moment before adding, “I was saving that for later.”

  Jones gave Uncle Newt an “Are you kidding me?” look.

  “Hey, they’re smart kids!” Uncle Newt said. “Well, most of them.”

  Silas and DeMarco glowered at him. “Not cool, man,” Silas grumbled.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Jones said, “why do you have kids in here at all?”

  “Dr. Holt’s niece and nephew are habitating with him this summer,” Mavis answered. “He didn’t have anyone queued up to macromanage them today because he thought the project was end-cycled. So I greenlit his request for permission to bring them in, along with a couple friends.”

  “Oh. Okay then,” Jones answered. But he didn’t seem to mean it.

  “This is my niece and nephew, by the way—Tesla and Nick,” Uncle Newt said. “And their friends Sirius and Dijon.”

  “Silas and DeMarco,” Hiroko corrected.

  “Kids,” Uncle Newt continued obliviously, “meet Mojo Jones, the—”

  “Let me guess,” Nick cut in. “Chief technology officer?”

  “No,” said Jones, sounding annoyed.

  “Database administrator?” Tesla said.

  “No,” he said again, sounding even more annoyed.

  “Network engineer?” said Nick.

  “No,” he said, sounding quite fed up with the questions. “I’m the—”

  “Senior system manager?” Tesla quickly interrupted.

  “No! I mean yes!” said Jones, his annoyance replaced by surprised. “How’d you know?”

  Tesla shrugged. “There are only so many names for the computer guy, and it’s obvious that’s what you are.” She threw a gloating glance at her brother. “Beat ya to it!”

  “Senior system administrator was my next guess,” Nick said.

  Jones and Mavis looked at each other. Obviously, Newt’s description of the kids was no exaggeration: they were smart.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Jones said, sounding almost friendly this time. “But I wish it were under better circumstances. Whatever just happened in here blew out the power for the whole museum and messed up all kinds of very important systems. I thought I was ready for the reopening, but now …” He shook his head hopelessly, looking almost as despondent as the Migraine Monkey on his T-shirt.

  “Do you think you can ideate the problem and get it one-eightied in time for the rededication gala tonight?” Mavis asked Uncle Newt and Hiroko.

  “Absolutely!” Uncle Newt said.

  “Assuming we can figure out what went wrong in the first place,” Hiroko added, with about a quarter of the confidence.

  Their answers didn’t leave the director looking very reassured. “Tonight’s the rollout of our new branding,” she said. “Our chance to reposition ourselves in an extremely mediagenic way in what’s become an aggressively competitive environment for the infotainment side of the urban facility-based destination market. We can’t afford any negative messaging just as we’re establishing a whole new public profile.”

  “Was that English?” Silas said quietly to DeMarco. But not quietly enough.

  “Tonight’s a big night for the Learnasium,” Jones translated for him. “It would be really bad—for everyone involved—if things ‘went nuts’ again.”

  “Understood! No worries! It’s as good as fixed!” Uncle Newt said enthusiastically.

  Hiroko managed a feeble smile but looked like she wanted to throw up.

  “Well then,” the director said, “we’ll leave you to it. Come on, Mojo,” she added. “We’d better go check on the mmm mmm mmmmm.”

  She said the last three words with her lips sealed.

  “Right,” said Jones, and they turned to go. As they hustled out of the hall, the director called back: “Keep me in the loop on your progress, Dr. Holt. If I need to proactively downgrade stakeholder expectations for the paradigm shift we can expect to leverage from tonight’s infovent, I’ll want plenty of runway time.”

  “Aye, aye!” Uncle Newt replied with a crisp salute. “Whatever that meant, I’m on it.”

  Mavis did not salute back.

  “Great,” Jones could be heard murmuring to her as they left the Hall of Genius. “It’s Mark Carstairs all over again.”

  Nick and Tesla looked at each other. They waited patiently till the director and Mojo Jones were out of earshot, then they simultaneously turned toward their uncle to ask the question each knew the other was thinking.

  “Who’s Mark Carstairs?”

  “An old colleague of mine,” Uncle Newt said, sighing. “Smart guy. Heck of a saxophone player, too. He used to take requests at Christmas parties. The only time I ever saw him stumped was when someone asked for—”

  “More important,” Hiroko broke in, “Mark was the original designer of the Hall of Genius. He oversaw the building of the animatronics and all the construction. But then there were problems, and he was fired.”

  “Like these kinds of problems?” Tesla asked, waving a hand at Isaac Asimov, who was still lying facedown on the floor.

  “Sort of,” Hiroko said. “There was trouble with the control mechanisms. Nothing this extreme, though.” She turned to Uncle Newt. “Do you really think we can figure out what’s wrong and have everything ready again by tonight?”

  “Not really!” Uncle Newt said with a smile. “But don’t you just love my can-do attitude?”

  “What did that Jones guy mean about it being bad for everyone if the Hall of Genius doesn’t work?” Nick asked.

  “The museum just spent millions on new exhibits,” Hiroko explained. “If something goes wrong at the rededication, it’ll be a huge black eye for them.” She turned a worried look on Uncle Newt. “And for us. With a project this big and expensive, there’s bound to be news coverage if it all falls apart. We’ll be laughingstocks.”

  Uncle Newt swiped a hand at her dismissively.

  “Laughingstocks shmaffing-bocks! I don’t care about that!” He walked over to animatronic Albert Einstein and picked up the chalk that had fallen from the figure’s hand. “I just don’t want to let these guys down.”

  He gave it a hearty slap on the back.

  Einstein’s left arm fell off.

  “Oops,” said Uncle Newt. “Sorry, Al.”

  Hiroko walked over to Uncle Newt as he bent down to retrieve the loose arm.

  “Is there any way we can help?” Nick asked.

  “No,” Hiroko said with a sigh. “I’m afraid not.”

  “I think there is,” Tesla said, her voice too low for the adults to hear. Besides which, they were too busy reattaching Einstein’s arm to notice.

  Tesla motioned for Nick, Silas, and DeMarco to join her by one of the displays on the other side of the hall—the office of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of modern psychiatry, to be specific.

  “I think it’s up to us to make sure the Hall of Genius doesn’t break down again,” Tesla said as the others gathered around.

  “Us?” said Silas.

  “What can we do?” said DeMarco. “We don’t know anything about fixing robots.”

  “Animatronics,” Nick corrected for the twentieth time that day.

  “We don’t know anything about that either,” said Silas.

  Tesla crossed her arms and frowned at the boys.

  “Don’t you get it? It’s not animatronics or robotics that’s the problem,” she said. “It’s sabotage!”

  “What?” said DeMarco.

  “Huh?” said Silas.

  “Of course,” said Nick.

  Tesla turned a grim smile on her brother.

  “What else could it be but sabotage, am I right?” she said to Nick. Then she noticed he was rolling his eyes. “What’s that look for?”

  “I wasn’t saying, ‘Sabotage! Of course!’ ” Nick explained. “I was saying, ‘Tesla thinks it’s sabotage. Of course.’ ”

  “And what’s that supposed
to mean?”

  “Look … just sit down for a second, would you?”

  Nick pointed to the couch in Freud’s office. The gray-bearded father of psychoanalysis sat in a chair nearby, watching thoughtfully, a fake cigar in the fingers of one fake hand.

  Tesla scowled.

  “We don’t have time for—”

  “Sit,” Nick broke in firmly. Firm wasn’t his usual style, so Tesla did as her brother asked. But she didn’t drop the scowl.

  “Tez,” Nick said, “ever since we came to live with Uncle Newt, you’ve been looking for trouble—”

  “And finding it,” DeMarco said. Tesla turned her scowl DeMarco’s way, prompting him to close his mouth very tight.

  “What have we done so far with our summer vacation?” Nick asked. “Catch kidnappers! Fight spies! Battle rampaging robots!”

  “See! Told ya robots were evil!” Silas said.

  Now it was Nick’s turn to scowl. Silas shrugged but said nothing more.

  “And do you know why we keep getting into one mess after another?” Nick continued.

  “A combination of bad luck and the fact that our parents are on the run because they seem to be working on some sort of super-secret government project that foreign agents are trying to get their hands on even though we thought they were experts on watering soybeans?” Tesla said.

  “Good recap,” said DeMarco.

  Nick was shaking his head.

  “It’s because you’re so worried about Mom and Dad, and so frustrated that we can’t do anything about whatever’s happened to them, that you keep looking for problems you think you can solve.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tesla said with a snort.

  Nick raised his eyebrows and stroked his chin.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes!”

  Tesla didn’t mean to shout it, but she did.

  Uncle Newt didn’t seem to notice the yelling, which wasn’t unusual. More than once he hadn’t detected when his own lab coat was on fire. But Hiroko looked up from the hand she was trying to reattach to George Washington Carver.

  The kids smiled and waved.

  Hiroko returned the wave glumly and returned to work.

  “Look, Nick,” Tesla said, fighting to keep her voice low, “just because we’re twins doesn’t mean you can read my mind. This isn’t some dumb obsession. It’s logic. The grown-ups are just too busy to stop and think it through.”

  “What’s so logical about it?” Nick said. “Some super-complicated machinery keeps breaking down. Why does that have to be sabotage?”

  “Because it wasn’t a mechanical failure, was it? The animatronics were working fine. They just started going way too fast. The displays are all controlled by computer, and all the computers in the museum are part of a network. Well, how hard could it be for someone to get access to the controls and crank ’em up too high?”

  “Pretty darn hard, actually, if that Mojo Jones guy is doing his job right.”

  “But what if we’re talking about someone who already had access to the network? Someone with a grudge against the Hall of Genius or the X-Treme Learnasium?”

  Nick started to say something, then stopped himself instead and pondered for a moment.

  “Like Carstairs, the fired designer,” he said. “You think he might be out for revenge?”

  “Or what’s-her-name. Mrs. Wheeler-Dealer!” DeMarco added.

  “Wharton-Wheeler,” Tesla corrected.

  “Right,” said DeMarco. “The grouchy curator lady. She hates the Hall of Genius.”

  “Or that bodybuilder security guard guy,” Silas said. “Obviously, he thirsts for vengeance because, uh, he’s bitter about, um …”

  “Getting lost in the halls all the time and not being allowed to guard the you-know-what,” DeMarco suggested.

  “Forget the security guard,” Tesla said. “We’ve got two strong suspects, and that’s enough. Don’t you think?”

  She stared hard at her brother.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Tesla hopped up, took her brother by the shoulders, and forced him to sit on the couch.

  “Tell me, Nick,” she said. “Why won’t you accept the obvious—that there’s a saboteur in the museum?”

  “Because it’s not obvious,” Nick said. “And I’m tired of all the trouble we keep getting into. It makes me think our lives are never gonna get back to normal.”

  Nick stretched out flat on the couch and clasped his hands on his chest.

  “I just want things to be like they used to. I wish we were back home in Virginia with Mom and Dad and—”

  Tesla grabbed his hands and yanked him off the couch.

  “All right, all right. We can get into all that later,” she said. “Right now we have to save Uncle Newt and Hiroko’s professional reputations!”

  “I do want to help Uncle Newt and Hiroko,” Nick admitted. “Sounds like this could be real trouble for them.”

  “Exactly,” Tesla said. “We have to catch the bad guy and rescue the museum.”

  “Yippee. Another adventure,” Nick said with a groan. “I don’t know why people think adventures are so cool. In fact, they’re really stressful.”

  “Stress is fun!” DeMarco enthused.

  “Yeah!” said Silas.

  “Well, I’m glad you guys think so,” Nick said. “Because something tells me we’re in for a lot more quote-unquote fun.”

  But DeMarco and Silas weren’t listening anymore. They were following Tesla toward the exit.

  Nick sighed. And then he followed, too.

  Unlike the back door behind Albert Einstein’s chalkboard, the official entrance to the Hall of Genius consisted of two tall white sliding doors that reached all the way to the high ceiling. For the gala that night, they’d be pushed into recesses in the walls, but at the moment they were nearly closed, with only a three-foot gap between them. Just enough space for the kids to pass through.

  One by one, they stepped into the museum’s cavernous atrium lobby. It was a dark and murky place. The ceiling was mostly glass panels, but little light was getting through on this overcast day. Plus, all the lights were turned off to save energy until it was time for the rededication soirée. The result was that the atrium had all the cheer of a tomb.

  Visible through the gloom were the vague outlines of various displays and activity booths. The open space was dotted with a pendulum and a zoetrope here, a holographic sculpture and a camera obscura there, as well as gyroscopes and periscopes and kinetoscopes and pretty much every other scope known to humanity. Around the perimeter of the atrium loomed large lumpy shapes that seemed like rolling gray hills but were in fact giant foam-rubber reproductions of just about every organ in the human body.

  At the center of it all stood a life-size re- creation of a Tyrannosaurus rex locked in a battle to the death with a bloodied triceratops. According to Uncle Newt, the dinosaurs were animatronic, too. During visiting hours, the Learnasium would pipe in their roars and shrieks, along with the sound of stomping feet and ripping flesh.

  “ ’Cause, you know … X-Treme, right?” he’d added.

  But for now the dinosaurs—and the exhibits surrounding them—were eerily quiet. All sides of the atrium featured entrances to the museum wings that held the larger exhibits, like the Hall of Genius. Most of the other wings were open but dark. The Hall of Genius was blocked by the big partition doors, as were two other exhibit spaces. One of the closed-off areas was on the other side of the dinosaurs, and the other was at the top of a flight of wide, open stairs that led to a second floor equipped with a balcony that jutted over the gift shop.

  “Well,” Nick said, “where do we start?”

  “At the moment, there’s not much we can do about Carstairs,” Tesla said. “He’s not here.”

  “As far as we know,” DeMarco added, speaking in an overly ominous voice that most people reserve for telling ghost stories.

  “But Ms. Wharton-Wheeler works right here in t
his building somewhere,” Tesla plowed on. “We need to figure out where her office is so we can—”

  “Hold it right there, punks!” barked a voice from the darkness. “Freeze!”

  And then the muscular man they’d met earlier—Berg—popped out from behind a giant (and disgustingly realistic) replica of the human brain. His sleeveless T-shirt and acid-washed jeans had been replaced by a blue police-style uniform that looked two sizes too small. In fact, his clothes looked likely to burst if he so much as lifted a bulging arm over his head.

  “Dang,” Berg said when he was close enough to realize he was talking to the four kids. “It’s just you again.”

  “Sorry,” Nick told him. “But I’m sure you’ll catch some real punks one day.”

  “Oh, I will,” Berg said. His expression turned wistful and his gaze drifted off to a spot about three feet above their heads. “I will.”

  Then with a rough jerk of the head, he shook the dreamy look off his face.

  “Anyway, what are you doing out here?”

  “Uhh,” said Nick.

  “Ohh,” said DeMarco.

  “Oooh,” said Silas.

  “We were just wondering where Ms. Wharton- Wheeler’s office is,” Tesla said.

  The boys gaped at her in surprise. It hadn’t occurred to them to tell Berg the truth. Or part of it at least.

  “We wanted to ask her what museums were like in the old days,” said Tesla. “You know, before they got so ‘X-Treme.’ ”

  “Well, her office is back in there,” Berg said, nodding toward a small doorway in the nearest wall. “In that maze, with all the other administrative offices. But you won’t find her there. She spends all her time puttering around with her baby.”

  “She has a baby?” Silas asked.

  “I mean, she’s working in her new exhibit. Up there.” Berg pointed up the stairs. “It used to be Going with Your Gut: A Journey through the Digestive System, but she’s replacing it with something else. About time, too.” Berg shivered. “You’ve never experienced creepy till you’ve been alone on patrol in a giant colon.”

  “Um, yeah, I bet,” Tesla said. “Well, thanks for the information. Come on, guys. We’ll just pop in on Ms. Wharton-Wheeler and—”