by Paul Tobin
“Hooray!” I said, landing atop the robot by the merest chance and taking the opportunity to strike a dramatic pose so that I could later claim it was exactly what I’d meant to do.
“Gurff!” Liz said, squeezed by the tentacle and menaced by some razor-sharp blades. Something needed to be done. There was a gaping hole atop the robot, like an open manhole full of wires and buttons. Balancing myself as best I could, I started pulling all the wires and clicking all of the buttons. Meanwhile, I had to dodge razor-sharp tentacles and also acidic sprays, because the robot was not delighted to have me on its back, bucking far worse than any rodeo bull. One slash went through my shirt, but caught only the barest hint of my skin. Another slash cut through my jetbelt, and then a tentacle tore it away. Then a slash took off several locks of my hair, the strands falling in front of my face before dissolving in an acidic mist I had to desperately leap in order to avoid, holding on to one of the tentacles and twirling around it, landing where I’d started and once more plunging my hands into the hole, flipping switches and unplugging wires. Then . . . the robot shivered. The robot shook. The robot sparked and it hissed and I leaped to safety just as the robot exploded.
The noise of the explosion was like “SKRANNNG,” which was great, but what was not great was the following noise of, “Gahhhh!” . . . that being the sound of my best friend Liz Morris being flung high into the air.
My heart almost stopped.
“Catch her!” I yelled to . . . well, no one. I couldn’t find any of my friends. Nate had disappeared into the horde. Stine and Wendy and Ventura were gone. Melville had vanished. I could hear Bosper barking somewhere far off, but the terrier was nowhere in sight. I was on my own and I needed to catch Liz. My calculations were that she was going to fall smack dab in the center of a huge horde of robots, and I was utterly positive that my calculations were correct, because no matter where Liz fell, there was a huge horde of robots.
I started dodging more tentacles, more bursts of acid, more slashes from knives, and even trying to dodge Maculte’s laughter, which was coming from each and every one of the robots like a physical force. I was squeezing between robots, and they . . . I have to be honest . . . were being rude. Mostly it was that “trying to kill me” thing, but there was no time to instruct the Red Death Tea Society’s robots in proper murder etiquette, owing to how I had to reach the spot where I predicted Liz was going to fall. Then, once I got there, I would have to figure out a way to catch her, and I’d have to do that immediately, because, glancing up, my best guess for where Liz was going to fall was . . .
. . . was . . .
Hmmm.
She wasn’t falling anymore.
“I’m floating again!” she said, floating high above the fight, giving me a thumbs-up.
“Excellent timing!” I yelled back. And then, even in the midst of fighting an endless horde of robots, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. And it was also at that moment that I felt something touch my shoulder.
I turned around.
It was Nate.
He said, “You’re right.”
“Of course,” I said. “About what?”
“We should fight. Even though there’s no way we can win.”
“There’s always a way we can win,” I said. “Nothing in life, nothing, is ever truly a zero percent chance.” I said all this while grabbing him up in a hug, because Nate was willing to overlook our mathematically zero percent chance of winning, willing to overlook math, in order to fight with me. Nate would never be like Maculte, a cold, calculating man who believed in nothing but numbers. Nate believed in people. He believed in me. That’s why I was hugging him. I wasn’t hugging him because it makes me feel better when I do, because that would be ridiculous, owing to how Nate and I are not dating and would never even think about it, not in a million years.
There’s just a zero percent chance of it.
“Can’t you disintegrate the robots?” I said, pointing to his pistol while doing a backward flip to dodge a tentacle, accidentally thumping my butt off a robot and sprawling to the floor, almost getting stomped on by another robot but being pulled to safety at the last second as Bosper came charging through the horde, chomping down on my collar and yanking me back. You know, the usual conversational problems when I’m talking with Nate.
“Tried,” Nate said, aiming his disintegrator pistol at one of the robots and pulling the trigger. The ray flickered over the robot, but . . . nothing happened. “Maculte adjusted their molecular structure. This pistol’s useless now.”
“No it’s not,” I argued. “Dissolve a wall so we can escape!”
“The walls are immune now, too,” Nate said, shooting one of the walls. It briefly glowed red, but the color faded and the wall was otherwise unmarked.
“Okay, here’s my last idea,” I said, but as I spoke, two of the nearest robots spewed an acidic mist into the air. Luckily, it was going to miss me.
Until, that is, Nate grabbed me by the shoulders and plunged me right into the worst of it.
“Nate!” I yelled, in what could easily be considered an admonitory tone, or even a chastising voice, or possibly even a shriek of outraged shock and horror.
“Don’t worry!” Nate said, which is an interesting thing to say to someone you’re holding in the middle of an acidic cloud.
“You’re safe!” he added. “The nano-bots in our systems will counteract the chemical changes. Sorry I didn’t have a chance to warn you, but I needed something to block the oncoming spray or else your friends would have been . . . umm . . . well, it was for the best that they didn’t get any mist on them.” I looked behind me and saw that Stine, and Ventura, and Wendy had joined us, all of them still alive, which is the way friends should be, even if the only way to keep them that way is to stand in front of a cloud of highly concentrated acid that smells like a heavily perspiring rat.
“Guhh,” I told my friends. “Don’t smell this.”
“Actually,” Nate said, “Don’t let it touch you at all.”
“That, too,” I said. “But seriously, don’t smell it.” Bosper came bounding across the tops of several robots, bouncing and leaping from one to another, using his incredible mind to calculate the various roboctopi attacks, avoiding them with ease since he could predict every last one. He bounded atop the nearest robot and was about to jump down next to us, but then he skidded to a frantic stop. His nose wrinkled.
“Has someone been doing the farting?” he asked.
“It’s the acid gas,” I said, dodging a tentacle by leaping up and over it like it was a jump rope, with Wendy, Stine, and Ventura doing the same. Liz was still floating in midair.
“The dog’s nose is going away,” Bosper said, repeatedly sneezing. He jumped from robot to robot, farther away, then stopped to chew on some wires, causing one of the robots to fall to the floor. One down, millions to go.
“Six hundred and seventeen,” Nate said.
“Huh?”
“I predicted you’d be counting how many robots there are. There are six hundred and seventeen.”
“Six hundred sixteen!” I heard Bosper call out from nearby, accompanied by the sound of another robot crashing to the floor.
“We’re winning!” I said, but then I heard a yelp from Bosper and looked to see him being smacked like a home run ball, hurled into the air, his legs limp. Unconscious, he arced high above us, crashing against several of the chains hanging from the ceiling, causing them to jingle like wind chimes. And then he started to fall. He was helpless. Unconscious. And plummeting toward certain doom.
Liz caught him.
“Got him!” she yelled, floating far above.
“Keep him!” I said. “It’s not safe down here!”
“It’s not safe anywhere, Delphine,” the roboctopi said, all of them speaking with one voice, the sort of voice that might come from a darkened closet in the middle of the night.
It was Maculte, speaking through his robots.
“I’ve enjoyed watch
ing you run around helpless,” he said. “But now it’s time to end this. Robots, initiate detonation protocol.”
“Excuse me!” I said, waving my hand. Maculte’s eyes, echoed six hundred and sixteen times on the robots’ display monitors, shifted from glaring at Nate to looking at me.
“Yes?” Maculte said.
“I was just wondering, when you said that thing about “detonation protocol,” were you talking about all the robots exploding?”
“Yes.”
“Ahh, piffle. Okay, thanks.” I turned to Nate and punched him in the shoulder.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just stress. Okay, Nate, you’re telling me there’s no way to beat these robots, right?”
“Correct.”
“But what I’ve been trying to say is . . . what if we didn’t have to?”
“That would be better,” he said.
“I’d vote for that,” Wendy said.
“Me too,” Stine added.
“Unanimous,” Ventura said.
I said, “Isn’t there some way we can turn them to our side? I mean, if there’s going to be an unstoppable robot army, wouldn’t it be better if it was on our side?”
Maculte laughed at my words as small panels slid open on all of the robots, revealing a transparent globe in each of them, no larger than an apple.
The globes were all pulsing.
Pulsing . . . red.
Remember how red isn’t a good color?
“One minute to detonation,” the robots said, speaking in unison.
“Time out!” I yelled.
“Fifty-nine seconds until detonation,” the robots said, obviously not in the mood to play fair.
“Hmm,” Nate said. It wasn’t much, but to me it sounded like music, or like warm blankets on a cold day, or like cake on absolutely any day at all. It sounded good is what I’m saying, because it meant that Nate was thinking, and if Nate was thinking then everything was going to be okay.
Right?
Nate leaped to the nearest robot and tore away one of the panels, revealing a control board. One of the robot’s tentacles grabbed his leg and tried to pull him away, but Nate refused to let go, so that for a moment he was being yanked apart, hanging between the robot and its tentacle like taffy.
“Karate chop!” I yelled, using the masterful karate chop that I learned on my training course, where I chop my hand into the pillow that Snarls, Mom’s cat, uses to sleep on all the time. I’m not fond of Snarls so I was quite pleased to steal his pillow.
“Karate owww!” I howled, because . . . as it turns out . . . a robot’s tentacle is much harder than a cat’s pillow. Still, my attack had the desired effect, if by “desired effect” you mean that the tentacle let go of Nate and grabbed me instead.
“Let me go!” I ordered the robot.
“Fifty-two seconds to detonation,” it replied.
“Hah!” Nate said, staring at the robot’s control panel. “You’re right, Delphine! I was looking at the problem all wrong! When you can’t beat them, force them to join you!” His fingers were working on the robot’s interior, connecting wires, using a small blowtorch to weld them into different places, and doing all sorts of other things that I might have been able to understand if I wasn’t currently being used as a flail, because the robot began using me to swat at Nate.
“Guhh!” I said, being slammed into him.
“Guhh!” he said, slammed into.
“Gahhh!” I said, as the roboctopus thumped me off Nate again.
“Oh,” Nate said. “Dang.” His tone of voice was . . . bad.
“What’s wrong?” Ventura asked. It was the question I would’ve asked him, too, if I wasn’t being helplessly flung around like a rag doll, because that does put a damper on conversation.
Nate said, “This . . . this robot has a user agreement.”
“Huh?” I said. The roboctopus wasn’t thumping me off Nate anymore, which I considered good news. The bad news (there was actually a wide range of bad news, but this one was immediately pertinent) is that it wasn’t thumping me off Nate anymore because several of the roboctopi were now fighting over me, yanking me between tentacles, apparently fighting for the right to thump me off Nate, which they clearly enjoyed.
“A user agreement,” Nate said. “Like, when you download a new application, you have to read and agree to all the rules of the user agreement.”
“I do those all the time!” I told Nate. “But you don’t have to actually read them! Just . . . check ‘okay’ and go on!”
“That would be a lie,” Nate said. He trembled a bit. I did, too, partially because I could now see where this was going, and also because I was still being yanked back and forth between several robot tentacles, like they were dogs fighting over a bone.
“Just check it off, anyway,” Stine said. “What’s it matter?”
“He can’t lie,” I told Stine, trying to wriggle out of a robot’s grasp. I was entirely successful in this, but I accidentally wriggled into a different robot’s grasp, which I considered to be unfortunate. “Nate’s currently genetically programmed so that he has to tell the truth.”
“Thirty-two seconds until detonation,” the robots said in tandem. I hoped they were lying.
“Here,” Wendy said. “I’ll click it.” She brushed past Nate and was about to hit a button when a blast of electricity sizzled out from the robot. Nate pushed her back just in time, or else she’d have been caught in the blast.
“That won’t work,” he told her. “I’m already in past the robot’s defenses. This has to be me.”
“Then start reading!” I yelled out.
Maculte was still laughing.
Nate was still frowning. He said, “Maculte entered an enormous amount of material here. It would take me . . . hours to read all this.”
“Twenty-four seconds until detonation,” the robots said. The pulsing globes were no longer pulsing, they were absolutely glowing. Then, the robots each reached into their own chest cavities and plucked out their globes, holding them high above their bodies, casting an odd heat, like sunlight pulsing against my face and arms. The robot that had been holding me dropped me, and I rolled to a stop with all the grace of a seventh grade girl terrified of being exploded by robots, meaning I pretty much fell on my face.
“Twenty-two seconds until detonation,” the robots said. Maculte was still laughing and talking about how clever he was, how his amazing brain could never be defeated, that Nate and I were just children, and children deserved nothing but merciless taunts and swift extermination, which is why he devised this little game that we couldn’t possibly win. I jumped to my feet and tried to push past Nate and click the user agreement button myself, but it sent out the same burst of electricity that had nearly charbroiled Wendy.
I didn’t dodge it.
I trusted the nano-bots in my system to deal with it, and they did, to a small degree, meaning that I wasn’t immediately burnt to ashes, but the sheer force of the electricity made it feel like I was being pummeled by baseballs. I was staggering backward, but not accepting defeat, never accepting defeat, gritting my teeth, stomping closer, my eyes on that user agreement button, and my eyes also on all the glowing globes that were nearing explosion, and on the robots that were talking about “eighteen seconds to detonation,” and I could see that Nate was trying to hurry up and read the user agreement, but both of us knew it was hopeless, because he had hours of reading to do and there were now only sixteen seconds before . . .
“Hey,” I said.
“Hmm,” I said.
“Ah-hah!” I said.
Then I said, “Liz! Do you still have that vial of Nate’s ‘Speed Reading’ potion?”
“Yes.”
“Need it. Now!”
“Thirteen seconds to detonation,” the robots said as Liz grabbed a vial from her pocket and hurled it down to me. I caught it, then immediately took out the cork and poured it down Nate’s surprised mouth.
“Glug glug glug,” he said.
“Ten seconds to detonation,” he said.
But Nate’s eyes turned to the control board, and I could see those brown eyes of his flickering and speeding through the lines, his fingers tapping on the tiny keyboard as an endless spool of pages went racing past, hundreds of pages at a time, with Nate’s amazing mind capturing all the information, zooming along with the aid of the “Speed Reading” potion.
“Seven seconds to detonation,” Maculte said. His confidence was returning. There were so many pages, and so little time. I could feel sweat trickling down my back. Stine reached out and grabbed my hand. Together, we watched Nate read.
The pages were speeding past so quickly that they were nothing but a blur. There was a growing hum filling the room. The globes were beginning to vibrate. Stine was whimpering.
“Five seconds to detonation,” the robots said.
The pages weren’t even a blur anymore, they were just a gray haze, as Nate was reading thousands of pages in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, we were running out of time, even for blinks of an eye.
“Three seconds to detonation,” the robots said. The combined voice, Maculte’s voice, was full of triumph. Melville came flying down from above and landed on my shoulder with a buzz of concern. Wendy took my other hand. My eyes wanted to close, to squeeze shut so that I wouldn’t have to see all those hundreds of glowing globes, the bombs being held up by the robots, and I wouldn’t have to see the seemingly endless views of Maculte, now with Luria standing next to him, the two of them grinning, the collective horde of roboctopi venting steam as they were reaching the moment when they would detonate and the entire room would be explosively—
“Agreed!” Nate said, tapping on the control board. Then, with his fingers flying, he typed at speeds that were comparable to how fast he’d been reading.
“Robots!” he yelled. “Cease detonation protocol!”