The Winter of the Robots (7 page)

“Never mind,” I told her. The site must be using the last known data. Penny had gotten a map of where I’d placed the cameras the first time. “It isn’t safe here, and it’s getting dark. Let’s go home.”

I helped her through the fence and we started back up Half Street. No blue bolts of electricity this time.

“Jim, do you believe in robots?” Penny asked.

“Of course I believe in robots. They’re not like fairies. We know robots exist.”

“Yeah, but this one probably doesn’t,” she said.

“Which one?”

“The one I just saw,” she said.

“You saw a robot that doesn’t exist?”

“I saw a robot,” she said. “Back there at the junkyard. It was a big lizardy robot.”

“Maybe you just saw something that looked like a robot.” I glanced back at the fence and the piles of snowy debris. Who knew what was lurking there?

“I’m too tired to walk home,” she said. “Can we call Mom and get a ride?”

“Sure. We should call anyway, just to let them know we’re OK.” The only problem was I’d left my cell at home again. “We just need to find a phone.”

The first two businesses we saw were closed, but the third was open—the service station. Webber Automotive. “We repair imports!” the sign boasted.

The door rang a bell as we came in. There was nobody there, so we waited a moment. A man came in, wiping greasy hands on a towel.

“Sorry, we’re not technically open—” he started saying. “Oh, it’s you.”

It was Sergei Volkov.

He gave us a ride home in the tow truck, all three of us in the front. I gave him the address, and he turned onto First Street, stopping for a train.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry I was mean to you this morning.”

“No problem.”

“Dmitri told me what happened,” he said. “You need to know, my brother’s not a thief. He’s never been in trouble before. He just acts retarded sometimes.”

“You’re not supposed to use that word,” said Penny.

“Yeah, there’s lots of stuff I’m not supposed to do.” The train passed, and Sergei headed up the avenue. “So, I’d make Dmitri give the stuff back, but somebody stole it from him.” He found our street and turned. “Dmitri doesn’t need to get into real trouble. It would kill our mom and dad to even know. Dmitri is the good one.”

“If he’s the good one, why did he steal?” Penny asked.

“I think he was trying to prove a point.” He pulled over, a couple of houses short of ours.

“Prove what?” I asked.

“That he’s a re—that he’s a dimwit,” said Sergei. He glanced at Penny. “Can I say dimwit?”

“I think so,” she said.

He reached into his pocket, came up with a handful of bills, and shoved them at me.

I thumbed through the bills. There were lots of ones and fives, and a few tens and twenties.

“That’s probably not enough to pay for everything that got stolen,” said Sergei. “But it’s all I got right now. Don’t tell anybody what happened, OK? Especially don’t tell anybody who might tell the police. Did you tell your mom and dad?”

“Not yet.”

“Then don’t.” I realized that the money wasn’t compensation. It was a bribe, with the hint of a threat on the other end.

“They were my dad’s cameras,” I told him. “He’ll find out sooner or later, and when he does, he’ll ask me a bunch of questions, and I’ll have to answer.”

“Listen,” said Sergei. “I’ll try to replace the cameras, all right? See if you can hold out a week or two.”

“Really?”

“Just keep your mouth shut.”

“He will,” said Penny. She shoved me out the truck door before I could think things over.

Mom was waiting for us.

“Where were you this time?” She sounded more exasperated
than angry. “Penny disappears; you go stamping out the door without telling us where you’re going. Now your father’s out looking for you both.”

“We’re fine,” I said. “Sorry.” I tried to come up with an alternative explanation and floundered.

“We were fighting,” said Penny. “Jim said that I couldn’t use the computer, even though he wasn’t using it, so I logged in anyway and got on Facebook as him and posted a few updates.”

“I don’t care what it was about,” Mom interrupted. “Jim, we need you to act more responsible. Your sister is only nine. Don’t let her goad you.”

“Sorry. I was mostly kidding around.” I looked like an idiot, but at least Penny came up with a story—and in genius Penny fashion, came up with something Mom didn’t even want to ask questions about.

“Who was the guy in the tow truck who just dropped you off?”

Uh-oh. She’d seen that.

“The brother of a friend from school,” I told her. “He saw us walking back and gave us a ride.”

“Right. Well, as long as you know him and didn’t take a ride from a stranger.”

“Mom, we’re not stupid,” I said.

“I know, I know. Let me call your dad. I’ll ask him to stop at the store so he has time to cool off.”

“Sorry,” said Penny. “We didn’t mean to make him mad.”

“Oh, I know you’re both going to act like kids sometimes.
Maybe this business with the missing boy will help him appreciate that you don’t get into
real
trouble.”

At least not yet, I thought.

That night Penny and I made a robot. We used tinfoil-covered boxes for the body and a cookie tin for the head. The legs were a wrapping-paper tube cut in half.

“Is this robot a boy or a girl?” Penny asked when the robot was nearly finished.

“Neither. Robots are its.”

“I think it’s a girl.” Penny gave the robot unruly rainbow hair made of used gift-wrap ribbons. “The robots I saw earlier were definitely boys.”

“You saw more than one?”

She looked at me. “You said there weren’t any robots.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Forget it! They don’t exist!” She wagged the robot’s wire arm to make it wave. “Hi Jimmy,” she chanted in a high-pitched, robotic voice. “My name is Celeste.”

“Don’t get too attached to it,” I told Penny. “Oliver’s robot is going to smash this thing to pieces.”

“No!” Penny protested. “You can’t hurt Celeste!”

“Never mind.” I patted Penny on the arm. “You can keep this one.”

“Yay!” She moved the arms up and down into different poses. “Can we make her do things?”

“Like what?”

“Walk and talk and beat up other robots?”

“I don’t know how,” I said. “We’ll have to bring in an expert.”

Oliver came over the next day with a book and a plastic box full of electronic bits and pieces.

Dad was in the living room watching a football play-off game. Green Bay was at Philadelphia. He was rooting for the Eagles because his second-favorite team was whoever was playing the Packers. Oliver glanced at Dad, then at me, raising his eyebrows inquisitively. I got his meaning and shook my head: No, Dad still didn’t know about the cameras.

“So what did you bring us?” Penny peeked in the box.

“Lots of gadgets and doodads and whatsits,” said Oliver. “Enough for a half dozen rudimentary robots.”

“Awesome! What’s this?” Penny picked through the box and found a plastic thing about the size of a deck of cards. It had a blank LCD display.

“It’s the logic controller,” said Oliver. “You use it to program the robot.”

“Program her to do what?” Penny asked.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “I’ll show you.” He started making a squidlike thing with the logic controller at the center and wires for tentacles, lecturing while he worked: The sensors were like our own senses, responding to light, sound, or touch. They sent messages to the logic controller, which was like the brain. The logic controller decided what
to do according to its program and triggered the actuators, which were like muscles. They made things work: flashing lights, wheels, whatever.

“What if I want her to talk?” asked Penny.

“You have either a playback mechanism or a TTV device—text to voice.” He tapped Celeste’s cardboard body. “Does she come apart?”

“Sure.”

I thought Penny would protest, but she watched in fascination as Oliver disassembled Celeste and punched pinholes in her body so he could thread the wires through until just the tips were visible.

“This is just like when you were in the hospital,” I whispered to Penny.

“Shut up. No it’s not.”

Oliver ignored us. He attached a mesh square about the size of a postage stamp to the end of each wire, and secured them with a few drops of wire glue.

“Usually I’d solder,” he said. “But this is good for more flammable robots.” He taped the controller inside the box and put Celeste back together. I had to respect how quickly he worked, and how neat the results were—the squares were evenly spaced around Celeste’s body, two on each side of the box. It made her look more robotic. Celeste also seemed better put together—more balanced and less likely to fall apart at the joints.

Oliver led a couple of wires down one of her tubular legs. He attached the first wire to a small button and glued it to
the back of Celeste’s ankle. He plugged the other wire into a plastic ring with wheels around the rim and secured it to the robot’s feet. “This is an omni-wheel,” he explained. “
Omni
mean all. An omni-wheel gives your robot the ability to roll in any direction.”

“Celeste,” Penny told him.

“Sure. Celeste.” He set the robot on the table, turned her on, and let her roll toward Penny.

“Cool!” Penny reached for her, but Celeste abruptly veered away. Penny’s eyes popped wide. I held out a hand to catch the robot, and Celeste turned again, heading back to Oliver. Oliver sent her back to me, and I sent her back to Penny.

Penny trapped the robot so she could pick it up. “I love it! How does it work?”

“Ultrasound sensors,” said Oliver. “If something is coming closer, the sensor is activated, and the logic controller tells the omni-wheel to change direction.”

“That’s all there is to it?” I asked.

“That’s all there is,” he said.

Sensor, controller, actuator. All that time I thought this stuff was way over my head, but it suddenly sounded doable.

I checked the camera website later that night. Penny had a good idea, “beeping” the cameras. Maybe I could track them down. I wouldn’t have the guts to confront somebody, but I bet Sergei would.

Amazingly, there were dozens of new five-second
fragments from all four cameras. The GPS data indicated they were still at the junkyard. Most were close-ups of junk: the first zoomed in on a bent-up sign, the second captured the logo from a bicycle frame, the third showed an embossed symbol on a refrigerator door. Y, A, W.

Strung together, they made words!

I clicked through the thumbnails, writing down the letters recorded on miscellaneous signs, inked markings on old wood, accidental letters made of twisted metal. What I got was an incantation from an ancient language.

YAWA YATS YAWA YATS

Then I remembered that the videos appeared with the most recent on top, so they were showing up in the opposite order of how they were recorded. The actual message was:

STAY AWAY STAY AWAY STAY AWAY

Whoever had taken the cameras knew I was watching and was sending me a message. I didn’t care who they were. I intended to do what they said.

I had a friend request from Malasha on Monday morning. She messaged me as soon as I accepted it.

It took two buses and an hour to get there. There was no straight route. We had to go downtown and transfer.

“So, talk to me about what?” she asked when we were on the second leg of the trip.

“I was wondering if you were going to do the otter thing without me.”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Because I’ve been thinking. I don’t think it’s safe. There were some metal barrels. I bet you they’re filled with toxic waste.” That part was a lie, but I needed to keep her out of there. “And the signs said Keep Out.”

“No worries,” she said. “I’ll do something else.”

“Cool.” I pulled the rope to stop the bus. “We get off here.”

The Volkovs’ house seemed to sag at the corners. There was a new Cadillac Escalade in the driveway, freshly washed and out of place.

“Wow. I wonder what his dad does?” The SUV probably cost even more than Peter’s A7.

“He’s a limo driver,” said Rocky. She pointed at a subtle decal on the back window: Lowry Limousine Express, Ltd. Followed by URL and phone number.

“Of course.” The fancy car was his business. Maybe it was worth it to drive around in style.

As if on cue, Mr. Volkov came out of the house. He was an older version of Dmitri, in a dark wool coat and aviator glasses. He nodded at us. The mirror shades and the overcoat and the luxury SUV probably accounted for the rumor that he was a mobster. He looked the part—more crime boss than hired thug.

“You’re here for Dmitri? He’s inside.” He had an accent. I wondered how long the Volkovs had lived in the U.S. He climbed into the car and backed out, the Escalade barely making a noise as he rolled it out onto the street.

Rocky elbowed me. “You’re crushing on the Caddy?”

“Yeah, I might get one myself. I should ask him how it drives compared with a Lexus RX.”