The robot olympics, p.8
The Robot Olympics, page 8
“Take your time!” I urged our robot. “You can do it!”
“Bury that rock!” Yo shouted.
Andy glowered at us.
SwiftBot raised the ball before him, took aim, … and scored!
The audience roared in approval. The game was now even, 9-9. Both robots needed only two more points to win the match, the tournament, and the entire Robot Olympics.
We were down to the wire. The next few minutes would determine everything. It was do or die.
Andy knew that too. “Don’t let me down, you stupid robot!”
Regaining possession of the ball, FugBot shake-and-baked, trying to get past SwiftBot. The silver robot hustled to box him out, sticking to his opponent as though they were magnetized together. Black plastic grazed silver carbon fiber as they jostled each other. SwiftBot’s arm reached for the ball again and again, aiming to steal the rock, but FugBot was too crafty for that. Andy’s robot dribbled the ball behind his back to keep it out of SwiftBot’s eager clutches.
“Yikes!” Yo exclaimed. “I hate to say it, but that robot’s got some killer moves.”
“There are people who can’t dribble that well,” I admitted.
Turning his back on the defender, FugBot sprinted past the three-point line. My heart pounded. If the ebony robot made a two-point basket from outside the line, the match was over.
“Stop him!” I yelled to SwiftBot. “Don’t let him score!”
SwiftBot raced to get in his opponents way. FugBot crouched low, then sprang into the air. His right arm carried the ball aloft before releasing it into the air. SwiftBot rocketed up to block the shot but couldn’t get enough altitude. I stared in horror as the ball soared above SwiftBot’s outstretched fingers. Yo gasped and threw her hands over her mouth.
It was a perfect jump shot. The ball came down right on target, touching nothing but net.
FugBot had won, 11-9.
“All right!” Andy exclaimed. “Game over!”
That’s that, I thought. The Robot Olympics were all wrapped up. As the adrenaline rush faded, a numb feeling came over me. The final awards ceremony, attended by Dr. VanderMeer would not be until tomorrow morning, but I could calculate the ultimate results easily enough.
Fourth place: MechaCrawler.
Third place: RollerBot.
Second place: SwiftBot.
First place: FugBot!
“I can’t believe it,” Yo groaned. “We lost … to Andy.”
Talk about adding insult to injury. “We’re never going to hear the end of this.”
“Starting now, it looks like,” she said.
Andy swaggered over to us. “See!” he gloated. Smug self-satisfaction was written all over his beefy face. “Didn’t I tell you that FugBot would clobber your wimpy robot? How’s it feel to know you’re only second-best?”
Not so hot.
9
Follow That Car!
“Thanks for giving me a lift home,” my sister said. She leaned back against the passenger seat of the Speedster as we cruised through Shopton with the top down. A warm breeze blew past our heads. “I can’t wait until I have wheels of my own.”
“No problem,” I told her. Our parents were having dinner with some old scientist friends who were in town for the Robot Olympics, but neither Sandy nor I were in the mood to listen to lots of grown-up chatter and reminiscences all night. After tucking SwiftBot away in his trailer, I just wanted to go home and veg out for the evening. Tomorrow’s final awards ceremony was going to come all too soon as it was. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Sandy must have heard how discouraged I sounded. “Sorry SwiftBot lost the big game,” she said. “You almost won. Plus, second place in the whole Robo Olympics thing is nothing to sneeze at.”
“I guess.” I appreciated Sandy’s efforts to cheer me up, but I was still feeling pretty down. Yo had taken off with Bud to drown her sorrows in a hot-fudge sundae. I had been tempted to join them but had decided that I’d rather be by myself for a while. Maybe I would get back to work on that jetpack. Get my mind off robots until tomorrow.
Sandy peered into the passenger-side mirror, then glanced back over her shoulder. “Heads up, big brother,” she said. “Don’t look now, but I think we’re being followed.”
“What?” I started to turn around in my seat.
Sandy punched me in the shoulder. “I said, don’t look!”
I peeked in the rearview mirror instead. “Which car?”
“The white sedan,” she informed me. She rifled through the handbag on her lap and extracted a small cosmetic case. Flipping open the compact, she used its mirror to keep watch on the other car while pretending to check her makeup. “I’m not a hundred-percent certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s been dogging our tail since we left the school.”
I spotted the car she meant, a snow white sedan. It was about two cars behind us and one lane over. As far as I knew, I had never seen it before.
“Let’s check this out,” I said. Even though we were only a few miles away from our house, I made some random turns that carried us away from the suburbs and deeper into Shopton’s business district. The rush-hour traffic grew heavier as we veered left at the bowling alley and headed straight down Stratemeyer Avenue. Department stores, office buildings, and coffee shops lined the busy thoroughfare. “Well?” I asked Sandy after a few minutes. “He still with us?”
Sandy tilted her mirror to get a better look. “Yep. A few cars back.” She grinned broadly, sounding more excited than concerned about our mysterious shadow. “This is awesome! For once, I’m not missing out on all the action!”
My sister was convinced that she always got the short end of the stick just because she was one year younger than me. She was still kicking herself for having missed all that excitement outside the trailers the other night. The truth is, I think I’m just better at getting into tight spots than she is. “Lucky you,” I replied.
I stared into the rearview mirror, trying to get a look at the driver of the sedan. All I could make out was a male figure behind the wheel. A baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses helped disguise the driver’s identity. He could have been almost anybody.
Who? I wondered.
Jay Robertson, the disgraced Olympian?
A TRB terrorist or sympathizer?
The guy in the ski mask who bugged our trailer?
Somebody else altogether?
“Who could it be?” Sandy asked eagerly. Her gaze was glued to the mirror of her compact. “What do you think he’s after?”
“Beats me,” I confessed. My brain raced as I tried to figure out what to do next. I could always contact the police or SE Security via Q.U.I.P., but that might just scare our shadow away before we could find out who he was. I didn’t want to just lose our pursuer—I wanted some answers, too. After a few more turns, an idea struck me. “I think I know how to turn the tables on him, if we can just get out of his sight for a few minutes.”
Sandy pounced on the challenge. “I know just the trick!” She glanced around at the street signs as we continued to drive through downtown. “Okay, we just passed the intersection of Thirty-fifth and Waverly. There should be an alley coming up on your right, about two blocks from here, that connects with Pine Avenue.”
I took her word for it. Sandy had a photographic memory, and she had long since memorized the local maps. When it came to getting around Shopton and the surrounding areas, she was more reliable than a state-of-the-art GPS system.
Sure enough, the alley she mentioned popped up right in front of us. I mentally apologized to my old driver’hadn instructor as, without signaling first, I made a sharp right turn into the alley. The narrow passageway looked clear ahead, so I hit the gas to increase the distance between us and the sedan. The sudden acceleration tossed Sandy back against her seat. “Hey!” she protested. “A little warning next time!”
I glanced in the mirror. The sedan hadn’t entered the alley yet, which meant there was still time to pull a fast one on our pursuer. If I couldn’t see him, then he couldn’t see us… .
“Attention: SW-1,” I said loudly. “Execute external modifications. Model number … 16/B.”
The Speedster immediately responded to my voice commands. Its nanoplastic shell reshaped itself in a matter of minutes. Millions of tiny molecular machines flowed upward, forming a top over our heads. The flashy sports car morphed into a retro-looking coupe. Even the color of the car’s exterior changed, going from cherry red to midnight blue. Tinted windows hid our faces.
“Talk about an extreme makeover!” Sandy exclaimed. “You have got to build me one of these for my birthday next year!”
By the time we reached the end of the alley, the transformation was complete. I peeked in the mirror: still no sign of the sedan. Maybe he had missed the turn and had to double back? Good, I thought. That meant he didn’t see the car change its appearance.
We pulled out onto Pine Avenue and waited to see if the white sedan followed us out of the alley. Thirty seconds later, there it was, right on schedule. An oncoming car honked angrily as the sedan hastily forced its way onto Pine. I couldn’t make out our shadow’s face anymore, but boy, was he in for a surprise! It wasn’t hard to imagine his confused expression as he looked around frantically for the bright red sports car he had been following.
“Tough luck, creep,” I said. “You’ve been punk’d!”
“Way to go, bro!” Sandy gave me a high five. “Now what?”
I slowed down and let the sedan pass us. The driver didn’t even give us a second look.
“Now we do to him,” I told her, “what he was doing to us. Follow him and see where he goes.”
The sedan circled around the block a couple of times, no doubt searching for the red Speedster, before finally giving up. We kept a safe distance behind the other car as it drove back toward the school. I didn’t think the driver spotted us following him, but if he tried to shake us, I figured I’d just change the Speedster’s appearance again to fool him. Given all the different models and colors I had programmed into the car’s memory, we could probably trail him halfway across the country without being spotted.
Not that he was going that far.
“Think he’s going back to our school?” Sandy asked. “He’s heading that way.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’m not sure why. There’s nothing else going on there until tomorrow.”
As it turned out the sedan wasn’t going to Shopton High after all. It continued on the road past the school until it reached a hotel a few miles farther ahead. I watched the white car pull into the hotel’s parking lot. “Must be from out of town,” I guessed.
I didn’t pull into the hotel lot myself. We didn’t want to spook him by following too closely. Instead I parked across the street in front of a convenience store. “Quick!” I said to Sandy. “There are binoculars in the glove compartment. Hand them over, pronto!”
Sandy passed the binoculars over in a hurry.
Peering through the magnifying lenses, I spotted the sedan parking in an empty space. My eyes widened as the driver exited his vehicle and took a moment to stretch his limbs. His scowling face suggested that he was still unhappy about losing us back at the alley. Thinking he was unobserved, he removed his cap and shades.
I recognized his blow-dried hair and photogenic profile immediately.
“Whoa!” I blurted. “It’s Luke McCabe!”
“Who?” Sandy asked.
“This cable news guy who’s been covering the games.”
“Weird!” she said. “I don’t get it. Why would he be following you now?”
“Good question. I’m stumped,” I said. It was better, I supposed, to have a reporter following you than a terrorist, but that still left plenty of unanswered questions. I wondered if McCabe and Ski Mask were the same guy. Was the reporter the prowler who had tried to bug all the trailers a few nights ago?
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I complained. “The Robo Olympics are all but over, so what’s his angle?” I put down the binoculars and scratched my head in confusion. “And why me? I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not going to win the grand prize. Andy Foger is.”
So why isn’t McCabe tailing Andy instead?
My first instinct was to call out McCabe right there and then. I was going to storm right up to the reporter’s hotel room, pound on his door, and find out why he was tailing me. But when I checked with the front desk, a clerk told me that there was no “Luke McCabe” checked into the hotel. I tried describing McCabe, but the snooty clerk wasn’t terribly helpful. “I’m afraid we cannot give out any sort of information concerning our guests,” he explained.
He had a point, I guess. It wasn’t like I was an FBI agent or something. Why should he help a kid my age track down some guy I’d just seen in the parking lot out front? The more I thought about it, the flimsier my case seemed. Even if I knew what room McCabe was in, there was nothing illegal about a journalist following someone in public. If it were, half the paparazzi in Hollywood would be behind bars. I didn’t have any sort of restraining order out against McCabe.
“Let’s go home,” I told Sandy. It had been a long, draining day and I was ready for it to be over. Whatever McCabe was up to could wait until tomorrow. Maybe I would run into him at the awards ceremony.
Our parents were still out when Sandy and I got home. I tinkered around in my lab for a while, answered some e-mails and IMs, then went to bed early.
But as the hours dragged by, I found it hard to sleep. Even when I managed to doze off for a while, I had anxiety dreams about showing up for the awards ceremony five hours late. Then I dreamed SwiftBot blamed me for his defeat because I had opted to give him a silvery finish. “No wonder I came in second every time!” he accused me, even though he didn’t have a speech synthesizer. “You made me the color of a second-place medal!”
I woke up around six, then couldn’t get back to sleep. After tossing and turning for a while, I finally gave up and got out of bed. The sun had not risen and the house was eerily quiet. Even the cleaning ’bots were recharging in their nooks.
Restless, I decided to head over to the trailer and spruce up SwiftBot for the ceremony later that morning. He had picked up some dings and scratches during the b-ball matches and could use a good polish. I figured he might as well look good for the TV cameras even if he wasn’t coming in first place.
Just so my parents wouldn’t worry, I instructed our house’s message center to tell them that I had left early for the ceremony.
To confuse any would-be shadows, the Speedster now resembled a bronze-colored station wagon. Even still, I kept checking the rearview mirror as I drove, watching out for any suspicious vehicles that seemed to be deliberately going my way. There was no sign of McCabe’s white sedan, however, or anybody else tailing me. Careful, I warned myself. You don’t want to be getting all paranoid now.
So what if McCabe was investigating me? I had nothing to hide.
The sun was just breaking through the clouds when I arrived at Shopton High. As I pulled into the parking lot, my jaw dropped at the sight of a white sedan parked in front of the school.
Huh? What was McCabe doing here already at this ridiculous hour? The big awards ceremony didn’t start until ten a.m., nearly three hours from now. Don’t tell me he showed up this early just to get a good parking spot.
I didn’t like the look of this.
Parking the Speedster in its usual space, I crept toward the fenced-in area where the robots’ trailers were being kept. Chances were, that’s where McCabe had headed, especially if the reporter and Ski Mask were one and the same as I was really starting to suspect. I figured I should alert the guards that he was around.
But as I approached the gate, I was surprised to see the reporter talking with the guards himself. On a hunch, I ducked behind a streetlight so neither the uniforms nor McCabe would see me. Better safe than sorry.
They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying. I wished I had my parabolic microphone on me. Then I could have eavesdropped on the men from a distance.
Suddenly, the guards stepped aside to let McCabe enter the trailer lot. What kind of security was that? I realized that the guards had to be working with the reporter for some reason. That was the only explanation.
McCabe disappeared into the lot while the guards remained at their post. I waited a few minutes, then approached the gate myself. “Hi there.” I greeted them casually, trying to pretend like everything was totally normal. “You guys still holding down the fort?”
“You’re here awful early,” one of the men commented. “Shouldn’t you still be in bed?” Was it only my imagination, or were the guards less than happy to see me?
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, honestly enough. “And my robot needs to get cleaned up for today’s show.”
The two men hesitated, like they were trying to think of an excuse to turn me away, but hey, I was the second-place winner in the Robot Olympics. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to see my own robot?
They stepped aside and I strolled through the gate. I kept acting all casual, until I was out of sight of the guards. Then I crouched over and started sneaking through the lot as quietly as I could. With luck, I could creep up on McCabe and catch him red-handed at whatever he was up to. At this point, I was willing to bet Yo a dozen pizzas that the reporter and Ski Mask were the same person, but I still had no clue what he was after.
Why would McCabe be snooping around the trailers now? The games were over. It was too late to spy on or sabotage the competition. So what was his motive?
I kept to the shadows, avoiding the glare of the streetlights. One of these days, I really needed to get around to building that stealth invisibility suit I had been thinking about for months. The idea was simple enough: Focus a camera on the scene behind you, then project that image onto the front of a suit composed of hundreds of tiny glass beads. The beads would reflect the image back to any viewer, who would end up “seeing through” you. Unfortunately, the concept still hadn’t gotten any further than some sketches and diagrams in my laptop. I could have used a suit like that right now.
