Revenge of the EngiNerds Read online

  For Isla

  Preface

  Saturday night, there was the blackout. For two hours our entire town was inexplicably without power.

  Then, the very next morning, the satellite—it just came plummeting out of the sky.

  And yesterday—Monday—we woke up to the news about the Food-Plus. That’s this little grocery store people go to when they can’t make it over to the Shop & Save.

  But no one’s going to be shopping there any time soon. The whole place—every last stick of gum and bite-size mini muffin—was mysteriously cleaned out overnight. There wasn’t a single crumb of food left on the shelves.

  Do I know for a fact that all this mischief was caused by the endlessly hungry, dangerously flatulent robot currently on the loose?

  No, I don’t.

  But who else could be doing it?

  The robot is on the loose thanks to Mike Edsley, the stupidest genius you’ll ever meet. The kid dismantled, repaired, and rebuilt the engine of his neighbor’s busted lawnmower at the age of six. But put him in a situation that requires the use of even the slightest bit of common sense, and Edsley will disappoint you every time.

  It was my best friend, Dan, who built the robots.

  Eighteen of them.

  Yep—you read that right.

  One-eight.

  The robots were programmed to cram their stomachs full of food (or “comestibles,” as they liked to call it), squash it all down into these tiny cubes, and store the cubes in their stomachs until their human owners got hungry. The robots were not supposed to endanger the lives of their human owners by firing those food-cubes out of their backsides at around ninety miles per hour. But they did, and—

  Well, if you want to know what happened next, there’s a whole book about it.

  All you really need to know is that, with a little help from a spontaneous rainstorm, we did away with sixteen of the bots—we being me, Dan, and our friends Jerry and John Henry Knox. The seventeenth bot was never assembled. Figuring the world didn’t need any more of these butt-blasters among its population, we split up that bot’s parts into four piles, then packed each pile into a box. I’ve got a box, and so do Dan and Jerry and John Henry Knox. Mine’s under my bed, cinched shut with about thirty yards of duct tape.

  Which brings us back to last bot, Number Eighteen, who’s out there on the loose because Edsley—that brilliant, brilliant idiot—refused to make him a sandwich. A second sandwich, to be precise, right after the guy had stuck the first one into his big metal belly. Edsley’s refusal sparked a heated argument, which ended with the robot attempting to tear off the kid’s face with a razor-sharp claw, all before stomping out of the house, down the street, and out of sight.

  Edsley, being Edsley, just let him go.

  And so here we are.

  Satellites are falling out of the sky.

  Grocery stores are getting cleaned out.

  And it’s up to us, the EngiNerds, to find the robot and put a stop to him before things can get even worse.

  If, that is, I can get any of the other guys to actually help me. . . .

  1.

  Three days.

  That’s how long we’ve been looking for Edsley’s robot.

  Maybe that doesn’t seem like that much time to you.

  But each of those days contained twenty-four long hours.

  That’s seventy-two hours—or 4,320 minutes—for that hungry, hungry robot to cause as much chaos, mayhem, and destruction as he pleased.

  Over the course of those nearly forty-five hundred minutes, we’ve tried nearly everything to find the bot.

  Some of our plans have been good. Some of them have been not-so-good. And a few, unfortunately, have been downright ridiculous.

  And let me tell you—it hasn’t been easy to keep the morale up and the momentum going among the guys. They went from determined to discouraged in about a day and a half, and now the majority of them are something even worse: distracted.

  All of which has left me feeling desperate.

  That’s why I’m currently at the park with Edsley, twenty-six rotisserie chickens, and a pair of giant, industrial-strength fans. A part of me already knows this plan is one of our most not-so-good ones. But at least I’m doing something. At least I’m actively trying to find the robot before he blasts someone with a turd-missile or, I don’t know, finds his way onto a computer and breaks the Internet.

  Dan had a dentist appointment right after school today, and Edsley was the only other one of the guys I could convince to come with me—and only because I’ve been hammering into him every chance I get that it’s all his fault the robot is on the loose and we’ve been spending so much time and energy looking for the thing in the first place.

  Also, I promised to let him eat some of the chicken.

  I turn to him.

  “Mike!” I shout. “I said some, not all.”

  He holds his hands up, professing his innocence. His fingers are slick with chicken grease.

  I shake my head and sigh.

  “Will you just plug the fans in, man?”

  Edsley reaches for my portable power pack. I wince, thinking about how nasty he’s going to leave the handle. I make a mental note to wipe it down with some disinfectant when I get home, then get the fans into position.

  Here’s the plan:

  Step one—aim one fan one way, aim the other fan the other way.

  Step two—set up half the rotisserie chickens in front of each fan and then turn those bad boys on full blast, sending the smell of the warm, oven-baked birds wafting across town.

  Step three—wait for the missing robot’s scent sensors to pick up on the irresistible aroma and come find us.

  When he does, Edsley and I will douse the guy in water.

  And then?

  SQUAH-POOM!

  Problem solved.

  Because if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that this robot has spent the past three days stuffing his stomach full of food and then squashing down all his meals and snacks into ultra-compact food-cubes. And when those puppies touch water, they expand, and rapidly enough to rip Mr. Dis-POS-al COM-pleeet apart.

  “Ready?” I ask Edsley.

  He places the last chicken on one of the overturned trash barrels we’ve got set up in front of the fans, then gives me a thumbs-up.

  “Please work . . . ,” I mutter to myself.

  I flip the switch on the power pack and the fans whir to life.

  2.

  DO I REALLY NEED TO tell you how the chicken-and-fan plan turned out?

  Let’s just say that the only butt-blaster that got doused in water was Edsley, after he “accidentally” sent a gust of some particularly foul gas in my direction.

  That was after an hour and a half of sitting at the park with him, listening to those fans whir and wondering how many washes it’d be before my clothes no longer reeked of chicken, all while baking like birds in an oven ourselves under the unseasonably hot mid-May sun. I gave it another thirty minutes, then slumped home in defeat.

  At lunch the next day, I don’t even bother giving the rest of the EngiNerds an update.

  I just move on.

  “So,” I say, opening a notebook to a blank page as I make my way up to the front of the room, “how’d the brainstorming go last night? Let’s hear some new ideas about how to find this bot.”

  Crickets.

  The guys just blink up at me.

  The ones who are even looking at me, that is.

  Some are completely tuned out, doing their own thing.

  And I get it.

  I do.

  They’re sick of banging their heads against the same problem and not making any progress.

  I’m f
rustrated too.

  But I’m also scared. Scared of what might happen if the robot shows up in the wrong place at the wrong time. And scared of what might happen if, after such an unfortunate incident, the bot gets traced back to Dan. Because he could get in some serious trouble. Maybe even jail-like trouble.

  All of a sudden Edsley leaps up onto his feet.

  His eyes are wide.

  His mouth is hanging open.

  “I’ve got it,” he gasps. “I figured it out. We don’t need to look for the robot anymore.”

  3.

  ALL EYES ARE ON EDSLEY.

  “It’s been four days now,” he says.

  “I’m aware,” I tell him, trying to hurry him along.

  He looks at me like I’m being dense.

  “Don’t you see?”

  I shake my head, then check on the rest of the guys. They look just as confused as I am.

  “The robot’s batteries,” Edsley says. “By now, they’ve gotta be dead.”

  My heart sinks, and my face must fall with it.

  “What?” Edsley says.

  “Dan,” I ask, nice and slow for Edsley’s benefit, “do the robots run on batteries?”

  “They do not,” Dan answers.

  “Oh,” Edsley says, sitting back down.

  “But . . .”

  It’s Dan again.

  “But what?” I ask him, careful not to let myself get too hopeful.

  “I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the bot has taken itself out of commission.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Like maybe he fell in a ditch,” Dan explains.

  “That’s what I was thinking!” says Max.

  “Or he could’ve—”

  “Slipped in a puddle!” Amir jumps in.

  “Exactly,” Dan says. “The bot might’ve done something to prevent him from eating and digesting and then, you know . . .”

  “Shooting food-cubes out of his bum at wicked fast speeds?” Jerry says with a smile.

  Dan doesn’t smile back.

  “Yeah . . . ,” he says. “That.”

  “So I was right,” Edsley says, leaping back up onto his feet. “We can stop looking for the robot.”

  The rest of the guys look relieved. They lean back in their chairs. They let their shoulders sag.

  And I really hate to burst their bubble. But most of these guys didn’t see the robots at their worst, when they were rampaging in back of the Shop & Save on Saturday afternoon. Dan, Jerry, John Henry Knox, and I told them about it. Dozens of times. But it’s just one of those things—you had to be there to really, truly get it.

  So burst their bubble I must.

  4.

  “GUYS—OF COURSE WE CAN’T stop looking for the bot.”

  Shoulders stiffen.

  Expressions turn glum.

  “Maybe the thing is in a ditch,” I go on. “But what if he gets up? These things are sophisticated, remember? They can learn. And the longer the bot’s out there, the more he’s learning.”

  Thinking about what terrifying new skills the missing bot might’ve mastered makes my skin crawl.

  I shove the thought out of my head as Edsley raises his hand.

  “Do I even want to know?” I ask him.

  “What if it’s a really deep ditch?” he says.

  I don’t answer, but just turn back to the rest of the guys.

  “Think about it,” I tell them. “Even if the robot fell into a”—I glance at Edsley—“really deep ditch, wouldn’t we have come across it by now? We’ve spent the past four days trudging back and forth all over town. And Dan, you said the bot couldn’t have made it more than five miles from Edsley’s place, right?”

  “Five miles tops,” says Dan. “They’re programmed not to wander too far from their home base.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So how about this?” I hold up the notebook I brought to the front of the room with me. “Let’s make a list of all the places this food-obsessed bot could be within a five-mile radius of Edsley’s house. Anywhere that’s got a lot of food—let’s write it down. Even if we’ve already looked there, we’ll look again. And along the way, we’ll check every ditch and puddle we see. If we’re logical about this, if we’re methodical, we’ll find the robot. We have to.”

  I grab my pencil.

  “I’ll start,” I say, scribbling something down in my notebook.

  “General Noodles,” I share with the guys. “That’s right around the corner from your place—isn’t it, Edsley?”

  He nods. Then says:

  “So is Cheese Louise’s.”

  “Perfect,” I say, and add the name of the pizza shop to my list. “You guys got any more for me?”

  “Mad Cow’s,” Dan says.

  I add it.

  Then he fires off a bunch more:

  “The Eatery. Animal Chin’s. Country Joe’s. Cate’s. That little breakfast place by the gas station.”

  “Good, good, good, good, good,” I say. “Now we just need to spend this afternoon checking all these places out. We can look around for evidence, ask the employees if there’ve been any, you know, robot-related incidents. If we work together, we can put this whole mess to rest by the end of the day. So, who wants to go where?”

  Silence.

  “Guys,” I say.

  Then:

  “Please?”

  And finally, I get a response.

  But it’s not the one I’m looking for.

  “Ahem.”

  It’s John Henry Knox, clearing his throat and rising to his feet.

  5.

  JOHN HENRY KNOX MARCHES PAST me and right up to the whiteboard. And as I watch him reach for a marker, a part of me thinks that maybe the kid is actually about to be helpful, that he’ll put his sizeable brain to work improving upon my most-recent plan and help me once and for all locate the missing bot.

  But then I see what he’s drawing.

  Clouds.

  “No,” I say.

  John Henry Knox doesn’t hear me. Or he probably does hear me, but just chooses to ignore me.

  “Hey,” I say. “Cloudy McCloudface.”

  That gets him.

  He pulls his marker away from the board and turns to face me, sighing like somehow I’m the one being ridiculous.

  “Kennedy,” he says, “are you familiar with Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity?”

  I consider asking him if he’s familiar with what it feels like to be hit in the face with a cinnamon-raisin bagel, because I’m about two seconds away from hurling my lunch at his head.

  “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” John Henry Knox tells me. “That is the definition of insanity, according to one of human history’s greatest minds.”

  “Are you saying that’s what we’ve been doing these past few days?”

  He widens his eyes meaningfully.

  “Okay,” I admit. “That’s kind of what we’ve been doing.”

  I spin around to face the rest of the guys before I lose them.

  “Listen,” I say, “I know how you’re all feeling. Believe me—I do. But we’ve got to see this thing through. We can’t just leave the bot out there on the loose. I mean, guys—there are satellites falling out of the sky.”

  “Satellites?” Simon says. “I thought it was just the one.”

  “Yeah, it was,” I give him. “But still.”

  “And you really think that was because of the bot?” Jerry asks.

  “Yes. No. I . . . I don’t know.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “All I know is that a lot of weird stuff has been happening around here lately. And when a lot of weird stuff happens all at once, in the same general area, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to look into whether all of it’s connected somehow. This robot’s been out there for four days now. That’s a long time. We have no idea what it’s been up to, what new things it’s learned how to do.”

  Jerry’s nodd
ing.

  So is Dan.

  Then Alan is, and then so are Max and Amir.

  Suddenly, a quote pops into my head. Not one from Albert Einstein, but from another of human history’s greatest minds—my grandpa.

  “Before he retired,” I tell the guys, “my grandpa had this note card hanging up in his office. And do you know what it said on it?” I pause to give the moment some drama. “It said, ‘Finish what you start, or down the road, it’ll bite you in the backside.’ ”

  This gets a couple more guys nodding.

  And a second later, there are a couple more.

  I’m about to get down to business, to start assigning each of the guys a different food place to check out that afternoon, when I’m interrupted by a whoosh.

  It’s the door, swinging open.

  And standing there in the doorway is something maybe even more shocking than a walking, talking, butt-blasting bot.

  It’s a girl.

  6.

  I KNOW THE GIRL.

  Well, sort of.

  I’ve seen her around, and I know that she’s a little . . . strange.

  Every day she wears a different T-shirt with something kooky on it. Sometimes it’s a drawing of a little green bug-eyed alien. Other times it’s a constellation map or a close-up, high-resolution photo of Jupiter or Saturn. And other times it’s just a saying, printed in big, bold letters. I BELIEVE or THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE—weird stuff like that.

  I wait for the girl to say something, to let us know what she’s doing here in our room.

  She doesn’t.

  She just looks around at each of the guys, inspecting them like she’s sizing us all up for some sort of super-important mission.

  “Can I help you?” I finally ask, making sure there’s enough sarcasm in my voice so she knows that I don’t actually want to help her, that I just want her to hurry up and leave.

  But apparently the girl doesn’t get sarcasm.

  She strides into the room like she owns the place, then plants herself right up front, next to me.

  “I hope so,” she says at last.

  I give her my best are you serious glare.

  Then I tell her, “Look. I don’t know who you are—”