network e-mail system.
“Andy,” she called. “I’m considering a bid for a new show to replace Cyborg Command. I need your technical appraisal.”
Andy sidled up and slumped on her desk. He quietly studied his thin fingers and awaited her orders.
Pinball
Chuck Mather had built the watchdog robot in his room, but he always let it out at night to roam around downstairs. Pinball couldn’t climb stairs or open doors, so its job was limited to patrolling the kitchen, the living areas and the study. Pinball wasn’t much like what most people thought of as a robot, it was just a personal computer really, slung between two ten-speed bike wheels. The wheels gave it mobility, the optical-liquid CPU gave it brains and a little IO board with an array of sensors gave it input. It didn’t have a video input unit, that was expensive and too hard to program, but it did have several motion detectors and infrared heat-detectors, not to mention a highly accurate sound-directional guidance system.
“You want to let it loose again, Chuck? Couldn’t you just keep the thing in your room tonight?” Sylvia Mather asked, with a faint note of hopelessness in her voice.
“Pinball is good protection Mom, especially since Dad died.”
“Alright,” she sighed in defeat, cinching her housecoat tighter. She disappeared down the dark tunnel of the upstairs hall.
Chuck was fifteen years old, overweight, had a lot of zits and had been sentenced to a wheelchair two summers ago in a boating accident. The same accident had cost his father his life.
Maneuvering himself out of his wheelchair and into bed was an effort. First he threw his weight forward, landing his face on his pillow, then sat upright with a practiced roll. He settled into the large double-sized sleeping bag that he liked to use during the summer nights, whether he was camping or not. Grunting a bit, he stuffed his numb, useless legs into the bag and wiggled his way down into it.
First checking to make sure his mother had really gone to bed and was not fooling around in the hall closet or the bathroom, he vertically set a ruler in the middle of the sleeping bag so it would hold up the center like a tent post. From beneath the sleeping bag he unearthed a wireless netbook. He then ducked down into his make-shift tent and zipped up the sides. Using a flashlight, he surfed to his favorite sites: a mix of porn, gaming news, pirated movies and social-networking. In some ways, this was the best part of the day.
He fell asleep in the early morning hours. When he finally awoke, mother was in his room and fooling around as usual, checking the batteries on his wheelchair, even though they had spent the night charging up. He shoved the netbook down deep into the sleeping bag before popping his head out of the top.
“Good morning,” she greeted him. Like Chuck, her hair was very straight, fine and blonde. It resembled fragile cobwebs and tended to wisp about on windy days.
“Mourning is right,” Chuck groaned. Bright July sunshine streamed in slices through the miniblinds making him squint and blink.
“I was thinking that I don’t really need to go to the wedding, Chuck,” she told him with a pursed-lip frown. She was already made-up and ready to go, wearing a green silk dress, a French braid and a heavy layer of lavender lip-gloss.
“Yes you do, Mom,” he said, rubbing his eyes and waiting for the blood to make it up to his brain.
“Aunt Marron has been married before, and you don’t need to be alone.”
“Go to the wedding, Mom.”
“If you’re sure you can take care of yourself…”
“I’m fifteen years old, I can spend one night on my own. Give me a break.”
Sylvia nodded and left the room, her hands behind her head, tugging and tucking loose hairs. Soon afterwards Chuck heard a short yell of surprise as Pinball caught her at the door. Pinball let out an alarm chime, and he couldn’t help smiling. The sound of servos whining and his mother making shooing sounds floated up the stairs.
“Chuck, your pet is ramming itself into my legs. If it runs my nylons again, I’ll have your tail son!” she shouted. Chuck grabbed up the garage controller that he used as an override switch and stabbed the button. It took five or six tries, but Pinball finally got the message and quit attacking Sylvia.
“Battery must be going dead,” Chuck muttered to himself, fiddling with the garage door controller. Pinball should have stopped right away.
His mother finally got away and slammed the front door behind herself.
The rest of the day was wonderful. For breakfast he had a bowl of mixed cereals, all different brands of sugar-fluff, and drank a root beer float on top of it all. Feeling only slightly queasy, he rolled to the escalator arm and let it carry him up the stairs like a giant, whining electric hand. He placed Pinball on top of a card table with his wheels off and hooked his serial port to another PC with a light blue cable.
Its numerous infrared sensors stared at nothing: the numerous eyes of a dead spider. Chuck spent several hours tapping the keys on his PC, downloading additional software onto Pinball’s ultralite 600 petabyte disk. Then he pulled the bottom drawer of his dresser completely out, almost dumping over his wheelchair in the process. Hidden underneath the drawer, down in the open space most dressers have between the last drawer and the carpet was a large rumpled shopping bag. Chuck pulled out the bag then glanced around and listened for a moment. Somewhere, Sylvia’s cat Peter was meowing, and outside someone was mowing their yard. Otherwise the house was silent.
He opened the bag and pulled out two objects. The first was a cattle prod with a long plastic handle, a red rubber grip and two copper prongs at the end. Next was the new purse he was hiding for his mother’s birthday, two weekends away. He had gone to great lengths to purchase the thing through friends at school and even greater lengths to hide both the cattle prod and the purse from his mother. He affixed this device to Pinball’s housing, strapping it with plastic snap-on ties to the frame underneath the motherboard. He wired the switch up to one of the screw terminals on the IO board. He tightened down the first the green wire, then the blue, and leaned back.
“There you go,” Chuck muttered, patting Pinball’s battery case.
“Now you can do more than just bark. Now you’re armed and dangerous.”
That night Chuck sat in his room and ate two microwave dinners and watched all the Friday night net shows. Once the credits had finally scrolled up the screen on Bleak Justice, he climbed back into his wheelchair and rolled into the dark hall. Little thrills ran through his intestines as he rode the escalator arm downstairs. Hugged tightly to his chest was Pinball, the aluminum rims of its wheels cold against his belly where his sweatshirt had ridden up. He reached the bottom and set the machine down gently, making sure that the cattle prod didn’t overbalance it. With a grunt of pride, he sat back and activated the machine with a touch on the warm-reboot button. Pinball came to life slowly, its disk light flashing as the operating system took control and megabytes of programming began to execute. After a few moments it rolled and tilted back six inches, like an animal sitting on its haunches. It held the cattle prod high, a knight saluting a king with his lance. Each of the forked prongs glinted, like two metallic eyes winking. With a sense of purpose, the machine rolled away into the kitchen.
“Goodnight, Pinball,” said Chuck with fatherly pride. Pinball did a sharp about face by spinning its wheels in opposite directions and followed the source of his voice, but Chuck was already riding up the stairs again to his room where the TV and a pile of magazines awaited him. Soon after he had let Pinball loose, Peter, the cat, came running up the stairs, looking for refuge. He found it on top of Chuck’s monitor shelf, and lazily let his tail drift in front of the screen. Peter was a fairly big tomcat with dark gray fur and a cream-colored underbelly. He normally spent summer nights outside, but tonight Chuck had forgotten about him.
“Don’t like Pinball, do you?” Chuck laughed. “Well, you had better steer clear of him tonight, boy, or you’ll be one unhappy kitty.”
“Merrooow…” commented Peter. He eyed Chuck with a mixture of deep thought and mild contempt. His tail slid further down the screen, blotting out the upper half of a comedian doing his monologue. As a precaution, Chuck pushed his door shut, so the cat wouldn’t get zapped during the night. Settling down on his bed, Chuck noisily pulled open a king-sized bag of cheesepuffs and ate until his hands and tongue were dyed orange. After the net programs got old, he got out his netbook again and enjoyed surfing his favorite pages in the open. Some hours later he flipped
