2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 27

  Robot Sister’s first word had not been a word at all. Instead, it uttered a string of numbers that was unfamiliar to Shai. “One point six one eight zero three three nine eight...”

  The numbers continued, making Shai dizzy. She could not remember it all, and she did not think Robot Sister would stop anytime soon. “This sounds like an extremely long number,” Shai said in the middle of the robot’s counting.

  The robot slowed its count. “...eight...three...four...that it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a ratio of extreme importance for a body like this one,” Robot Sister moved its torso, almost like it was going to spin, but stopping as it twisted a little to the left. “Though this one is made of asymmetric parts, this one is of divine proportion.”

  Shai stared. “But why the numbers?”

  “The numbers make life,” Robot Sister said.

  “Doesn’t biology make life?”

  “All life is biology, all biology is physiology, all physiology is chemistry, all chemistry is physics, all physics is math,” Robot Sister said in a soothing rhythm, almost like a song. “Quote, unquote. Marquardt. Numbers are the essence of human life.”

  Shai nodded. She decided that even though she only understood some of what Robot Sister said, it was better than to not understand at all. Already Robot Sister’s intelligence far surpassed Angel’s, and Shai was fine with this.

  She pulled at Robot Sister’s skirt and said, “Can we go out now?”

  “This one can do as you please,” Robot Sister said. “For you brought this one to life. What did you have in mind?”

  …………………………

  The park was at the end of the town near the café and children’s playground and the long bridge-slash-elevator that took people up towards the floating city. It was far too long of a walk for Shai, but only three stops away if she took the speedbus. With Robot Sister following close behind, Shai boarded the bus and gave the automated driver – a computer screen with a friendly, orange bald face – two tokens, one for Robot Sister and one for herself.

  Because bus drivers were no longer people, it was easier to get on a bus and not be turned away as long as there were tokens available. Mama had spoken of days long ago when bus drivers used to be people, and sometimes that meant bad news.

  “Some of them frowned for so long that their unhappiness was plastered on their faces,” Mama said. “Mi madre always kept me close and away from the unhappy drivers. Nobody wants to see them in a bad mood at the start of the morning. It spoils the entire day.”

  Shai did not know if that was the reason why bus drivers were now automated. Papa told her this reasoning did not account for too many “variables.”

  “Don’t accept one explanation as the absolute truth,” Papa said, winking. “Sometimes there’s more to things than the one perspective you know.”

  All Shai knew, as she sat on that bus with Robot Sister standing next to her, was that while the automated driver was cheery enough, there were actual people on the bus that were bound to spoil anybody’s mood with their long, frowning stares and their miserable expressions.

  One old woman even went so far as to point at Shai and then at Robot Sister. “And where are you taking that, young lady?” the woman croaked, her finger wagging disapprovingly between Shai and Robot Sister.

  Shai straightened on her seat. She would have ignored the lady or would have answered impolitely, but she was taught better manners than that. One always respected one’s elders, Mama used to say, especially when out in public. The elders had been around since before the Age of Mechanicals. They demanded respect, even when some of them grumbled about the “sorry youth of today.” Shai always heard bad things about the “youth of today,” but never about the “youth of yesterday.” Weren’t they one and the same?

  Robot Sister whirred, looked at Shai and awaited a response.

  “The park, grandma,” Shai said as politely as she could. Then, proudly, she said, “I just finished Robot Sister today.”

  The old woman snorted. “Nothing new about that. My grandson’s been building robots since that Genius Academy dragged him out to City Centra.” She snorted again. “That’s not a particularly good robot to lug around. It’s all scrap and uselessness. What good is it?”

  Shai deflated and could not find a proper response.

  So it was Robot Sister who said, “Good is unquantifiable. The purpose of this one is companionability, which this one is serving currently. Logically, this one believes that is the essence of usefulness.”

  The bus halted at a side street, and the automated driver’s voice boomed all over the bus. “We are now in Hypatia Lane. Repeat, Hypatia Lane. Next stop, Curie Cross.”

  The old woman stared, frowned, then hobbled to the exit. “Your robot’s as silly as you, girl.” Once she was off, the bus continued to move.

  Shai’s cheeks were warm and red, and she had grown angry by what the woman had said. She had been on the verge of an Angel-like tantrum, but the anger didn’t bubble forth because next to her, Robot Sister continued to speak in a pleasant voice.

  “The park is located between Evergreen View and Euclid Hills,” Robot Sister recited. “It is filled with flora and fauna, all of which hold proportions of most agreeable states. There is even a pond filled with ducks and swans and geese, although during the winter, the pond freezes over and the birds have flown to warmer climes.”

  And so Shai relaxed as Robot Sister droned on. And she looked out the window, ignoring the other stares and frowning faces.

  …………………………

  Angel was at the park.

  She did not see Shai until one of her friends pointed her out. At first, Shai stood there, hoping that maybe Angel would just ignore her like she did most days whenever they saw each other at school or at family parties. Angel had many friends, and so she was always busy with them. Busy enough to want to ignore Shai, who had almost no friends. Shai’s friends had been accepted to Genius Academy, and she had not.

  Robot Sister clicked and whirred. Shai thought maybe Robot Sister was reciting the numbers again, only this time it was doing so in silence. She took Robot Sister’s curved hand and began to pull it away from Angel and her friends, to another part of the park.

  “Did you make that?” Angel asked.

  Shai stopped and turned around and said, “I did.” It was a proud sort of moment for Shai.

  Angel’s friends laughed, but Angel did not. She frowned like she always did, like her favorite red bow had been dyed purple and green and it was not supposed to be amusing, because the bow should be red. Like roses and cherries and stop signs. Shai thought she would say, “That’s unladylike of you,” but Angel did not say such a thing. Instead, Angel said, “Papa helped you?”

  Shai shook her head. Papa had been extremely busy lately. He would not have been able to help her, even if Shai had asked.

  Robot Sister placed her mismatched hands on its metal hips, and it pursed its metal lips to say, “It is not ladylike to stare.” The voice had been almost identical to Angel.

  The way the robot mimicked Angel seemed to surprise her friends. One of them, a boy named Thomas, laughed. “Angel, she sounds better than you! Where did your sister get all these parts? It’s like she rummaged from the garbage or something!”

  Angel’s friends laughed again. Shai refused to look at them and continued to pull Robot Sister away.

  “Are those my bracelets?” Angel breathed. It would have been a whisper, but she repeated it louder, and everybody heard the disappointment in her voice, Shai included.

  Robot Sister’s broom-limb moved up, as if to touch the bracelets that had made up its hair. This time, Angel’s friends booed her, with Thomas calling Shai a “thief” and a “sneak” and more words that would have made her cry, if not for Robot Sister’s whirring and clicking and spouting of times tables and ratios that ended irrationally.

  Shai clenched her fists and glared and stomped away.
She did not like her sister’s friends, and at that moment, she did not like her sister at all. Robot Sister followed from behind, its rubber-soled feet crunching on the grass softly and in rhythm.

  If Shai had been paying attention to the continued laughter behind her, she would have seen Angel’s thoughtful, disapproving face. And she would have seen that Angel was no longer looking at Shai and her robot, but at Thomas, who had laughed and ridiculed, and at her best friend Reeja, who had called Shai a thief and a sneak and a silly bum.

  Most of all, Shai did not see the look that Thomas gave Robot Sister, because if she had, she would have told the robot to run.

  …………………………

  The magnet playground was one of Shai’s favorite places. It was set up into four different courts, two for four players, and two for two players. She and Robot Sister had gone into one of the small courts, and Shai took gloves out of a box next to the court entrance. She wiggled her fingers inside the glove, and thought about whether Robot Sister needed gloves as well.

  The robot had already entered the court, and Shai saw that Robot Sister was already zinging magnets away from it with its polarizing metal body. So Shai followed.

  Playing Magnits was like playing table tennis without the bouncing; using the metal gloves, one person would push a magnet away and send it to the other person at the end of the court. If the other person failed to stop the magnet from flying off past the court table, or if the magnet touched the ground on the other player’s side, the person who pushed the magnet gets a point. Likewise, the other person gains a point if the first person doesn’t push the magnet with enough force, leaving the magnet on the first person’s side. And this happened back and forth until a person’s points went to ten.

  Shai often played the game with Papa. Her father was a master Magnits player, and he liked teaching Shai a thing or two about mathematicals and mechanicals as he pushed magnets toward his daughter. He used his own reshape-able magnet – a clever invention he patented when he was only twenty-eight – at Shai, and Shai would have to identify the shape before sending the magnet back to her father.

  “Octagon,” she would say, and the magnet would zing back to Papa, who nodded and reshaped the magnet again.

  Trapezoid, oval, diamond, dodecahedron, pentagonal trapezohedron. The shapes became harder and harder after every correct guess, and there were so many -hedrons that even Shai’s exemplary memory could not remember them all.

  Robot Sister did not ask about shapes, though. Instead, it zinged Greek letters toward her. Shai was not very good with the letters, and the first game ended quickly, Robot Sister racking up ten points within minutes. The second time, Shai recognized alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and made points that way. The third time, zeta, eta, theta. She began to rhyme them together. Mu and nu. Pi, chi, psi, xi.

  Shai had just been on the verge of winning her first game against Robot Sister, but had lost the match point when someone spoke up on the court sideline.

  “I like your robot, Sneak,” Thomas said, sneering the word “sneak” like Angel would sneer the word ‘slug.’ “Give it to me.”

  Shai let the magnet zing past her. Phi, she thought. Robot Sister walked to Shai’s side of the court, aware that the game had been over. “This one detects a disturbance, Mistress Shai.”

  But they could not leave, because Thomas and his friends had blocked the entrance. There were two boys and Thomas, and two girls, one of which Shai recognized as Reeja. Angel was not in sight.

  “You deaf, Sneak?” Thomas said, louder this time. “I want your robot.”

  “No.” She stood her ground. She heard her mother’s voice, and how she often told her daughters to never let el abusador win.

  “These people are estupidos and know nada about the greater world. They are not like tu padre, who is always kind to anyone he meets. There is only one way to deal with un abusador,” Mama said, rolling her R’s and speeding over the S’s. Shai had known the anger in that tone, because her mother always went quickly from English to Spanish and back whenever she was irritated with something. “And that is to face him and fight.”

  It was harder to do when Thomas had friends who would help him. Shai only had Robot Sister.

  Robot Sister moved, pushing Thomas with its mismatched hands until he yelped and gave way. “Come now, Mistress Shai, this one believes it is time to go home.”

  Shai decided to run past Thomas, who grabbed her wrist and twisted. She cried out.

  Robot Sister pried Thomas’ hands out of the way, and this time it was he who yelped. The boys and girls scattered away from the robot, and Shai was free to move. She hurried out of the magnet court and off toward the playground exit.

  After a few seconds of running, she stopped and turned. Robot Sister was no longer following her.

  The two boys with Thomas had grabbed both of Robot Sister’s limbs and pulled. The arms fell to the ground, landing with a loud clunk clunk. Robot Sister tried to move, but the girls had pushed the robot back to Thomas, who punched and kicked its legs.

  Shai stood there a moment, shocked and numbed and all sorts of miserable. Then she ran back, her small body tipping forward like a bull charging at a torero after seeing red. She hit one of the girls – Reeja, she thought – and the two of them flew toward the ground, Shai on top and scrambling up.

  The other girl pulled at her hair and Reeja recovered quickly enough to give Shai a pinch. Shai yelled and bit Reeja’s arm, then tried to yank her hair out of the other girl’s grasp.

  Beside her, she heard a loud clank, and saw that Robot Sister had lost its legs. The torso seemed strange on the ground, and there was no escape after that. Robot Sister whirred and emitted alarms that cried like screaming cats, but nobody was headed to the magnet playground to check on them. Shai would not be able to save the robot she spent so many days and weeks to build.

  When Thomas and the two boys rounded back to Shai, she knew she had lost. And while she still fought, it was only a matter of time before Thomas would start punching her. She fought back the tears, but her eyes blurred anyway. She cried for Robot Sister, whose only response now was to go back to reciting numbers.

  “One...point...six...one...eight...” The counting was slow and broken. Within seconds, it died down. Robot Sister ceased to function.

  She did not see the punch or feel Thomas’ fist on her stomach. But she knew it had happened because her body moved back while her arms remained where they were, held by the two boys who’d come to help the girls with Shai. She was numb, and she closed her mind to the pain.

  The next punch did not come. The cruel hands around her loosened, and Shai broke away, pushing one of the boys down in her attempt to escape. Nearby, Thomas had fallen, and so had Reeja.

  Angel stood there, her hands curled up into fists, her ribbons in disarray, and her red shoes scuffed with dirt and dust. Her face was almost as red as her shoes. She was yelling, but not at Shai.

  “Don’t you dare harm my sister again,” Angel said, kicking Thomas, who doubled over on the floor. She glared at the other two boys, who backed away. If Shai had not known any better, she thought she had seen fear in their eyes. Fear at the way Angel stood there, fierce and regal, even when she did not appear at all ladylike. “Or I will kick you where it really hurts.”

  There is only one way to deal with un abusador. And that is to face him and fight. Angel had listened to Mama that day, too.

  Thomas whimpered and sniffed. Reeja, who’d landed on the ground with her rump, backed away. “Angel, we were just–”

  “Go,” Angel said, her hand grabbing Shai’s wrist. When she said no more, the boys and girls ran, leaving only Thomas, who ached too much to get up.

  Angel took a deep breath and prepared to kick the boy again. She stopped when Shai pulled her away. Then, with one quick stride, Shai knelt beside Thomas, and slapped him once on the face. She stood up, satisfied.

  Thomas hobbled out of the magnet playground soon after. Angel and Shai sto
od for a long time to watch him go.

  …………………………

  It was Angel who moved first. She picked up one of the fallen robot arms, then the other, and touched the bracelets on Robot Sister’s head gently. She looked at Shai with a frown. “I’m still mad at you for taking them,” she said. Then she knelt by Robot Sister and began to put the arm back together.

  “Why are you doing that?” Shai asked, confused. In fact, she was confused at why her sister saved her at all. And when did Angel learn how to put robots back together?

  “It’s a good robot,” Angel said. One of the arms held, and she moved to work on the other. “Papa would be proud.”

  Suddenly, more tears threatened to spring from Shai’s eyes.

  “What’s her name?” Angel asked, distracting Shai before she could let the tears fall.

  Shai paused. Suddenly, Robot Sister seemed to be too strange of a name. The robot was not like her sister at all. No one was.

  “Phi,” Shai finally said, remembering the last Greek letter that the robot had sent toward her during their game of Magnits.

  Angel nodded once and continued to work on attaching the other arm. When there were no more words between them, Shai searched for the two robot legs that rolled away. She returned, and Angel nodded again. The two worked in silence to bring Phi back to life.

  There was nothing angelic about Angel as she stood on the magnet playground, her dress ruined, her curly hair all over her face, her eyes red and blazing and bug-round. Angel’s skin would be mottled and bruised later, though she did not seem to feel as many aches and pains as Shai did.