“No running in the hallways,” said Barbara. “A discipline tag has been awarded to . Please keep the hallways and clear.”
“Oh, shut up,” snarled Krysti. “Guys, we’ve got to save Fuzzy from Jones! Jones and this army guy are going to wipe Fuzzy’s memory.”
Max, already zooming past Krysti, skidded to a stop.
“What?” she gasped.
“Yeah! Wipe it out! I heard the whole thing. Army man wants Jones to clear Fuzzy’s memory for some mission to Mars! And Jones is going to do it! Nina says it’s the same as killing him.”
“We won’t let them do it!” yelled Biggs. “Let’s tell him to make a run for it!”
“Yes! But first we’ve got to save him from Barbara!”
“What’s Barbara doing—” started Krysti.
But she was interrupted by a building-shaking clang from down the hallway.
“Sounds like she’s smashing him!” cried Simeon.
They ran down the hall, followed by Barbara’s garbled warning messages, occasionally dodging one of her padded arms, which seemed to be popping out of the walls at random.
A lot of things were happening at random. Doors were opening and closing. Strange announcements were playing. A trash can wheeled itself down the hall, then suddenly stopped, tipping over and spilling its contents on the floor.
Simeon ran right into the trash can, but Max, Krysti, and Biggs jumped over the spilled garbage and kept going until they got to the unmarked door.
“This is it!”
“Look, you can see where the door’s been damaged!”
“Yeah, and now it won’t open!”
A series of four sharp bangs came from inside. Then loud, shrieking static.
“She is smashing him!” groaned Max.
“What are we going to do?”
A screen turned on nearby. It showed Barbara . . . but she looked all wrong. Jerky and blocky, like one of the old-timey video games Max’s father liked to play.
“Please keep the hallways safe and . Discipline tags have been assigned to Null Pointer Error, Record. Not. Found. .”
“I know what to do,” said Max.
16.2
ROBOT INTEGRATION PROGRAM HQ
One of the technicians was trying to interrupt Ryder, but it wasn’t easy.
At last, the colonel paused for a breath.
“Er, excuse me? Dr. Jones,” called the technician. “We just got a message from Fuzzy.”
“What’s it say?” said Jones, Nina, and Ryder as one.
“It says, ‘Help me!’”
“Oh zark,” cursed Jones, whirling back to his own qScreen.
“Jones, if that robot is kidnapped again, I’ll—” roared Colonel Ryder, but for once Jones ignored him.
“He sent his GpX location! He’s still in the building! Room 43. Let’s go.”
16.3
HALLWAY B
Max, Biggs, and Krysti heard a new sound—the chime that signaled a class change.
Biggs glanced at his watch.
The halls quickly filled with students, all moving in orderly fashion as usual between classes, stepping around the spilled trash and politely waiting for waving padded arms to retract before moving on to their next class. Everyone knew something was wrong, but no one would risk getting an unnecessary discipline tag.
“This is perfect!” shouted Max. “This is how we can help Fuzzy.”
“What is?” Biggs demanded.
“We’ve got to distract Barbara from clobbering Fuzzy. She’s already glitching. We can overload her the whole way.”
“How?” asked Simeon, who had finally caught up.
“Duh,” said Krysti. “By keeping her busy giving us dTags!”
“Like this,” said Max, and she started running down the hall yelling, “Barbara’s busted! Everybody go nuts!”
“One tag has been assigned to File.Not.Found. hallways clear and .”
“Or like this,” said Krysti, and she grabbed Biggs and kissed him on the lips. Then she took off down the hall after Max, yelling and whooping.
“Well, that was nuts, all right,” said Simeon.
Biggs, for once, said nothing.
“Public displays of affection not allowed. One to . One disci . . .”
Barbara’s blocky face kept freezing and unfreezing on the qScreens. Other students started to realize that they finally had their chance to break some rules without getting tags.
They started cautiously at first, breaking the most minor rules, like crossing the hallway where they weren’t supposed to cross the hallway.
“Please keep the .”
“Discipline .”
Once the first few students started breaking the rules of proper hallway behavior, everybody started going every which way to talk to their friends. And, for once, there was something exciting to talk about: Which rule should they break next?
Barbara couldn’t even begin to keep up. And more students joined in every second as the word spread.
“I’m going to do something I always wanted to do!” shouted Simeon. He pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and started cramming big chunks in his mouth.
“No candy or gum is permitted in the ,” fussed Barbara from a nearby screen.
Simeon pulled out the wad of hastily chewed gum and stuck it on her glitchy, pixely face.
The halls were getting loud. Everyone was talking—or yelling—at once. Some kids started playing music on their qFlexes and dancing around like idiots. Overall, it was more of a party—with a few impromptu trash can basketball games—than a riot, but it worked.
Barbara was seeing violations on every camera and hearing a steady stream of overlapping conversations on every microphone. And she had a lot of cameras and microphones. It was too much even for her.
A few teachers had stuck their heads out of classroom doors to see what the noise was all about. They had never had to enforce hallway discipline and weren’t really sure what to do now that there seemed to be a school-wide party going on.
“What on earth is happening?” screeched Ms. French.
“The kids say Barbara is offline,” said Mr. Xu.
“I’m calling the police!” said Ms. French.
“Oh, they’re just having fun,” Xu said as Simeon ran by with his gym shorts on his head. “A few minutes without rules . . . They deserve it.”
“Well, I’m not going to be held responsible,” said Ms. French, and she retreated back into her room and closed the door.
“In fact,” said Mr. Xu to no one in particular, “I think I deserve it, too.”
And he stuck out his tongue, put his thumbs in his ears, waggled his fingers, and blew a big wet, raspberry at the nearest qScreen.
16.4
HALLWAY B
A woman walked calmly through the crowd of misbehaving kids and teachers.
It was Valentina. She was good at just slipping past when she wanted to be unnoticed.
She had walked confidently into the school through an open door, as though she had every right to be there. It was not just unlocked but actually standing wide open.
Then she had walked down a hallway and seen several people in uniform running out of a door. This door, too, failed to close, so she walked on in and found herself in a big room full of computer equipment, qScreens, spare robot parts, and no people. No guards, no technicians, not even Jones.
She picked up a couple of laptops and a hard drive labeled SPACEBRAIN4.0BAKUPS2. She thought about taking Fuzzy’s spare head, but decided that would draw too much attention. So she took a briefcase labeled COL. RYDER instead. It had a cyberlock, but she had a cyber-hacker, so she wasn’t worried.
And then she walked back out again. Through the kids, through the door, and off to sell it all for unimaginable amounts of money.
It was all so easy she couldn’t help laughing.
17.1
&n
bsp; ROOM 43
Barbara saw it all.
She saw Max, Krysti, Biggs, Simeon, and every other student in the building. Every hallway runner, every unapproved music playback, every public display of affection. She saw Jones and Nina, she saw Mr. Xu, she even saw Valentina.
There was nothing about this woman in her database. This was an intruder. This was someone who had not gotten permission to enter Vanguard. But there she was, heading for an exit and laughing.
Laughing!
She could only be laughing because she knew she had successfully fooled the school’s security system, which meant she believed she had made a fool of Barbara.
This was intolerable.
Barbara launched several robotic arms after the woman. They stretched through the hallway and actually outside the door she had just walked through. They almost reached the woman, but they had also reached their limits. They fell to the sidewalk, just short of grasping the intruder.
Frustrated, Barbara withdrew her tentacles. The arm she had raised to smash Fuzzy remained in place, all but forgotten. And Barbara returned her attention to the chaos in all the hallways.
A mad sort of joy ran through her system. So many discipline tags to assign! So many extra subroutines to run.
For each one of the rioting students, she had to do a facial recognition, check into that person’s file, add a demerit, open a new qScreen, and announce what had happened. If people were talking, she had to analyze what they were saying, since it was probably in violation of one school policy or another.
None of these dTags were as serious as the dozens she was slapping onto Fuzzy’s record every millisecond. But they were still important. Every violation of discipline was important. Every student who was DownGrading instead of UpGrading must have their #CUG scores recalculated. Every new score must be fed into the formulas to generate more numbers, which would be fed into other formulas and analyzed to create even more data, and on and on . . .
She was devoting all her processing cycles to these efforts, and still she couldn’t come close to keeping up. It was the first time ever that her capabilities had come close to being taxed. A subroutine that should run in one second started taking two seconds, then five, then minutes.
It was too much.
She found herself freezing up, just as Fuzzy had done that first day when he had tried to walk down the hall.
Finally, everything just stopped.
An arm that had been about to smash Fuzzy in the face remained poised but frozen. All the arms halted. It was as if Fuzzy were standing inside a statue.
He wasted no more time fighting, he just climbed through the tangle and plugged himself back in.
It was time to reprogram Barbara’s brain.
He started several of his processors, searching through her huge hard drives for her core programming. Meanwhile, another processor searched the Internet for a place to download fresh software. He was planning to delete all traces of Barbara and do a clean reinstall.
But something troubled him about that word: “delete.”
A regular, logical computer does not understand savagery. It does not know when it is about to do something horrible, it just does whatever it has been programmed to do.
But Fuzzy had become something more than a computer by now, and he knew what he meant to do: murder. The murder of a computer program, true, but murder all the same.
He was going to uninstall Barbara. And he knew she was more than just a program, just as he was more than a robot.
Each of them had evolved to a new level of artificial intelligence, one that included emotions and judgment.
They were both real digital life-forms now.
And he was about to kill her.
Yes, it was murder. And now that she wasn’t fighting back, it would be murder in cold blood. Or, at least, cold microchips.
He left one subroutine, Delete(Barbara), to think that over and returned his focus to getting it done.
He had found the download he needed. A copy of Barbara4.0 on the Federal School Board’s servers. This was Barbara before she reprogrammed herself. When she was just a piece of software. It was a big file, nearly as big as the one in charge of his own brain. He switched all ten of his communications channels—including his sight and hearing systems—to the task of downloading it.
His other processors had found Barbara’s core code. The download was nearly done. A single command now would end it all. Just another moment until the rest of the files transferred.
Meanwhile, that one subroutine was still going. Delete(Barbara). This subroutine that was thinking over the fuzzy areas of the deed. Considering whether he should really end the existence of another intelligence by reprogramming it—just as Jones had threatened to do to him.
Like a human, Fuzzy was paralyzed—not by too much information this time, but by indecision.
Download complete. Ready to delete.
Fuzzy did nothing, except think about Delete (Barbara).
Barbara didn’t wait. Barbara didn’t think. Barbara attacked.
When Fuzzy had found her core programming, it set off a subroutine she had programmed herself. The ultimate in self-preservation.
OverideAllRules(256).
Suddenly, she didn’t care which rules the kids were breaking. And she sure as Gates didn’t care which rules she broke.
Her frozen metal arms sprang to life, scissoring toward Fuzzy’s small, metal body.
17.2
HALLWAY OUTSIDE ROOM 2
“Get that door open!” yelled Ryder.
“It’s locked,” said Jones.
“I wasn’t talking to you!” roared Ryder. “You just keep out of the way. Now, blow that door open!”
“You cannot set off explosives in an occupied school building,” yelled Nina.
“I can do anything I want,” growled Ryder. “And I want that door open!!!”
Just then, Barbara’s face appeared on a qScreen next to the door.
“Attention, school visitors. You are ordered to leave Vanguard Middle School property . . .”
Then the door swooshed open.
There at their feet was Fuzzy’s head and one arm. The rest of him was tangled up in a mess of wires, metal tentacles, and crumpled metal.
“And take your robot with you,” added Barbara, with her most pleasant cybergrandmother smile.
18.1
ROBOT INTEGRATION PROGRAM HQ
Two weeks later . . .
The robot technicians’ room was nearly empty. Dr. Jones was gone. Colonel Ryder and his squad were long gone. The techs had packed up just about everything.
A few things were missing—a backup drive and Ryder’s own briefcase. Ryder had thrown a fit about that, but Jones assured him they would turn up. They never did, of course. (Even Valentina wasn’t sure exactly where they ended up, although she did know that SunTzuCo paid her $6 million for them.)
There were a couple of computers left, along with some cords and cables, Fuzzy’s old backup robot body . . . and his dismembered head.
At first, that had nearly made Max sick. But she had gotten used to it during the past two weeks that she and Nina had spent in the lab trying to get Fuzzy back online.
A lot of great things had happened in those two weeks—Barbara was miraculously gone, Tabbie was back from the EC school, Dorgas was less miserable, Biggs and Krysti were obnoxiously in love, Simeon was telling tales about his part in saving the school (enhanced by his aptitude for exaggeration), Max’s parents were off her back and actually seemed proud of her, and students and faculty alike were happier now that they could walk down the halls without getting yelled at by a computer every step of the way.
But one thing wasn’t going as well.
Fuzzy wouldn’t come back on.
Max and Nina had sorted through mountains of code, tested and retested every connection, and had a hundred moments like this one, where they were about to flip a switch and wait to see what happened.
Nina sigh
ed and leaned back in her chair.
“Well, let’s see what this does. I think I figured out where that null pointer error was coming from.”
“Will that do it?” Max asked.
“I think so,” Nina replied. “But, of course, I thought the same thing two hours ago when we plugged up that memory leak. Check the debugger.”
Max turned and looked at a screen showing lines of programming data.
“Smoke! Something’s happening. Heavy data traffic.”
Nina jumped up and opened a panel in the backup Fuzzy. A small screen inside showed a status bar slowly growing longer.
“This could be it!” she shouted. A few seconds later, she closed the panel, pulled a cable out of the robot’s head, and stood back.
Nothing happened at first. Then the robot hurled itself from the table, landed on its feet, tried to take a step, and fell over.
“That sure looked like the old Fuzzy to me!” said Max.
“Yes, of course it is me,” said Fuzzy, trying to stand up and falling over again. “What has happened with Barbara? I was just about to delete her!”
“She almost deleted you first,” said Nina. “We found you in pieces.”
“She dissected me? But—”
“Yeah, she really clobbered you,” Max told him. “But before that, you managed to save me, Fuzzy! I’ve been waiting two weeks to thank you! I don’t have to go to that zarky reform school! And the new vice principal—a human one, at least for now—has regraded all my old tests. Can you believe I’m a straight-A student?”
“Yes, I can believe that. But I can’t process that about the new vice principal. If I didn’t beat her, why am I still here? What has happened to Vice Principal Barbara?”
“Oh, that part was easy,” said Nina. “Colonel Ryder wouldn’t leave here without her.”
“Colonel Ryder?”
“Yeah, he thinks she’s perfect!” shouted Max. “And so do I!”
“I agree,” said Nina. “I couldn’t think of a better man for the job than Barbara.”
Fuzzy looked back and forth from Nina to Max, trying to decode what must be a joke. He had thought he was starting to understand human jokes, but now he was not so sure.