A/N – Let's do a few review-responses here. Deadeye1, yikes! You've put more analytical effort into the story than I have! In the spirit of Teen-Bot, Jenny's dating adventures revolve more around social awkwardness than physical plausibility; I'm trying to keep a PG rating, after all. Yes, Brad will be doing some big time emotional struggling soon; his main problem isn't that Jenny's a robot, but that he doesn't know how he feels about her. Drew's parents are an interesting angle, but I'm already worried that I'm on the verge of over-using Drew as it is. Including his parents would only increase his share of the story.
As for Allison, a number of you are trying to figure out what's happened to her. You're right in thinking that LSN droids are almost like the "system administrators" of the ClusterNet, but none of you has guessed the truth about her situation yet. Dark Rebel Master, that's cool! And you have too much time on your hands. Hyper Monkey, no, I haven't read any Dan Brown books, and I've already got a giant stack of "to-read" books on my end table screaming for attention! BoneSatellite, I've decided to do something different with this story; I'm not going to worry about chapter or story length. I have it plotted out, but the story will take as long as it takes to tell. Right now I'm guessing somewhere around fifteen chapters.
And yes, I saw the Christmas special, and I thought it was funny, and very well done. And for the purposes of this story's continuity, it never happened. As I said before, this story takes place pre-Season Two. I can just hear all those Sheldon fangirls across the globe squealing with glee. Groan.
Countdown to Mindshatter
A "My Life as a Teenage Robot" Fanfic
Chapter Three – Let's Make a Deal
Mrs. Wakeman strolled to the front of the large canvas tent with a stern expression on her face, clutching a pointer-stick under her arm, like a Prussian field marshal about to address her troops. The folding chairs in the briefing area were filled with high-ranking officials from government security agencies, the world's military, Skyway Patrol, and the Space Defense Forces – some had already been onsite at the Cluster starship camp, and the rest had been flown in by emergency request. They made for a pretty intimidating audience, but Mrs. Wakeman was confident and resolute as she strutted next to the hastily-erected projection screen, certain of her findings and fretful of their ramifications. The assembled officials could infer the seriousness of her message from the squint of her bespectacled eyes.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she began, flexing the pointer in her fists, "I bring you urgent information regarding the Cluster and its evil designs for galactic conquest! I dare say that my findings bode ill for the freedom of every man, woman, and child on the planet Earth!"
Lines like that were usually punctuated by flashes of lightning in the background. Satisfied that she had captured the attention of everybody in the tent, the doctor thrust her pointer into the air with a dramatic flourish. "Commence the presentation!" she barked. A picture sprang to life on the screen …
With a giant fan-shaped silhouette blotting out the middle of the image. A few of the generals in the front row exchanged confused glances, and Mrs. Wakeman slapped her forehead in frustration. Here was a tent filled with the highest-ranking military people in the world, charged with the responsibility of saving the human race, and instead of sensitive intelligence, they were being treated to shadow puppet theater. She glared towards the back of the tent …
Where Jenny was standing, with one of her eyes telescoped outward and shining with a bright light, acting as the video projector for her mother's presentation. But her chest-plate was split open too, and a thin robotic arm was deployed, holding a fanned-out deck of paint strips that was blocking the video image. The robot girl was talking in hushed whispers with a pair of tall, barrel-chested guards who looked like they could have played professional rugby. "So tell me … and please, be brutally honest … should I go with more of a taupe? Or maybe something bolder, like a burgundy?
The first guard tapped his rugged chin, which sported an impressive scar. "Hmmm … with your coloring and features, I think I'd do off-white. Maybe the ivory."
"No, no, no," said the second burly guard, leaning on his high-caliber proton assault rifle. "It's the prom, she wants something that says 'look at me, I've arrived!'. Go with the hunter green."
Mrs. Wakeman silently counted to ten, wondering for roughly the millionth time just why she'd ever thought it had been a good idea to build a teenage robot. "It appears there is a slight problem with the projection equipment," she growled, hissing the words through clenched teeth, "but I'm certain it's nothing that the threat of a two-week grounding won't fix."
With a gasp of horror and the sound of a robotic arm being quickly retracted, the picture on the screen cleared up immediately, showing a still image from the recording that had been found in the starship's computers earlier that afternoon. Everyone in the tent immediately recognized the sneering face that belonged to the Cluster's all-powerful robotic monarch, the dreaded Queen Vexus. The purple-and-white robot girl was a bit of a mystery, however.
Mrs. Wakeman cleared her throat and began. "As you are all no doubt aware by now, we received a recorded message from Cluster Prime earlier this afternoon. What you may not know is that there was another message hidden inside of it – a secret message. A series of rapid optical burst patterns, coming from the eyes of this robot in the lower right, was actually a form of binary code, containing a terrible warning. This Thursday, at precisely three o'clock in the afternoon, the Cluster will launch a military operation code-named 'Cluster Dawn' … phase one of which is a full-scale invasion of Earth, with the intent of turning us into a colony of the Cluster Empire."
A wave of astonished murmurs rippled through the crowd, and the doctor moved on to the next slide. The screen changed to show a three-dimensional map of the space immediately surrounding Earth, overlaid with curving arrows and spaceship icons. "Furthermore, interwoven in the video feed at a frequency of 755 megahertz was a much denser stream of binary code, disguised to look like ordinary subspace interference. After careful interpretation of the data, I have discovered that it contains detailed maps and charts showing the Cluster attack plans. Subsequent pages show the number of vessels that have been committed to the invasion, their attack strategy, navigational vectors, soldier drone counts, weapons compliments, and in-flight movie selections. Gentlemen, the Earth has forty-four hours to prepare for Cluster invasion!"
The tent erupted into a chaos of heated conversations as the doctor quietly folded her arms, and shot a subtle smile off to the side of the room, where Dr. Phinneas Mogg was frowning with his team of hand-picked scientists. Mrs. Wakeman didn't have to say a word … it had been Phinneas' job to find useful military data in the starship's computer, but he'd been upstaged by her, again, and he knew it. She'd just scored another point in their life-long academic jousting match.
Heated conversations grew into shouts of panic. "That's less than two days!" "They've never sent anything more than an excursion force at us before!" "Our defense systems are still in ruins!" "They'll mop the floor with us!" "Earth is doomed! Doomed, I say, doomed!"
"Gentlemen, gentlemen, please!" cried Mrs. Wakeman, trying to restore some semblance of order. "I know this is all somewhat alarming, but the important thing is that we know the Cluster's battle plans now, and we can prepare to defend ourselves!"
"Oh, really?" sniped a foreign defense minister, pointing to the attack plans on the screen. "And s'il vous plait, Madame Docteure Wakeman, would you be telling us just how you propose we defend ourselves from an invasion of zis magnitude?"
"Why, the same way we defend ourselves against every alien invasion," she smiled. "With the most powerful robot guardian in the known universe … my Global Robotic Response Unit … XJ-9!" Mrs. Wakeman gestured to her metallic daughter at the back of the briefing tent, who perched her fists on her hips in a heroic pose, beaming with pride.
The defense minister raised a cultivated eyebrow. "Zat leetle robot is going to defend ze Earth from a fleet of one thousand of ze Cluster starships?"
"You bet your boots I am … whoops! Did you say one thousand?" Jenny deployed a small polishing wheel from her wrist, and ran it over her projector-eye. A piece of lint on her lens, under the "total ship count" column, had made the number three look like the number one. "Sorry about that … heh-heh … my bad!" An audible gasp rose up from the crowd as the chart showed the now-corrected number of starships in the Cluster invasion fleet: not one thousand, but three thousand.
That little revelation did not have a calming effect on the crowd. As a new round of heated arguments flared up among the military and government officials, Jenny simply folded her arms, and smiled a confident smile. Three thousand Cluster starships? No biggie! They were going to be rumbling on her home turf now, and that made all the difference in the world. Fighting on Cluster Prime had been the toughest combat of her life, because the Cluster seemed to have an infinite supply of ships and weapons at their disposal. The Cluster home planet was armed to the teeth; even the artificial ring surrounding it was a massive weapon. Every time she had destroyed a ship, three more would pop up in its place. But if those Cluster creepos tried to invade her home, things would be different. "Remember, I've stopped the Cluster before," she said, hoping to settle the crowd's fears. "I stopped the Minutians, and I stopped those freaky fish-head guys with the giant walking ships. This won't be the first time I've had to prevent some aliens from annihilating us all."
General Brohammer stood up and raised his grizzled voice above the clamor of the crowd. "There's another important question we haven't asked yet," he shouted. "Dr. Wakeman, how do we know if this information is even genuine? We don't know if we can trust the source or not."
"Trust her? How the heck can you wonder if we can trust her?"
Standing perfectly still up to now, the projection screen warbled to life, and sprouted a blob of silver-green molasses that grew into a pained, exasperated face. A few gasps of surprise rose from the audience; most of them had heard about this bizarre "nanodroid", but this was the first time that they'd seen Drew in person. He ignored their reactions for the moment; he had been listening patiently as Jenny projected the slides onto his expanded rectangular belly. But he wasn't going to let that last comment slide by.
"Listen, General Mills, or General Electric, or whatever the heck your name is … that 'source' saved our sorry butts, and helped us escape from Cluster Prime! She stood up to Queen Vexus and risked her life so that we could get back home!" Drew flinched for a split second, fighting to hold his voice together. "Until we got this transmission, we thought she was dead!"
"Verifying intelligence sources is standard operating procedure," said the general, choosing to overlook Drew's little insult; he'd been briefed on what had happened on Cluster Prime, and was not completely unsympathetic to the android's feelings. "Listen, son, I know this puts a burr under your saddle, but it's possible that the Cluster could be using your robot friend to feed us disinformation. I mean, look at her. Tell me she doesn't look like she's been assimilated."
Drew collapsed into a gurgling silver-green pillar, reverted to humanoid form, and flailed his arms wildly into the air. "Disinformation? Why the heck would Vexus even tell us that she was going to attack? Allison's job was to connect herself into the ClusterNet. She could have found out all this stuff on her own! Look, I don't know how she's doing it, but the important thing is that she's alive, and she's still trying to help us. And we've gotta figure out a way to save her!"
That ridiculous suggestion ignited a new round of shouting, as Jenny and Drew came to Allison's defense, and Mrs. Wakeman desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to keep her teenage charges from embarrassing her in front of over a dozen high-ranking generals. The cacophony of voices increased in volume and chaos until the military briefing tent sounded like the trading pit of a stock exchange. The doctor tugged uncomfortably at the collar of her turtleneck; it was a nervous habit that surfaced whenever events felt like they were spiraling out of control. She had brought XJ-9 and Andrew back to the starship site with the intention of presenting the decoded Cluster intelligence, and then reassuring the world's military that the Cluster threat was nothing that XJ-9 couldn't handle. She had confidence in XJ-9's design and engineering; she had reams of numbers from her applied statistics and computational analysis, and she had a smattering of motherly pride. But she was having trouble infusing her confidence into the audience.
As she fretted over the deteriorating degree of civility in the tent, she suddenly became aware of a presence at her side, and turned with some annoyance to see the smirking face of Phinneas Mogg next to her. "A most excellent presentation, Nora," he grinned, speaking up to be heard over the shouting. "Looks like you've got them eating out of the palm of your hand."
She heaved her shoulders with a deep sigh, growling at the snickering scientific lackeys who followed behind Mogg like his personal nerd posse. "Phinneas, this is neither the time nor the place for another one of our little bouts of verbal pugilism. I am trying to …"
"Oh, I'm sorry, Nora, I was just teasing," he chuckled. "Actually, my colleagues and I weren't surprised at all that you came up with a bombshell like this. You know we all consider you to be the world's leading Cluster expert."
"Oh, puh-leeease," she groaned, rolling her eyes with dramatic sarcasm. "I didn't just pop out of a Petri dish, you know."
"Why Nora, Nora, you've got me all wrong," said Mogg, clutching a gloved hand to his chest as if to grasp some imaginary wound. "I know you're upset with me, but I just want to help! After all, we're talking about the safety of everyone on the planet Earth, right?"
Mrs. Wakeman arched a suspicious eyebrow; this was the last thing she had expected from him, especially after one-upping him with the decoded message. "Er … riiiight …"
"Sure, we've had our arguments over the years," he continued, oozing charm from every syllable, "but that's to be expected from two world-leading scientific giants such as ourselves, eh? Nora, we're both professionals. We can set our differences aside until the Cluster invasion is over. What do you say we call a truce? For the good of all mankind? Hmmm?"
She stared at Phinneas' outstretched hand as if it were radioactive. As long as she'd known him, he'd never been one to put "the good of all mankind" ahead of his own personal ambitions. But then again, Earth had never faced a threat like Cluster Dawn before. Perhaps, she thought, just perhaps, he was having a change of heart. Mogg, along with the rest of the officials in the briefing tent, were the only people on Earth who knew just how grave the impending danger was. Perhaps he had taken a peek into the abyss and realized that now was not the time for bickering with one's rival. And if Phinneas Mogg was big enough to admit that … then By Jove, Nora Wakeman was big enough to admit it, too.
"Very well, Phinneas," she said, shaking his hand with a cautious smile. "A truce. It will require all of our combined efforts to ward off this hideous alien onslaught."
"Combined efforts … my thoughts exactly," he grinned.
Dr. Mogg bounced up to the front of the tent and, with some difficulty, regained the attention of everyone in the audience. "Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, please! If we can have some order, please! You've come tonight to hear the latest intelligence on the Cluster's plans, and to organize a defense against them. And that is precisely what we're going to do, right now."
He swept an arm towards his "former" adversary in a gallant gesture. "First, I would like to recognize the spectacular achievement of my esteemed colleague, Dr. Nora Wakeman. With all due respect, General Brohammer, I believe Dr. Wakeman's decoded message is completely genuine. We all remember the sabotage attacks from the Cluster shape-shifter last week. It's quite typical to undertake sabotage activity prior to an actual invasion. And the debriefing of rescued prisoners and high school students after their return from Cluster Prime led us to believe that the Cluster was preparing some kind of new aggressive action. At the very least, sir, I believe we should err on the side of caution. We must assume that Dr. Wakeman's intelligence data is correct."
A chorus of heads nodded in agreement; that sounded logical enough. Mrs. Wakeman dug her little finger into her ear to make sure she was hearing Mogg correctly. As she pondered Phinneas' unexpected new attitude, one of his associates erected an easel behind him, and set up a large whiteboard.
Mogg uncapped a black marker, and began to jot down a stream of incomprehensible equations. "Now, while we still have considerable forces available on the ground and in the air, we have virtually no defenses left in outer space. The only way to save the Earth is to stop the Cluster armada while they're still in space, denying them any chance to land forces on the surface. And at the moment, we have only one resource capable of fighting that armada – Dr. Wakeman's amazing young robot, Miss XJ-9. She is the planet Earth's best and only hope."
Jenny's pigtails nearly shot off of her head in surprise. She hadn't been listening that closely to her mom's boring old school buddy, but … it almost sounded like he'd just paid her a compliment. And for once, he hadn't call her "robot" or "automaton". Now a bit more curious, she decided to pay attention to his perplexing whiteboard scribblings.
With a final flourish of his marker, Dr. Mogg filled the last empty corner of the whiteboard with mind-bending mathematical gobbledygook. "Unfortunately … she's not powerful enough."
"WHAT?!?" shouted Jenny and Mrs. Wakeman, in near-perfect unison. Both of them bolted for the whiteboard, ready to defend their respective reputations. But after allowing the ladies to vent their righteous anger, Mogg began to explain the formulas and figures he had written on the board. It was a giant equation that neatly boiled down the fighting capabilities of two warring parties – the Cluster armada on one hand, and the XJ-9 robot on the other – taking into consideration their speed, firepower, battle effectiveness, defense capabilities, and a dozen other matrices and coefficients that made no sense to anyone with less than two doctorate degrees to their name. Mogg explained that his starship research team had uncovered an important piece of information after all – Cluster starships were being refitted with next-generation reactors and weaponry that increased their lethality by a factor of five. When these changes were added to the Cluster side of the equation, the result was the same every time; Earth came out on the losing end. Mrs. Wakeman looked over the whiteboard with a morbid expression on her face. If there was one thing she respected unwaveringly, it was the authority of cold, hard numbers.
"I do believe you're right, Phinneas," she mumbled, looking like she was swallowing a jar of cod liver oil. "According to these figures, this time the Cluster is throwing more firepower at XJ-9 than she can possibly handle. It's simply a matter of mathematics."
"True enough," replied Mogg, "but if the Cluster can upgrade, then so can we." He waved to one of his colleagues at the side of the tent, a tall, gangly man in a white lab coat. "Plink, bring it over!"
Mogg's scientific partner moved as if he was all elbows and knees; he could only have been an intellectual, as it was immediately obvious that he had not an ounce of physical coordination in his entire body. He babbled under his breath as he pushed a wheeled cart between Phinneas and Nora, stumbling over his own feet twice in the span of twenty paces. Somehow he managed to bump his elbow against the whiteboard, and in the process of steadying it, his small, round glasses nearly came off of his light-bulb-shaped face. The generals in the front row exchanged uneasy looks with each other; Jenny had to quickly cover her mouth to stifle an ill-timed case of the giggles.
"Good evening, gentlemen … and nice lay-dy … my name is Professor Mortimer Plink." His voice was so nasal, he sounded like he was talking into a duck call. "Dr. Mogg and I have been working around the clock on a radical new power source … revolutionary, actually … bwah, well, no so much revolutionary as, heh-heh, well, really, really cool. Everybody gaze in wonder at … the Z-Pack!"
On top of the wheeled cart was a bulbous cylinder, three feet high and two feet wide, looking like nothing so much as a cast iron wastebasket.
Mogg slid up next to it, his chest puffed up like a rooster about to crow. "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the Zero Point Energy Generator."
A wave of ooohs and aaaahs washed over the audience, and even Mrs. Wakeman seemed to be genuinely in awe. Jenny cocked an eyebrow at the strange-looking device, looking unimpressed in the way that only teenagers can. "Zero Point Energy? What the heck is that supposed to be?"
"Supposed to be? Bwa-haw!" Plink's lanky arms shot into the air; it was as if Jenny had questioned whether or not the Earth actually revolved around the sun. "Why, it's only the most primal source of energy in the entire universe, is all! Tapping into the quantum fluctuations … bwa-haw, that's, like, teeny tiny … itsy bitsy … um, the quantum fluctuations that compose the very fabric of the, uh, space-time continuum. With the electrons, and the quarks, and the … bwah … teeny tiny neutrinos … so very tiny, they are …"
"What Professor Plink is trying to say," interrupted Mogg, "is that these Z-Packs are capable of generating almost infinite amounts of power. And if we were to mount one of these Z-Packs onto the chassis of the XJ-9, and integrate it into her circuitry …"
Mrs. Wakeman clapped her hands excitedly, and her eyes lit up like firecrackers on the fourth of July. "Oooh, yes! That kind of power source would increase XJ-9's combat effectiveness by an entire order of magnitude! Oooh, Phinneas! Well done, well done indeed!"
Jenny's jaw dropped agape when she saw how much her mother loved the idea. "Hold on a minute … Mom, are you serious? You're going to let them bolt that … that thing onto me?" She flipped open a door in her belly, and out slid a metal railing holding a narrow steel reactor tube with a soft blue glow. "You always said my double-fusion fuel-injected subatomic reactor was the most powerful energy source in the whole world! What do I need one of these stupid Z-thingies for?"
Mrs. Wakeman waved off her daughter's concerns with a flip of her wrist. "Oh, don't get me wrong, dear, you have a darling little reactor. But its design is already three years old! I've been working on a Zero Point Energy generator since before you were assembled, and I was certain that it was a scientific impossibility. Just think of what one of these Z-Packs would do for your efficiency!"
And to Jenny's horror, enthusiasm for the Z-Pack seemed to be winning over the powerful generals and politicians that had amassed in the briefing tent. Well, sure, it was easy for them to love the idea! All they saw was a bigger number getting plugged into Dr. Mogg's giant goofy equation. True, she had to admit, having more power would make it a lot easier for her to fight off an attacking Cluster armada … but none of these losers were going to have to wear that thing to school! Where the heck did they plan on "mounting" that monstrosity, anyway? It wouldn't fit inside of her belly, and it didn't look like it could collapse down for easy storage. On her back? Her chest? On top of her head? Each possibility seemed more terrible than the last.
Dr. Mogg clasped his hands behind his back, quite pleased with his now-increased stature in the eyes of the big cheeses. "Of course, we're trying to come up with additional ways to bolster our defense; every little thing helps. For instance, there are several operational fighters in the flight bays of the Cluster starship, including several of the latest Stealth Wasp models. The ship's weapons bays contain a full compliment of anti-spacecraft missiles, and we may be able to reprogram a few of the automated combat drones to fight on our side. And last, but not least, Professor Plink has been brainstorming some exciting new ideas in the area of … unconventional weaponry. Specifically, he feels that we may have an "X-factor" in our arsenal … a renewable supply of cutting-edge Cluster nanotechnology."
Drew's head perked up at the sound of the syllable 'nano'. He had been standing off to the side, seemingly forgotten in the discussion on how best to defend the Earth; he was doing his best to put up with a circle of curious onlookers, and a gaggle of fascinated scientists who poked at him as if he were a silver-green Pillsbury dough boy. But if Mogg and Plink were talking about Cluster nanotechnology, then that could only mean one thing … him.
"Hey, um … excuse me?" he said, raising his hand as if he were in physics class. "Professor … Plink, is it? Um, how am I supposed to fight Cluster starships? You know I'm not built of the same nano-doodads that the Omni-droid was, right? I can't make engines, or lasers, or even gears …"
"Of course I know that!" blurted Plink, every other word seeming to trigger a spasm of elbows and shoulders. "Please, I do have a Doctorate in nanotechnology! Also particle physics, applied chaos theory, artificial intelligence, and, uh … glah … photocopier repair. I've read all of Dr. Wakeman's papers on your particular …" – he made quote marks with his fingers – " … 'breed' of nanobots, if you will, and I have some ideas. Come up to the front of the room, young fellow."
Drew nervously approached the front of the tent; crowds still made him feel very uneasy. Dr. Plink pulled a small metal rod out of his lab coat pocket, and tossed it over to him. "Bwah, if you would, please, take a moment to enjoy this … heh-heh … tasty little snack. It's late, and I imagine you haven't had dinner yet. I know I haven't. Muh-haw, haw."
With suspicion bordering on the paranoid, Drew tasted the metal rod with his fingers, and found that it was just that, an ordinary metal rod. Well actually, a very nice metal rod. Some titanium mixed with carbon, silicon, and a few of the rare earth elements, mixed in an unusual combination … his fingers quickly flowed around the rod, and in seconds, it liquefied, and was absorbed into his arm.
The professor clapped his hands with a hearty guffaw. "Fantastic! Bwa-haw … look at that, will you … so squishy, with the flowing, and the oozing, and the melting … oh, my. Faster than a scoop of soft-serve in a breeder reactor! Simply amazing. Folks, that metal rod was actually a piece of armored hull from the Cluster starship, and those nanobots gobbled it up like nobody's business! And that is the driving idea behind the genius that is … ah, wait just one second here …"
He reached underneath the wheeled cart and pulled out a large placard, struggling absurdly to get it set up on the whiteboard easel. When he finally got it turned right-side-up, Drew's face nearly fell onto the floor. It was a rough schematic for a electro-magnetic gun barrel … except that this gun wasn't designed to shoot shells or bullets. It was designed to shoot … nanodroids.
Plink thrust out his almost nonexistent chest. "… here we go. I give you … the Universal Nano-disassembler Slurry Linear Projection Assembly! Um, patent pending, of course. We just slap one of these bad boys on a space fighter, fly up to a big old Cluster cruiser … nygah, they're the bad guys … shoot a blob of hungry little nanobots onto their hull, and muh-haw, it's chow time! Ah, I have to admit, the name is a bit, ah, unwieldy … Larry down in laser spectrometry calls it the Plink Pudding Cannon. Bwa-haw! Pudding Cannon. That Larry, he's a pistol, muh-haw, haw … glavin."
"I don't believe this!" shouted Drew, his head swimming with disbelief. "You've got more degrees than a thermometer and the best you can come up with is shooting me out of a cannon?"
"Well, it does have the disadvantage of, ah, being a one-shot weapon," mumbled the professor, pushing his glasses back onto his nose. "But, uh, that could be remedied if we added a mechanism to … bwa-haw … slice you into smaller pieces before firing. Sort of like … bwah … a giant space nano-sludge paintball gun! Except … y'know … it would actually shoot the nanobots, and not the, uh, paintballs."
It was hard to tell which teenage robot was more horrified by the end of the defense briefing. But the officers, ministers, and scientists seemed more optimistic than they'd been in days. True, the Earth was about to face an invasion of epic scope, but now the battle was no longer a mysterious, abstract threat. There were numbers and vectors and plans to point at, and study, and pick apart – and a deadline to beat. General Brohammer was positively overflowing with optimism, praising Doctors Wakeman, Mogg, and Frink as shining examples of ingenuity and teamwork in the face of crisis. Jenny and Drew desperately tried to talk some sense into Mrs. Wakeman, their only potential ally in the whole tent, but she seemed completely enthralled with the Z-Pack. Their objections grew more ineffectual with each passing second, and as the meeting came to a close, a swarm of scientists circled around the protesting robots, eager for a chance to get their own close-up observations.
In all the ruckus, Doctor Mogg and Professor Plink snuck off to the side of the tent, and gathered up their research notes and data charts. Mogg had a smile on his face like the proverbial Cheshire cat. Plink, on the other hand, seemed to be a bit … bothered.
"Muh-haw, Phinneas … ah, do you really think it's such a good idea to ah, just give a Z-Pack to Nora like that? For installing on her robot daughter … haw, would you just look at her … so cute, with those little pigtails …"
"Of course it's a good idea," beamed Mogg. "After Nora's robot defeats the Cluster armada on Thursday, using one of our Z-Packs, every government in the world is going to want them. They're going to want millions of Z-Packs. And we shall happily build as many as they are willing to pay for. And pay handsomely, I might add."
"But that's not what I mean," gulped Plink. "Nygah, you know we still haven't had a fully successful test run. I mean, sure, everything starts off just hunky-dory in the beginning … but then comes the power surges, and overloads … glah … then there's that slight, teeny tiny chance of … eh … catastrophic atomic implosion. With the burning, and the shouting, and the annihi-lation …"
"That's why we have it tested in space," whispered Mogg, with an evil grin. "And if worse comes to worse … well, Nora can always build herself another daughter."
Continued in Chapter Four / Forty-four Hours to Cluster Dawn
