Fuzzy (6 page)

4.3
THE DINING ROOM TABLE

There was no longer any question about whether Fuzzy would stay for supper. Max's mother was delighted to have found another sci-fi fan and was eager to talk even more.

When she went to program the food dispenser, Max finally got a chance to talk to Fuzzy.

“That was amazing,” she said. “You downloaded the books on our shelves, right?”

“Yes,” said Fuzzy.

“And you had time to read them?”

“Yes, I have a subroutine for analyzing literature. However, I may not understand a book as well or in the same way as a human does.”

“Well, you seemed to have figured out those pretty quickly,” said Max. “But how did you know they were Mom's and not my dad's?”

“Some of what your mother was saying was reflected in those books. And I thought that your mother would be the one to enjoy having old-fashioned paper copies, given that your father has a background in technology and would be more likely to do his pleasure reading with an electronic device.”

Max shook her head in amazement. “You're learning, Fuzzy! Fast!”

But a moment later, Fuzzy showed how clueless he could still be.

When they went to sit down around the table, they were one chair short.

“Oh, let me go get a chair from the guest room,” said Mrs. Zelaster.

“No, thank you,” said Fuzzy. “I do not need a chair.”

And he lowered himself to the correct height.

Max looked under the table and saw that his legs were in what looked like a very uncomfortable squat, at least for a human. In fact, she realized, one of his knees was
bent backward. It was disgusting, and when she looked up she saw that her parents had seen it, too.

It was an awkward reminder to all of them that this wasn't a human after all.

“I'll get the chair,” said Max, jumping up.

Unfortunately, by the time she returned, the conversation had completely stalled, and her mother had remembered where it all started.

“All right, Max,” said her mother, no longer shouting, but calm and logical, which Max knew was often worse. “Your ‘friend' here may be a fun distraction for you, but we can't have all these discipline and test problems piling up on you. You have got to start really concentrating on important things.”

“Well, Mom, I—”

“Uh-uh.” Her mom held up a hand. “I'm not finished. Not even close. Acting like a companion to a robot may be a big deal among your friends at Vanguard, but you can't play the hotshot at school when you're failing your tests.”

“I'm not acting like a hotshot!”

“But you
are
failing the tests, Max,” said her dad. “You promised us you were going to study and bring
your scores up. Look, I just downloaded the report from your school, and your scores are actually worse this week!”

He held up his communications pad to show Max the report Barbara had sent. It was an animated line graph, and her mother got more and more upset as it played.

“Do you see that line?” her mother asked. That's your test scores! And this one is discipline! And . . . oh, Max . . . this is the overall #CUG score. That's the big one, right? Well, it looks like a stock market crash! Do you see that?”

Max stared at it. It did look pretty bad.

“Your mother asked you a question: Do. You. See. It?”

“Yes, I can see it!”

“Don't give me that attitude!” said her mom. “We don't need attitude—we've got plenty of attitude—what we need is for you to study!”

“I did study! Honest, I don't know how I could have failed. I knew those answers!”

“Don't sit there and say you knew the answers when you obviously didn't. Do you think this doesn't matter? Do you know what the person from the school board
told me? They told me that you may have to take remedial classes . . . at the county EC school!”

Max froze. EC school?

EC stood for ExtraChallenge. Supposedly it was a school for students who needed a little extra help UpGrading, but everyone said the EC schools were full of bad kids and really bad teachers. Max wasn't even sure where the actual school was.

“From what I hear,” said her dad, “once you get sent to EC school, you'll never catch up.”

That was what Max had heard, too.

“Oh, Max,” said her mother, “you're going to end up just like Tabbie Filmore.”

Tabbie had been a friend of Max and Krysti who started the year at Vanguard but didn't last long. She was weird and hilarious but also smart. Or at least she had seemed smart. But then she started flunking the UpGrade tests. One day she told Max and Krysti some school board official had actually come to her house to tell her parents she would have to be transferred to the ExtraChallenge school if she didn't do better. She didn't, and one day she wasn't at school anymore.

(All this time, Fuzzy just sat there. But he was busy.
He downloaded Max's records. And then Tabbie's. He looked at the EC school's statistics. This wasn't public information, of course, but the school system's password was easily bypassed.)

“You should not go to the ExtraChallenge school, Max,” Fuzzy said.

“
Ugh!
Not you, too!” groaned Max. “Trust me, I don't
want
to!”

“Well,” said her mother, “then Fuzzy better go home, and you better go study.”

“I am contacting Jones,” said Fuzzy. “He will be here in approximately forty-five seconds, based on the van's present location.”

4.4
MAX
'
S HOUSE

Fuzzy got up and very politely thanked the Zelasters for dinner—even though he hadn't eaten anything—and for the lovely evening, even though it hadn't been lovely.

When they had been preparing Fuzzy for the Robot Integration Program, Nina had sent him links to several websites about manners and etiquette and he had created a long list of PoliteBehavior() code.

So when Fuzzy thanked the Zelasters, he was just running the appropriate code. That's what robots and computers do, after all. And when they can't find the appropriate code, they either do nothing or generate an error message.

But not Fuzzy. When Fuzzy couldn't find the right code, he started writing it himself. This was what he was built for. To make a plan to fix an error, not just report it. To keep going . . . like a human has to.

And all through that dinner, listening to Max and her parents, Fuzzy had tried to find the appropriate code for the trouble Max was in. But he couldn't. The problem didn't even make sense, he realized: The scores showed that Max was not smart, but his own analysis showed that she
was
smart.

Smart = not smart
. It just didn't work. Something was wrong. He needed to fix it. In fact, he wanted to fix it.

Robots aren't supposed to want things. They are not supposed to like one person better than another person. They aren't supposed to do things they are not programmed to do.

But that's where the fuzzy logic came in: Fuzzy
was
programmed to do things he wasn't programmed to do.

And so he put all available processing power into creating a new, high-priority subroutine:

HelpMax().

4.5
NEAR MAX
'
S HOUSE

A block over from Max's house, a cargo truck was parked so that the occupants had a view, between two buildings, of the street in front of Max's house.

A man and a woman watched intently from behind the truck's heavily tinted windows. Another man was in the back, staring at qScreens and fiddling with equipment.

“Valentina! The van's pulling up,” said the big barrel-shaped man in front.

“The robot must have called them in!” said the woman. “Zeff, did you pick up the transmission?”

“What? No! Maybe!” came shouts from the back.

“Just keep scanning, in case there's another message. Look! Here comes the robot out of the house.”

“Doesn't look like much,” said the man in the front seat. “Robo-football players move a lot smoother—”

“Would you shut up? There's Jones. Looks like he's got a couple techs with him. Robot's in the van. There they go.”

“Should I—”

“No, you shouldn't,” the blond woman said, and it was obvious that hers was the final word. “Just watch! I want to see if those three SUVs are guarding them . . . Yeah, there they go.”

Two big black nonautomated SUVs passed by Max's house, following the van.

“Hmm, I guess the other one went back to the school already,” said the woman.

“Are you sure they were military?”

“Of course I'm sure! Either military or, worse, military contractors. Well, no big surprise. We knew they wouldn't make this easy.”

“Are we going for it?”

“No, tonight's just research,” said Valentina. Her eyes turned to slits. “There will be other opportunities.”

5.1
SCIENCE CLASS

The next day, Max seemed to breeze through the test.

As usual, it seemed to focus on the least important things they had studied, and a few questions were so strangely worded that she wasn't quite sure which answer they wanted. But she had overstudied so much that most of it was pretty easy.

As she scrolled back through, checking her answers, she was certain she had passed and was pretty sure she had actually done great.

Fuzzy had finished even sooner than Max. In fact, it only took him a few seconds to scan in the page from which each question was drawn and pull the answers
from his memory banks. At first he did not know how to enter his answers on the touch screen like the other students. He would normally just transmit data wirelessly, not laboriously type it in. But once he had created a TouchQScreen() subroutine, his hand moved with lightning speed . . . and the test was done.

He was about to go into PowerSave() mode when he decided to see how Max was doing. Logically, he could have just waited for Max to have her test graded and receive her score. But he did not wait.

He could see her screen from where he was sitting, almost beside him in the next row.

He got a full scan of Max's test as she scrolled through. She had only missed one of the seventy-five questions, so . . . 98.66 percent correct, he calculated. He might not need HelpMax(), because she was doing just fine by herself.

Max glanced over toward him, then turned back to her screen.

Biggs's desk was a little farther away in the same row as Max. It would have been too far for normal eyesight to make out, but Fuzzy's vision zoomed in so that Biggs's
screen appeared to him as large as the main qScreen in the front of the room where the teacher displayed visuals.

Biggs hadn't finished yet, but the answers he was entering were all correct. Biggs must be smarter than Max thought, Fuzzy decided.

Since HelpMax() didn't seem to be needed, he turned his processing power to a few other routines he needed to tweak, running simulations in his mind to see how the changes would work.

Eventually, the clock on the big qScreen up front hit zero.

“Time's up. Save your work, send it to Barbara, and turn off your screens, please,” said Ms. French. “You may talk quietly. Very quietly.”

Max hit the send button, then leaned across the aisle.

“Fuzzy,” she asked in a low voice. “Were you peeking at my test?”

“Yes,” said Fuzzy in his usual, slightly loud, slightly robotic voice.

“Shh!” hissed Max. “Whisper.”

Fuzzy turned his volume down to 0.5.

“You're not supposed to do that,” Max said. “I thought
maybe you were using your super-vision or whatever it is when I saw you staring at my screen. But, Fuzzy, that's cheating!”

“I was not copying your work, Max. I had already finished. I was simply curious to see how you were doing.”

“Oh.” She thought that over. “Well, then—how'd I do?”

“Your final score was ninety-eight-point-six-six percent. You missed a question about the planet Jupiter being mainly composed of metallic hydrogen and helium.”

“Argh! I knew that! But the question didn't make any sense.”

“Biggs didn't have any problem with it,” said Fuzzy.

“What?”
Max gasped, forgetting her own volume control for a second. Then she went into a really, really low whisper.

“You peeked at Biggs's paper? What did he get?”

“A ninety-three-point-three.”

“Well, smoke . . . I didn't know he had it in him. But, like I told my parents, it's an easy test. I can't wait to tell them I got a ninety-nine.”

“Ninety-eight-point-six-six.”

“Whatever. Listen, why don't you ask Jones to let you come home with me again tonight? The test scores get messaged home by five o'clock. My parents will probably take us out to eat to celebrate.”

“No, thank you,” said Fuzzy.

After last night, something in his Preferences() was telling him not to spend any more time listening to the Zelaster family argue.

Max seemed to see through his thought processes. “Come on,” she said, “it won't be like last night. They're going to be happy, not yelling at me. Besides, it's Friday. We can kick back and relax over the weekend.”

As it turned out, Jones didn't want Fuzzy to go, either. Fuzzy had experienced a slight freeze-up in the cafeteria again, and Jones wanted to figure out what went wrong.

So Max went alone . . . to her doom.

5.2
MAX
'
S HOUSE

Student ID: 836294-0383ZEL

Name: Zelaster, Maxine

Dear Parent,

In accordance with the Constant UpGrade program, MAXINE ZELASTER was tested today for MATH, LANGUAGE, PHYSICAL EDUCATION, FOREIGN LANGUAGE, and SCIENCE learning.