The Superpower Project (9 page)

Mr Finn's favourite way to relax was to tinker in his lab: unscrew things, hit stuff with hammers, set things on fire… once he even created a death ray while trying to calm down. It fired a relaxing green laser up to two hundred metres.

But there was nothing he could have invented that would calm him down today. He hadn't imagined that the children and the Tin Jimmy would be able to damage his sculptures so badly. He was starting to take it personally, even though the attack had technically been a success.

“Young people today have no respect! And terrible haircuts. They should be locked up! And then fired into space!”

Apart from his collection of discarded robot heads, no one was listening, but Mr Finn was shouting all the same.

“
Months
we've been stuck here,” he continued. “Months of searching old offices and abandoned buildings for sigils and any crumpled old bits of paper that might mention Tin Jimmy, the guardians or the river.
And
it's been raining the entire time!”

Mr Finn picked up a robot head and looked it straight in the electronic eye.

“I am getting bored of ransacking old buildings, demolishing them and building shiny new offices in their place to cover our tracks. How can I get to the power under the water when I only have one sigil?”

***

Years previously, using a few of James Watt's old maps, Mr Finn's dad, Professor Finn, had pinpointed the exact area of the river where the power was supposed to be. At the start of this year, Mr Finn had sent a few of his Waterworx team down there with one of his own inventions, the Seismodulatron, to start exploring the riverbed.

Mr Finn turned the robot head around and pointed to a big box full of cables and bent metal in the corner of the room.

“The Seismodulatron! Nobody else has ever invented anything that can cause miniature earthquakes in small spaces.” Mr Finn allowed himself a humble chuckle, then shook the robot head. “But it didn't unlock the power! The idiots managed to hit an
actual
fault line under the river and create a proper earthquake!”

It hadn't been a big earthquake, but it was big enough for Mr Finn to put the Seismodulatron back in the big box of unused inventions along with the Quantumbler and the Octopants.

“It was after the earthquake that I decided to follow Sarah Stone. She seemed to be the only person still around who was involved last time.” Mr Finn nodded the robot head to acknowledge the cleverness of this plan. “I followed her for weeks, hoping I would see something, anything, that suggested she knew about Tin Jimmy or the sigils. But she just did lots of old-lady things like going to the shops on the bus or walking round the dam with her granddaughter. And then she just wandered off on holiday. Useless. I may have lost my temper with her… while holding a hydroboom.”

Mr Finn was still sure Sarah Stone had been hiding vital information. He had even forced himself to read all her rubbish books and comics, just in case there were any clues there:
The Moon Pupil, Santa's Little Werewolves, The Boy Who Wasn't There, Candybones
. There were lots of monsters and weird things, but nothing useful like a map or something written in code, which was what he'd been hoping for.

“We need more information,” said Mr Finn, putting the robot head neatly on a shelf beside the Defabulator. “The very friendly Mr Garvock from the local museum was telling me about a massive store of James Watt's old pictures and documents that the museum currently doesn't have room to display. Some of the documents were gifted by the noted collector Professor Finn – or ‘Dad', as I used to call him.”

Mr Finn looked at the shelved robot head once again. “I know what you're thinking… why not ask to borrow it? And I did consider that. But I might need it for a while, so that's why Evolve and I are going to break into the museum and steal it instead. It'll be easier that way. And more fun.”

***

The museum was 150 years old, a friendly looking structure fringed with stone castle battlements.

“Just beautiful,” said Mr Finn, gazing up at the expertly crafted turrets and windows, “an excellent site for a new supermarket.”

Mr Finn had dressed in his best black tracksuit and balaclava, and brought a sports bag full of gadgets and inventions he thought would be useful during a burglary.

Evolve, standing nearby, was mostly silver, but also a giant round robot, so it was harder for it to blend in.

“Let's be quick,” said Mr Finn, “in case someone sees you. Is there a back door I wonder?”

Evolve rolled around to the rear of the building and stopped, flashing its lights at Mr Finn. There, a newer building had been added on to the main structure. It had no doors, but there was a slightly rusty set of metal shutters.

“Right. We could get in quietly that way I'm sure,” said Mr Finn.

Before he could work out the best way to do that – perhaps something involving the Magnomatic Beam – Evolve simply rolled forward, smashing through the doors and setting off the alarm.

“What? Why did you…” Mr Finn ran inside the building.

Evolve was waiting beside a pile of stuffed animals he had knocked over.

“Stay here,” said Mr Finn, scowling. “Please switch your lights on so we can see, and don't move until I tell you.”

Evolve beamed its coloured lights from underneath its circular rim, illuminating rows of old paintings, engine parts and model boats.

Mr Finn scuttled towards some rows of crates at the back of the room, and quickly started reading the contents.

“Dinosaur bits. No. Egyptian treasures. No. Pirate files. No. Watt archive! Three crates?! I knew I should have brought Resilience.”

Mr Finn dragged the first crate out. Two smaller ones were stacked behind. “Right. We'll have to hope for the best here. Evolve!”

The robot rumbled forward, its arms unfolding from its huge spherical body.

“Pick these up and run… I mean roll!” said Mr Finn, grabbing the smallest of the three crates.

With the alarm still ringing through the darkness, and the museum's hidden treasures left open for all the world to steal, Mr Finn and Evolve disappeared into the night with boxes full of secrets.

Cam had a problem. Usually, Megan would have told him that was because he had a chip on his shoulder, but for once, the problem was not really his fault. Together, they were trying to figure out the best way to solve it on the way home from school.

“So, Mr Finn likes your sculpture design the most for the Waterworx competition,” said Megan, “and it turns out there's a fair chance that whatever you make will be turned into a robot.”

“Well, if our last two encounters with Waterworx sculptures are anything to go by, then yes – an
evil
robot.”

“Correct,” said Megan. “An evil robot which may end up trying to smash us and
our
robot.”

“
Your
robot,” said Cam.

“Whatever,” said Megan. “And worse, it looks like it will probably be a massive scary sea monster from one of my own gran's stories, designed by you and Kevin.”

“That about covers it, except the part where Mr Finn requested more claws and teeth,” said Cam. “Discuss.”

Megan sighed. She had been feeling quite low since she dropped the coin in the hospital. She did drop it while saving Cam's life, and Cam had made a big show of appreciation by buying her a Chinese takeaway on the way home. But she knew it wasn't a good thing that they had lost it.

“Talking of horrible sculptures…” Megan pointed to a lorry that was slowly driving past. Phoenix Egg from the shipyards was securely strapped to its back. A crane truck followed behind, ready to lift it into place in the town square.

“I'm starting to feel a bit outnumbered,” said Cam.

“Can't you just convince Kevin to change his design?” said Megan.

“Change it to what?”

“I don't know – something less dangerous,” said Megan. “A kitten or something.”

“Kittens have claws,” said Cam, “and teeth.”

“You're right,” said Megan, “kittens are terrifying.”

They opened the door to Megan's house, and there was an excited stomping as Tin Jimmy battered down the stairs like an oversized puppy. Megan was glad her parents weren't back from work yet.

“Megan! Cameron! The Morse code has worked. I have printed.” TJ was brandishing a tiny strip of thin paper with holes in it.

“Seriously?” said Cam, grabbing it from him.

“What does it say?” asked Megan.

“Well, I don't know, do I?” said Cam. “I don't speak Morse. Google it.”

Megan was already on her phone doing just that. “Dot dot dash, dot dash dot, dot dot dot dash… urv?”

“Does that help?” asked TJ, sounding almost eager.

“Nope,” said Cam, “sounds like we only got part of a word, like ‘curve' … or ‘scurvy'.”

“Or ‘survive'?” said Megan. “Maybe if I hook the Goozberri Five up to the Morse-code machine it'll help download the missing part of the message.”

“Well, you do that while I go home for tea. Plus, I've got to work out how to tell Kevin we need to change our dead-ly sea monster to something cute and fluffy tomorrow.”

“Try and think of a nice way to say it, Cam,” said Megan. “Try really hard.”

“Of course,” said Cam, “I'll be extra polite.”

Megan hoped that ‘extra polite' would take Cam up to the level that most normal people would consider ‘basic polite'.

“I'll meet you at lunchtime,” said Megan, “you can tell me how it goes.”

***

The beeping started again as soon as Megan took TJ back up into her room. “Is it the rest of the message?” she shouted.

“What.” TJ abruptly stood up. “What. What. What.”

“TJ, are you ok?”

TJ walked out of Megan's bedroom and stepped towards the stairs. “What. Initiate take off,” he said, stepping forwards and not taking off at all. He tumbled noisily down the stairs, landing face-down at the bottom.

Megan ran down after him, relieved again that her parents weren't in to witness it all.

TJ was on the floor, still attempting to walk, like a wind-up toy that had tumbled over. The fall had dislodged the panel at the back of his head. Megan had been wondering about opening it, but not like this…

“Hang on TJ, let me try and help,” said Megan, carefully opening the panel and peering inside. A circuit board with a large black microchip was welded to the inside of his head. It had a few different wires connecting to bulbs, other dusty-looking circuits and down towards the Morse-code machine in his chest.

“Well, I'm pretty sure James Watt didn't build this bit,” said Megan, carefully pulling at the microchip, loosening it from the circuit board. TJ stopped moving, and the lights in his eyes disappeared.

“TJ? TJ you still there?”

Nothing. Megan pushed the microchip back in. Still nothing.

“Have I broken you?” said Megan, laughing nervously and pretending not to panic. She was feeling bad enough about losing the coin; she really didn't want to have busted her gran's robot as well. “I can't have broken you!”

She thought back to coding club and her conversations with Miss McTeer about what to do when computers didn't work properly.

“You switch them off and back on again.” Megan pushed the button on the back of the robot's neck, and his eyes once again flickered into life.

“Megan. What happened?”

Megan stared into the back of TJ's head, deep in thought. “I'm not sure TJ, but I think it's maybe time for some replacement parts. Come on, I've got the stuff in my room.”

TJ slowly got to his feet and looked up the stairs. Realising he had fallen, he began checking his arms and legs for breakages. “There have been many replacement parts,” he said sadly.

Everyone in the dinner hall was watching. It was a bit embarrassing.

“No!” shouted Kevin, the angriest Cam had ever seen him. His face was going a bit red.

“I just think…” said Cam.

“You're just jealous because I've done all the work and I'm going to win the Playstation.”

“I don't like Playstations,” said Cam, “I have an Xbox. And that's not even it.”

“What is it then?” said Kevin. “Another one of you and your girlfriend's little secrets?”

“Megan's not my girlfriend,” said Cam, who had this conversation with someone at least once a week.

“Then how come you hang about with her more than anyone else?” said Kevin. “The rest of us might as well not be here at all.”

“Suits me!” shouted Cam.

“Fine!” Kevin stormed off.

“Well,” said Cam, “class this afternoon's going to be really awkward.”