Runaway Robot Read online

  To Denny

  A book about a better world for my (much) better half.

  And to all the bionic heroes who are helping to

  build that future. May all your departures be

  thrilling and your arrivals glorious.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  STEP 1: I GATECRASHED A PARTY

  STEP 2: OK, I LOST MY HAND

  STEP 3: LOST PROPERTY

  STEP 3 AGAIN (I missed a step): ABSOLUTE EXTREME FEAR

  STEP 4: DO. NOT. LET. GO.

  STEP 5: SKYWAYS

  STEP 6: R-U-RECYCLING

  STEP 7: CONTROVERSIAL

  STEP 8: UNLEASH YOUR POWERS

  STEP 9: THE EMERGENCY HAIRBRUSH

  STEP 10: DEXTERITY WORKSHOP

  STEP 11: KILLER ROBOT

  STEP 12: HUMAN VERSUS ROBOT

  STEP 13: I ORDERED PEPPERONI PIZZA!

  STEP 14: HANGAR WOOD

  STEP 15: ROGUE ROBOT

  STEP 16: SIX THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND TEN PARTS

  STEP 17: AT YOUR SERVICE

  STEP 18: HOME

  STEP 19: WHY WOULD I. EVER HELP YOU?

  STEP 20: YOU

  STEP 21: IN YOUR FACE, DESCARTES

  STEP 22: PEOPLE ARE NOTHING LIKE MACHINES

  STEP 23: ARTY IS MISSING

  STEP 24: EMERGENCY SITUATION

  STEP 25: ROBOT REVOLUTION

  STEP 26: SEND HELP – QUICK

  STEP 27: ALFIE

  STEP 28: ERIC VERSUS THE DRAGON

  STEP 29: A MESSAGE FOR ARTHUR

  STEP 30: FELIX CULPA . . .

  STEP 31: I’M GOING. HOME.

  ARRIVALS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  I’m part human/part machine.

  I’m a bit bionic.

  I’m like Wolverine.

  You could call me Alfie Wolverine.

  That’s not true, by the way. Not going to lie: I’m not even one bit like Wolverine. ‘I’m like Wolverine’ is one of the things they teach you to say at Limb Lab during New Limb, New Life lessons. They worry people will laugh at you or start hating on you for being part mechanical, so they teach you a load of jokes and put-downs.

  And, in case the jokes don’t work, they teach you karate.

  They even teach you what to think.

  For instance, don’t think too much about how your accident happened. Accidents happen. End of. Start talking about it, and you’ll start thinking about it. Start thinking about it, and you’ll soon be thinking bad thoughts such as, Was it my fault? Why didn’t I just . . .? etc. Rule number one: don’t talk about it. Talk about something else.

  That’s the advice.

  So I’m not going to talk to you about me.

  I’m going to talk to you about Eric.

  Eric is missing.

  There is no sign of him. Weird, because normally wherever Eric goes he leaves plenty of signs. For instance: broken doors, crushed wheelie bins, and, one time, a car stuck up a tree. (Controversial!)

  Today, there is nothing. No clue. It’s like he’s evaporated. It’s not like he would be easy to miss . . .

  Eric is six foot six.

  He likes to sing.

  He’s super polite.

  He does as he’s told.

  He’s made of metal.

  When he’s cheerful, his eyes light up. Literally.

  When he’s worried, he spits fire. Literally.

  Eric tends to take thing literally.

  He can prepare light snacks.

  Get rid of unwanted guests.

  He can be conveniently stored in a shed.

  He is magnetic when anxious.

  Everyone knows him.

  No one has seen him.

  The thing is, I really want to find him for you.

  Eric always says if you lose something try to retrace your steps.

  So I’m retracing my steps.

  These are my steps . . .

  If you’re going to swerve school, swerve it with style. Find somewhere to swerve to. Somewhere actually better than school. There are certain people who swerve New Limb, New Life lessons (naming no names – Shatila Mars) and spend their day hiding in the little wooden house in the children’s playground in Skyways Park, or sitting in the bus shelter at Concorde Circus until their bums go numb, and their phones die of boredom.

  No! Don’t do this!

  Go somewhere warm and exciting with excellent facilities and free entertainment.

  When I swerve school, I go to the airport.

  You’re probably disappointed that I swerve school at all. But, seriously – stay with me.

  There was a day when I couldn’t face seeing anyone. I didn’t have a plan. I got almost to the school gates, and then I swerved. Literally.

  I mooched back up to the Circus, which is not a proper circus, by the way. It’s the name of a traffic island with a tree in the middle. There were no jugglers or fire-eaters to be seen, just the 10A bus waiting at the stop. Oh, and Shatila and her mates lounging under the tree. The minute they saw me, they scrambled to their feet like predators in a wildlife documentary.

  I acted like I hadn’t seen them and stepped on to the bus. The 10A is a driverless bus, so no one was going to ask me why I wasn’t in school. I sat back to enjoy the ride.

  Five stops later, we were outside the airport. Even though I’ve lived here all my life – even though the planes fly so low over our house we can see the big flaps on their wings moving – I’d never been to the actual airport until that day.

  Shatila can tell the time of day just by looking up at passing planes. She’ll be like, ‘That’s the ten forty-five departure for Amsterdam’, or whatever.

  My brain said, ‘One does not simply walk into an airport. One needs tickets and passports and stuff.’ But another voice in a different part of my head was going, ‘Let’s see what happens.’

  I listened to that one.

  I walked through the door, and I was in a magic kingdom.

  On the bus, we’d passed shops and houses and people taking their dogs for a walk or pushing pushchairs. On this side of the airport doors, it was people in suits pulling little suitcases on wheels, families dressed for sunny days, people in uniform and people getting ready to fly. There was a departure board with the names of cities I’d only ever seen on telly: Paris, Rome, Prague. There were places I’d never even heard of. Places that sounded made up: Faroe, Knock, Riga. All the ordinary things – home, school, all that – they all felt far away and not really real. All these new places felt like they were just one step away.

  Obviously if you’re in departures you need to look as though you’re going somewhere. Especially if you’re a Year Seven with no grown-up. Even if you’re going nowhere, Nowhere is a big place. It’s best to narrow things down. Instead of going Nowhere, pick a particular destination and decide that is the place you’re not going to.

  That first time I decided not to go to Disney World, Florida, I got into the queue at Area C, Desk 23 for Miami. Then I just let myself chill. Everyone else was complaining about queuing, but I was loving it – just standing there, looking at the adverts and the people coming and going, and imagining myself flying off to Miami on a school day, instead of going to my ICT lesson.

  I tried to figure out how the airport worked.

  Maybe it’s because I’m part machine myself, but I’ve noticed I’ve started to think about things as though they’re machines. For instance, you could look at an airport as a kind of vacuum cleaner. It sucks people out of the city – off buses and out of cars – into metal tubes, then spits them into the sky. That’s departures.

  The airport has two settings: departures and arrivals.
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  Departures is all stress. Everyone’s hurrying to get into the right tube before it flies off.

  Arrivals, though, is all just chill. It sucks people out of the sky and sends them home.

  Departures is full of people stressing and crying.

  Arrivals is full of people being happy and crying.

  Arrivals is a party.

  And I gatecrashed the party that day, and the next day, and whenever I felt like it from then on.

  People in arrivals aren’t queuing to check in or for the baggage drop. They are mostly standing around, behind a barrier, staring at big automatic doors marked ‘Arrivals’. Soon after a plane lands, people start piling through those doors, pulling their luggage after them. If the people waiting recognize the people arriving, they duck under the barrier, rush forward and hug them. A lot of people hold up signs for their arrivals to see. Mostly they’re taxi drivers with just names on their cards, like ‘Mr Soyinka’. Or people in suits holding ‘Welcome to Delegates of the International Labradoodle Convention’ placards. Some people make special colourful signs with messages like ‘Welcome Back, Mum’. Once there was a man with a sign that said ‘The Love of My Life’, but I don’t think the love was that mutual because he was there three days running and went home alone. Another time, a load of people turned up dressed as Imperial Stormtroopers with a banner that read ‘Welcome to the Dark Side’.

  There’s a flower shop in arrivals called Up, Up and Bouquet, and a cafe called Many Happy Returns. Sometimes people have just settled down to eat there when their friends or family come through the doors. Nine times out of ten, they will jump up, have a hug and forget to go back to their food. When that happens, you can walk past the table and quietly minesweep handfuls of chips, or swipe one of those massive cups of Coke. Sadly no one ever seems to leave crisps. Not even Pringles.

  The good things in life are just too portable.

  The woman who runs the cafe wears a big badge that reads ‘Feel Free to Ask About Our Meal Deal’. It’s a lie. Everything about her says, Do Not Ask Me Anything – I’ve Got Paninis to Heat.

  If you’re going to gatecrash a party, you have to know how to blend in. Otherwise people start asking you things like, ‘Why aren’t you in school?’ So I decided to make a sign of my own. Even though, of course, I wouldn’t actually be waiting for anyone, a sign that says, ‘Not Actually Waiting for Anyone’ would attract the wrong kind of attention.

  So that night I rooted around in the shed, found a big cardboard box – I think it had had a duvet in it once – ripped one panel off, wrote ‘Welcome Home’ on it with glitter pens, then spent ages trying to think of a name to put there. If you put an ordinary name like Kate, then you might end up with hundreds of Kates coming at you. So I didn’t write ‘Kate’. I wrote ‘Kate’ with a twist: ‘Katja’. It just popped into my head. That, I thought, is convincing. Unusual but convincing. I had no idea where it came from.

  The next day, I was dangling it over the barricade when Feel Free strolled by me. Her body kept striding forward – busy, busy – but her head swivelled on her neck. She had noticed me. A few minutes later, she came back the other way, so I noticed her. What I also noticed was the name on her badge: Katja. So the name Katja had not popped into my head from nowhere at all. It was her name. It had got into my head without my realizing it. And now she was standing right in front of me looking down.

  ‘My name’s Katja,’ she said. ‘Are you waiting for me?’

  ‘No. A different Katja. Auntie Katja.’

  ‘Really? And is she coming today?’

  ‘Yeah. This flight. From Knock. Look, it’s just landed. Won’t be long now . . .’

  ‘She’s a busy woman, your auntie, isn’t she? You were here yesterday. And the day before . . . and last week. You seem to have been hanging around the airport waiting for her for days. Why aren’t you in school?’

  She grabbed my hand. I tried to slip her grip, but she was definitely never going to let go.

  So I did the only thing I could.

  I let go of my hand.

  I flipped the catch on my wrist that holds my hand in place and ran off, leaving my right hand behind in her left hand. I looked back just long enough to see her staring down in horror at what she was holding.

  She looked up at me in shock.

  She probably didn’t know my right hand was detachable. She probably thought my arm was spurting blood. She dropped my hand as though it was blazing hot. It clattered to the floor.

  ‘Your hand!’ she shouted. ‘Come back! You’ve dropped your hand.’

  I’m not Wolverine.

  But I am part machine and slightly bionic.

  My hand is detachable. State of the art. It came from a special factory in Hungary by 3D printer. It was given to me by Dr Shilling at the Limb Lab.

  The Limb Lab is in a kind of glass bubble in the courtyard of a sprawling old house near Hangar Wood. The entrance hall has got swords and shields and coats of arms along its walls. It even has a propeller from an old-fashioned aeroplane, because the man who used to live here made his money building aeroplanes. There’s a fireplace the size of a tennis court with a Latin motto – Felix Culpa – carved over the mantelpiece.

  I used to think Felix Culpa was the name of the man who lived there, but Dr Shilling explained that it was Latin for ‘Happy Accident’, which is annoying, because nearly everyone at the Limb Lab had had an accident, and none of them were happy.

  Felix Culpa was the motto of her family, the Shillings. The man who built the aeroplanes was Dr Shilling’s grandfather. After a while, he switched from building planes to making artificial body parts. Back then, the old house was in the middle of a country estate with trees and lakes and cows and deer. The kind of place where ladies with big hats go horse riding, and men with big beards go on shooting parties.

  That’s all gone now. They built the airport and the Skyways housing estate on it. But the old house is still there. That’s called Shilling House Bionics. It’s where they design all kinds of state-of-the-art bodily appendages: not just arms and legs, but hands, fingers, toes . . .

  ‘And I’m proud to say there’s still one Shilling working here – namely me,’ says Dr Shilling. ‘I am the last of the Shillings.’

  The Limb Lab is the bit inside the glass bubble. That’s where kids like me go to learn to use their new legs, hands, fingers or whatever they’ve had replaced. From the outside, it looks like a goldfish bowl. From the inside, it also looks like a goldfish bowl – only this time, you are the goldfish. You can also have normal lessons in there until you’re ready to go back to school. There’s even a Limb Lab uniform: short-sleeved shirt with a pocket for pens and rulers like an actual scientist.

  ‘Because,’ says Dr Shilling, ‘here at the Limb Lab, we don’t have patients. We don’t have customers. We have co-researchers. This is a journey, and we travel together.’

  The day my hand arrived, Dr Shilling let me watch it downloading. The whole hand just sort of happened, bit by bit, on a table in the Limb Lab, like it was beaming down from space. It took hours to materialize. Dr Shilling bent over it the whole time like a big Anglepoise lamp. She thinks Limb Lab’s replacement body parts are way, way better than ordinary human ones. She calls the ordinary ones ‘flesh jobs’. She calls the new ones by their model names. My right hand is an Osprey Grip MM.

  ‘Look at that Osprey Grip MM,’ she’d said with a sigh when it was finished. ‘Isn’t she the best?’

  To be honest, it looked like something that had dropped off a shop dummy if the shop dummy was made of Lego. When I had to touch it, its coldness completely triggered me. It nearly made me remember the last time I saw my hand-hand, which is when it was flying through the air over my head before it splat-landed next to me. I was lying on my back on the ground. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how I’d ended up on the ground. Or how my hand had ended up in the air. Didn’t we usually stick together?

  That’s what I asked Dr Shilling about when sh
e said, ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Did it land somewhere? Did someone pick it up? Did they try to put it back on?’

  ‘I mean questions about your new hand,’ said Dr Shilling. ‘Not your old one. Your old one is in the past. Most of your memory is stored in your brain, but some of it is stored in your muscles – that’s why you can do some things without thinking about them. You lost your hand. And some of your memory went with it. You’re getting a new hand. You’ll make new memories after a while. Maybe your old memories will be recovered. Maybe they won’t. Until then, enjoy your brand-new hand.’

  She tried to show me how to attach the hand.

  It didn’t fit.

  Dr Shilling couldn’t understand it. ‘It’s a perfect copy,’ she said. ‘We did it with lasers.’

  Like I said, because I’m part machine, I’m usually good at thinking about machines and how they work. ‘This is a perfect copy,’ I said, ‘of my left hand.’

  ‘An absolutely perfect copy,’ said Dr Shilling, ‘of . . . Oh. Ha! I see what you’re saying! Very good, Alfie! We’ve given you two left hands. We forgot to reverse the template.’

  When the right version came a few days later, it fitted OK, but I couldn’t really work it.

  As long I don’t look at my empty wrist, I can still feel my old hand there. I mean, I know it’s gone. I saw it flying off into the air. Fairly unforgettable sight. If I lift my arm and look at my wrist, I can see that it’s totally hand-free. But as long as I don’t look, I can still feel it. I mean, really feel it. I can wriggle fingers that aren’t there, clench an impossible fist, point, feel the cold, feel the heat . . .

  ‘What you’re feeling,’ explained Dr Shilling, ‘is not your hand. It’s the ghost of your hand. That is completely normal. Ask the others.’

  Oh. The others.

  I’d better tell you about the others. ‘The others’ refers to everyone who goes to the Limb Lab. Obviously they’ve all got state-of-the-art body parts. Some have got new hands, some new legs, some both. There’s actually a kind of league table. Your ranking depends on two things: