This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

I let him take the eviction warning out of my hands. He folded it up neatly and placed it on the stack, then absent-mindedly picked at the spot of charcoal where my autogyro had burned through the table’s finish. I sat with my back against the wall and wrapped my arms around my knees.

“This seems like a good time for me to take the scholarship and move out,” I said slowly. “Then you wouldn’t have to keep paying for me and all my disasters.”

“Don’t go unless you want to,” he said, sliding down to sit next to me, then putting his arm around my shoulders and drawing me in close. “Believe me when I say I don’t want you to go if you’re not ready. Actually, I don’t want you to go ever. I’ve been dreading the day when you move out, you know. But, well, education is worth any sacrifice.”

It wasn’t until then that I realized my leaving would be as hard on him as it was on me. Then I imagined him having to live in his van for the rest of his life, which is what would happen if he had to keep paying for my housing, food, and collateral damage. It was only fair that I accept my exile to make up for my mistakes.

Look out, college—here I come.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

But I did have my reasons for not wanting to go. First, who ever heard of the Mechanical Science Institute? I was still hoping to get into some really well known science program like MIT or Stanford or Georgia Tech, even though I had no idea how I could afford one of those big-name places. But the real reason I didn’t want to go came down to this: I just didn’t want to leave my Dad.

For five years now, it had been just him and me and the occasional cockroach living happily in this little apartment. Sure, I was planning on leaving after I graduated high school, but that gave me two more years to adjust to the idea. And now this woman from this crazy school wanted me to pack up and leave my entire life to travel a third of the way across the country with less than two week’s notice. It sounded seriously mental. Thinking about it made me lose concentration on what I was doing and I accidentally cranked the power a bit too high. The autogyro’s motor emitted a loud POP as it erupted into orange flames and zinged upwards in one last burst of speed. Trailing a line of black smoke, it ricocheted off the ceiling and streaked down onto the stack of bills my Dad was trying to pay. What can I say—my experiments always explode.

My Dad knocked his chair over as he jumped up in surprise. I was already on top of the mess, smothering the flames before they could spread too much. The only problem was that I pushed the papers off the table and they fluttered all over the place.

“Sorry, sorry!” I yelled, stooping to gather up the bills.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said a bit shakily. “Better shuffled then burned, I suppose.”

I started reading the papers as I handed them to him. Water bill: first notice of overdue payment. Electricity: second notice. Rent: warning of eviction.

I unfolded the last one and started reading it.

“Soap, don’t—don’t read that,” he said, but it was too late. I had seen enough.

“We’re being evicted?”

My Dad was quiet a really long time. “Not until next month,” he finally said. “Then we have 30 days to move out. Don’t worry, we’ll work out something.”

“We’re getting evicted and you tell me not to worry? What part of working out ‘something’ is supposed to make me feel better?”

He put his hands up in a gesture that told me to calm down, but we both knew the electrician job market was in the toilet right then, plus there was the matter of repairing the gym and replacing all those cell phones. All because of me.

Chapter 5: Soap

“I think you should reconsider that scholarship,” my Dad said as he sat at the kitchen table paying bills. He was resting his forehead on his left palm like he always did when he balanced his checkbook.

I was zig zagging through the apartment with a hand-held version of the EMP broadcasting device. With one hand I adjusted the power level while with the other I kept the focusing dish aimed up at a miniature autogyro helicopter I had constructed from balsa wood pieces salvaged from a model airplane and the motor from an RC car. It flew pretty well, but whenever the autogyro got too high, it would lose its energy and begin to float down where it would come closer to my broadcaster. Then it would get its motor energized by the electromagnetic field I was broadcasting and would go zipping back up to the ceiling. Up and down, up and down in our tiny apartment. The challenge was that it would veer off in all sorts of directions, so I had to move constantly in order to keep the broadcaster directly beneath it. It was kind of like that old game with the rubber ball on the string that you’re supposed to get in the cup, except here the rubber ball flies away on its own.

“I know it’s short notice,” my Dad went on. “But I think it would be a really good experience for you to go to that college.”

“Seriously?” I asked, hopping to my right to stay beneath the autogyro. “I’m only sixteen. I’d never fit in at college. Plus, it doesn’t seem fair that the only reason I got the scholarship is because my cousin was all smoochy-smoochy with the Dean of Students there.”

“That’s not why you got this scholarship,” he said. “Soap, you have a gift—”

I couldn’t hear what he said next because the autogyro veered off and I had to lunge to keep up with it, which made me knock over a floor lamp.  The lamp fell with a cymbal-crash, and it made both of my Dad’s autographed basketballs fall off their shelf and bounce to the other side of the room.

“Soap,” I think my Dad tried to yell at me, but it came out more like a sigh of defeat. “Sorry, Dad!” I said. “I just have to calibrate the amplifier and then I’ll be done.”

“I just feel like you might be happier there,” he said. “This city is just too small for you.”

“Dad,” I scolded. “New York is as big as cities can get.”

“That’s not what I mean. This place is too confining. Too… closed-in. You need open air and empty fields where you can run around and play Frisbee and launch your rockets without raining fire back down on densely populated areas.”

I smacked my shoulder into a wall trying to keep up with the autogyro. Aside from knocking the wind out of me, it took away any argument I might have made about not needing more space.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

Most of the rest of the day passed in a blur. Thankfully, no one was hurt beyond a few minor burns and bruises. All the same, I got some mean looks from the students whose experiments I had ruined. The judges wouldn’t talk to me, either, and the guy from MIT wouldn’t even look at me—although I did see him talking with the antimatter kid for a long time.

I felt lower than the scavenging worms at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Even for me, this was an unprecedented disaster. My experiment had even burned out some of the wiring in the gymnasium. My Dad, being an electrician, had negotiated to repair the gym himself, but it would probably take him days to do it, and that didn’t cover the cost of all the cell phones and other electronic devices that were wrecked by the EMP. Here we were, so poor we couldn’t afford anything but the crummiest of cell-phones, and now somehow we were going to have to pay to replace everybody else’s high-end devices. I couldn’t even look my Dad in the eye all the way home.

The weird thing, the amazing thing, was that it turned out the science fair fiasco wasn’t the most important thing to happen that day. When we got home there was a letter from the Mechanical Science Institute waiting for me.

I recognized the name of the Institute because about a month ago a professor named Denise McKenzie had sent me a get-to-know-you letter saying she wanted to look into scholarships for me. I guess my cousin Dean had told her about me, but I don’t know what he said because I hardly knew him and the last time I saw him I think I was ten, back in the days when the whole family would get together for holidays sometimes. (I remember Dean because he stomped out the fire I accidentally started on the rug after rewiring the Christmas lights.) I guess he and my Dad must stay in touch a little, and my Dad must have bragged (or complained) about my inventions, and that’s how word got out to McKenzie.

Anyway, I didn’t think much of the Mechanical Science Institute at the time. The letter said it was a special program at some school called Langdon University, which was located in the weirdly-named town of Bugswallow, Minnesota. I had never heard of it before, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to look into it as one of my safety schools, so I sent Professor McKenzie the paperwork and copies of a few of my blueprints. Now I finally had her reply.

With a sigh, I decided my day couldn’t get any worse, so I opened the official-looking envelope and pulled out the letter.

Dear Sophia Lazarchek,

I have reviewed your transcript, your personal statement, and, most importantly, your schematics. I am particularly impressed with your knowledge and implementation of Tesla’s work with wireless electricity broadcasting. I regret that I will not be able to see your demonstration at the science fair, but I trust all will go well.

I am pleased to offer you enrollment in the Mechanical Science Institute with a full scholarship, including expenses for tuition, room, board, and books. Our classes begin on September 13th. I apologize for the short notice, but I hope you will join us this very year, as we are in need of a student with your expertise.

Sincerely,

Professor Denise McKenzie

Dean of Students, Mechanical Science Institute

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

Rusty wasn’t trying to catch her, he was only trying to stay two steps behind her wherever she went. The problem was that nobody, especially not the little girl, could see the difference. The girl and her mechanical pursuer careened through the aisles, first bowling through the crowd and then through the tables. Test tubes, telescopes, circuit boards, and all kinds of other expensive experiments smashed to the floor. One of the dads in the crowd lunged for my robot, but he only managed to knock over someone else, who fell against another person.Before I knew what was happening, half the crowd went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

Everybody was screaming. The girl started shrieking “Help! Mommy, Help!” but that only made things worse because Rusty is programmed to respond to verbal commands, and “help” means you need a hand up. When she said it, those two pincer-arms deployed, reaching out for her and snapping as they came.

The MIT judge was right in my ear, yelling at me to turn it off, but before I could reach for the power knob, another judge shouldered me out of the way and cranked the knob as far as it would go… in the wrong direction.

The thing about broadcasting electricity is that the electromagnetic pulse, the EMP, is the same thing that causes blackouts within a hundred miles of a nuclear bomb explosion. At lower power and at just the right frequencies, Rusty’s EMP could run small electronics for short periods of time. Maybe it was a mistake to have fit Rusty with the most powerful Tesla coil I could make, because at maximum power it made the magnifying transmitter dangerous to anything with circuits or wires.

The moment the judge accidentally cranked the power to maximum, there was a bright flash overhead as the light bulbs in the ceiling burned out. On the tables all around us, dozens of experiments with electrical components burst into flame, and everyone within twenty feet of Rusty yelped in almost perfect unison as the cell phones in their pockets overheated. At the same instant, Rusty collapsed in place, a pathetic trail of smoke rising from his back, his battery fried by his own sudden output.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

“Question,” said the MIT judge. “Can you explain what you mean by ‘wireless electricity’ and why you would equip your robot with this feature?”

“Sure,” I said, twisting the power knob at the control station. Rusty hummed to life, his limbs twisting and clicking through their initiation sequence. “It’s based on an electromagnetic pulse—EMP for short. This electricity broadcasting is based on the work of Nikola Tesla, who invented the alternating current which runs every plug-in appliance in your home. Tesla was this amazing genius who wanted to broadcast wireless power all over the world, but he never could get funding because nobody could see how it would make money. Anyway, I’m doing it on a small scale and I figured it could be an energy savings if Rusty followed you around in your home. You know, so the lights would come on whenever the two of you entered a room and they’d turn off when you left. No more forgetting to flick the switch.”

One of the other judges raised his hand. “You really think people would want that… that thing following them around in their houses?”

I’m not good with sarcasm or rhetorical questions, but I think that question was really meant to say that Rusty was ugly. That kind of hurt. I’d been working on this robot for years. If you noticed, I even call him a “him” instead of an “it,” because to me he was a family pet. Whether you have a cat, a parakeet, or a robotic scorpion-dog, you still love your pet no matter what. You just can’t help it.

I cleared my throat and moved on, hoping to get back to the important parts of my demonstration. “Rusty can navigate just about any terrain on his own, even climb trees and ladders. If you wear this tracking bracelet,” I held up a black plastic strip about the size of a wristwatch. “Rusty will always follow you obediently wherever you go. Just watch.”

For some seriously stupid reason, I picked the little girl for my demonstration. I don’t know what I was thinking, except maybe I thought if that little girl could see Rusty as I saw him—a reliable and helpful companion—then maybe everyone else would see him that way, too.

I don’t think the girl’s mother realized what I was doing when I asked if I could put the bracelet on her daughter’s wrist, but she said it was okay. The little girl didn’t protest when I clicked it into place.

I returned to the controls and inched the power knob up to ten percent. Rusty hissed as his pistons drew his body up to standing, and the spiked turret on his back twitched. One clanking, growling step was all it took and that little girl screamed and ran. Rusty, following his programming, ran after her.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. (type “J” to skip back one post; type “K” to skip ahead one post)

The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

The judges seemed really interested in the antimatter reactor blueprints. Even the guy from MIT asked a lot of questions, and they all took tons of notes, which meant that they were going to give it lots of points.

Then it was my turn. My palms got really sweaty and I started to feel a bit dizzy. The things I hate the most in the world are germs, followed by bugs and rodents, which carry a lot of germs. But public speaking is a close third. I have a hard enough time talking to people one-on-one, but when there’s a crowd I end up doing really stupid things. I think my IQ is inversely proportional to the number of strangers who are listening to me. The bigger the group, the dumber I feel. And this was a big group.

“So, what have you got for us?” said the judge from MIT, and now every eye in the crowd was on me.

“A robot,” I answered. I could see that this statement didn’t make much of an impact. Half of everyone in the building had come equipped with some little gizmo that could walk or roll or change directions when it bumped into a wall.

“What makes my robot special is two things,” I went on. “The first is that Rusty—that’s my robot’s name—can recognize its master and follow him or her around a room. The second thing is that Rusty can broadcast wireless electricity. That means when Rusty is around, you can run small appliances without having to plug them in.”

That got a few of the judges to scribble some notes on their clipboards, but they weren’t writing a lot. They needed a demonstration.

“Ladies and gentleman,” I said as I gripped the corners of the cloth. “I give you… Rusty!”

The crowd gasped when I pulled back the cover to reveal my Rottweiler-sized metallic monstrosity. I had modeled the robot after a crab, but it came out looking more like a clockwork scorpion, with its eight piston-driven spider legs tensed at its side and its pincer-arms poised in front. Rusty’s back was flat and segmented, mounted at the rear by a turret that terminated in a curved radar dish with a long spike protruding from the center. I had tried to make Rusty’s head more friendly-looking by making it long and somewhat dog-like in appearance. I had even given him big, round, friendly eyes, but I think it may have turned out more menacing and predatory than I wanted, especially because those big eyes flickered red as they received LIDAR range-finding feedback from their surroundings.

Now I had everyone’s rapt attention, but maybe not in a good way. Several of the judges shook their heads, perhaps thinking I had been too theatrical in my presentation. The little girl with pig-tails hid behind her mother’s legs, her Raggedy Ann doll forgotten on the floor as she stared at the mechanical monster only a dozen steps away from her.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

Not for the first time I wished I had an “undo” button for what I said.

The boy just looked at me for a moment. Then he went back to setting up his poster and ignoring me.

“Why do you have to say things like that, Soap?” My Dad was sitting in a folding chair by my project. He put his Popular Mechanics magazine under his arm and gazed up at me with dark, tired eyes. He seemed like a shrunken version of his former self, like one of those ancient Egyptian mummies. It was my fault he looked that way. It costs a bundle for a single father to raise a child in New York, even out where we lived in Flatbush, and I’m way worse than a normal child because of the expensive electronics I keep disassembled on the dining room table. And the fires I start in my bedroom whenever I overload a transformer. And the time I designed a robot that could make other robots out of whatever materials were at hand, which was great except that it mistook the neighbor’s Honda for scrap metal.

Actually, I’ve been worried about my Dad a lot lately. Even after my mom divorced him and moved to Chicago five years ago, he still got really excited about two things: electronic gizmos and basketball. But last time there was a game on tv, he just sat on the couch without even shouting at the refs like he usually does. And when we were shopping for the servos and circuit boards I needed for this science fair project, he just didn’t seem into it, and his face got really pale when it came time to pay for the order.

I sat down quietly and studied my hands for a while. I felt terrible because once again I had said something stupid and disappointed my Dad. There was nothing I could have done to make it better. The only option I thought I had to make it up to my Dad was to amaze the judges, get a scholarship, and move out after graduating high school in two years. To be honest, if the rest of the competition consisted of fantasies like antimatter reactors, I knew I had a decent chance of pulling it off.

After a very awkward hour of sitting between my disappointed father and my pissed-off neighbor, the judges showed up for their demonstration. The MIT professor was in that group, and he was kind of pudgy with wispy blonde hair. There were about ten other judges in boring suits that looked really uncomfortable in the heat of the lingering summer. There were a few spectators as well, mostly the parents of other exhibiters who followed the judges like pilot fish following sharks, probably hoping to pick up tidbits that indicate the current rankings. There was also one little girl with cute blond pig-tails who tagged along after her mother, playing with a Raggedy Ann doll the whole time.

This continues a (slightly abridged) excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel will be available 12/16/2011. In this chapter we really get to know Soap as she (accidentally) wreaks havoc at a high-school science fair.

Chapter 3

Soap

“Well, Soap, I talked to your principal,” my Dad said as we spread the cloth to conceal my experiment. “She says there will be college professors here today. There’s even someone from the admissions office at MIT.”

I have to admit, that made this year’s New York All-State Science Fair Invitational into a big deal for me. MIT is the most famous school of engineering in the world. Their graduates go on to build robots, space ships, fighter jets, and everything else that’s cool. It had pretty much been my dream school since the day my Dad first started pestering me about college planning. But before I could worry about getting into MIT, I needed to worry about winning some science-fair trophies. No awards would mean no scholarships, and no scholarships would mean the only higher education I’d be able to afford would be the Burger Emporium’s training video titled “Do You Want Fries With That?”

As usual, most of the science fair was seriously boring. All the students set up their exhibits at little tables that lined the floor of the big gymnasium, and clusters of judges and spectators would move from one competitor to the next, asking for demonstrations and taking notes. Most of the time, there was absolutely nothing to do but sit back and wait for the next group to come by.

I looked over at the kid next to me. He looked South Asian, maybe Indian. He was very good looking, sharply dressed with close-cropped hair and an athletic build you find at these kinds of gatherings more often than you might expect. That made him just about my opposite: I’m short-ish, I wear all black, I keep my dark hair long but tied back in pony-tail, and I’m not really interested in sports. I’m also not really interested in English or history or Spanish, either, which is why my GPA was pretty much garbage. I always thought it was unfair that colleges cared so much about grade averages. I mean, why do they want me to be good at everything when I only want to study one thing? Can’t I just be good at the thing I’m passionate about and forget the rest? You just have to add that to the list of life’s injustices, I guess.

“What’s your project?” I asked. My brain was still screaming at me to shut up before I made a fool of myself.

“I designed blueprints for an antimatter power plant,” the boy said.

“Whoa, great idea,” and I could feel myself getting jealous. Antimatter fuel would be a thousand times more powerful than a nuclear reaction using uranium, and the only real waste product would be gamma-rays, which could be soaked up with thick shielding. If he had invented that, it would mean the end of the energy crisis on this planet.

“So, how do you make the antimatter?” I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I only designed the plant to burn the stuff in.”

I blinked a few times while I waited for him to finish, but apparently that’s all he had. Apparently, he hadn’t considered that producing antimatter would cost something like 20 billion dollars an ounce—no exaggeration—so it seemed to me like he might as well have been talking about squeezing milk out of dinosaurs.

“Is that seriously all you’ve got?” I said. “That’s pretty lame.”

Tune in on Monday to see how Soap fares at the fair!

For the next few weeks I will post excerpts from my novel Mad Science Institute, which is set to release Friday, December 16, 2011. Read the first 30 pages here first! Then you can hit the ground running when you get your copy.

Chapter 1

Soap

My experiment exploded. Again.

Now I’m thirty feet above a concrete sidewalk, dangling from the railing of a gigantic, burning doomsday machine designed to bring civilization as we know it to a sudden and very messy end. Oh, and BTW: my fingers are slipping.

My name’s Sophia, but people call me “Soap.” They also call me a mad scientist, which I hate. Everyone knows mad scientists are old men in white coats who build monsters and death-rays and stuff and then laugh like maniacs while trying to conquer the world. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, and whoever heard of a girl being a mad scientist? Besides, I don’t mean to keep blowing things up. For me, explosions are just a bad habit, like talking with your mouth full or chronic butt-dialing. The only difference is that my bad habit causes widespread property damage.

So how did I end up here? It sort of started when one of my gizmos accidentally caused a couple dozen cell phones to explode while they were still in people’s pockets. On the up-side, that experiment got me a college scholarship. On the down-side, it set off a chain of events that included chasing a lizard monster through a radioactive basement and being kidnapped by a motorcycle gang. And now I’m stuck between burning alive and falling to my death.

To be fair, half of the story belongs to my cousin, Dean. For him, it started 16 days ago, when the woman he loved showed up out of nowhere. This was the same woman who offered me admission to the college, so it’s probably fair to start the story with them.

More to come tomorrow! Mad Science Institute will be available 12/16/2011. Tell me what you think by leaving a comment below!