Fuzzy Read online

  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.

  His/her SCIENCE score of 62.7 percent is BELOW the passing ACE_FYP score of 65 percent.

  (See attachment for additional scores and data.)

  The category SCIENCE is designated as MANDATORY for completion of GRADE SEVEN.

  Combining these UpGrade results with other recent changes in his/her scores:

  DISCIPLINE (–15.3)

  TARDINESS (–.4)

  SCHOOL CITIZENSHIP (–8.3)

  Produces an Overall #CUG score of 48.341.

  His/her status has been changed to: AT RISK.

  A Federal School Board representative will contact you within two workdays to discuss the options available to MAXINE.

  This time Max’s parents really erupted.

  “But I know I passed that science test!” Maxine protested.

  “You obviously don’t know as much as you think you do, young lady,” said her mother, still waving a printed copy of the report.

  “You don’t understand! I know for a fact I only missed one question on the whole test!”

  “Honey,” her father said, “how could you possibly know that?�
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  “Fuzzy checked my answers.”

  “So you think Fuzzy knows more about the test than the testing software does?”

  “Oh no,” said her mom. “Not that robot again. I admit it was fun talking to it, but it’s obviously a huge distraction to you. It shouldn’t have been here at all on a test night.”

  “I’m not talking about last night, I’m talking about today at school!”

  “Watch your tone, young lady,” said her mom. “That tone isn’t going to help you at all.”

  “Nor is arguing with us about it,” said her dad. “This Federal School Board person is the one we’re going to have to worry about. I’m willing to ask them to have your test regraded, but even if they find a mistake, that’s just one test.”

  “And it’s more than just the tests!” fumed her mother. “Look at the discipline score!”

  The entire weekend passed like this . . . . one big looping argument, interrupted only by study sessions.

  5.3

  HALLWAY B

  The first face she saw when Max dragged herself to school on Monday was about the last one she wanted to see.

  “Well, Ms. Know-It-All,” Biggs said as they made their way down the hall to their respective classes, “I suppose you aced the science test last week.”

  For once, she didn’t feel like getting in an argument with him.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, low voiced, “I flunked it.”

  “You flunked it?” Biggs seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought I was the only one. It seemed like an easy test, what with Ms. French going over all the material fifty times like she did.”

  Max came to a dead stop, causing several other students to pile up behind her. “You didn’t pass, either?”

  “Must have been some trick questions,” Biggs said. Before he could say more, an all-too-familiar grating voice came from the wall next to them.

  “Discipline tags noted for J. Biggs and M. Zelaster,” Vice Principal Barbara said, her avatar frowning in disapproval. “Discussion of test results is not permitted.”

  “But there’s no rule against . . .” Max stopped herself before she got another tag. Obviously there must be such a rule, even if she had never heard of it. She glanced over at Biggs, and for once the two of them seemed in total sympathy with each other. Biggs shook his head angrily, then peeled off to talk to Simeon.

  ZARRRK!! It seemed like Vice Principal Barbara just made up these stupid rules as she went along.

  Max couldn’t wait to talk to Fuzzy, but deliberately avoided doing so in the halls or at lunch. Vice Principal Barbara’s “ears” were everywhere. Max managed to wait until school ended for the day, and asked Jones if Fuzzy could walk around the school track with her.

  “Fuzzy,” she began when they got there, “you said you scanned my test paper and I got a ninety-nine on it . . .”

  “Ninety-eight-point-six-six,” Fuzzy said.

  “Could you have been wrong?”

  Fuzzy hesitated, as though puzzled by such a question. “Of course not,” he said.

  “Then how do you explain that it came back with a sixty-two-point-seven on it?”

  “That is impossible, Max. You had ninety-eight-point-six-six percent correct.”

  “No, Fuzzy, I couldn’t have. And you got Biggs’s results wrong, too. He told me this morning that he also failed.”

  “There must be something wrong with the grading program,” Fuzzy said. “I am sure they will find their error and correct it.”

  Max stamped her foot. “They aren’t looking for any error! They’ve sent the results home. Some kind of school board ‘representative’ is going to be visiting my folks to decide whether I can even stay in school!” She impatiently wiped away tears of frustration.

  “Are you sure?” she asked Fuzzy again. “You only saw my answers from a distance while I was scrolling. Can you really see something for a second and be sure?”

  “Yes,” said Fuzzy, “I can. I was designed to be able to do so.”

  “Well, then, how do you explain it?” Max tried to keep her voice down but with little success.

  Fuzzy did not answer. He was thinking. Trying to answer her question.

  It was complicated. Even for him.

  So he increased the priority of HelpMax() and thought some more.

  5.4

  MAX’S HOUSE

  “And this must be Maxine,” enthused a gushing female voice. “You arrived here at just the right moment, my dear.”

  Max raised her downcast eyes and saw a large red-haired woman seated on a living room chair, facing Max’s parents, who sat together on the couch. The woman, Maxine thought, was built like a tank. She looked like she could qualify for the football team, despite a sweet smile, which Max instantly classified as phony.

  “Max, this is Ms. Brockmeyer,” said Carmen Zelaster.

  “She’s from the Federal School Board,” her father added. “She’s here to talk about your poor performance at school this year.”

  “Oh, let’s not say ‘poor performance,’ Mr. Zelaster,” Ms. Brockmeyer said. “Let us just say that Maxine’s see-you-gee score isn’t what it should be.”

  It took them all a moment to realize that Brockmeyer was talking about Constant UpGrade, #CUG, when she said “see-you-gee.”

  “Maxine needs a bit of work on improving her academics and her attitude. With your help and support, I’m certain the child can accomplish both goals.”

  “Max has always been a good student,” said her father. “I’m sure this test failure was just a lapse. We’ll see that she studies more for the next one . . .”

  “And I’m certain there’s something wrong with the test grading,” said Max. “I’d like to have my test rechecked or even take a retest.”

  “Well, of course, a retest is out of the question, since that would be unfair to students who performed well the first time. However, I will be happy to have the test regraded. Errors do happen. Very rarely, but they do happen.”

  Well, thought Max, at least they’ll look at it.

  But Brockmeyer was far from finished.

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t simply a question of the test scores,” she said, turning to Carmen Zelaster. “We have to look at the overall see-you-gee. Maxine has accumulated so many discipline tags. And then these citizenship scores . . . tut-tut.”

  Maxine couldn’t believe the woman had actually said “tut-tut.” It felt like her whole life was on the line here and this woman was saying “tut-tut”!

  “Now, I can tell already that Maxine is a fine young lady. I have reviewed the recordings of her discipline violations, and I think she just needs a little attitude adjustment.”

  Max’s mother looked at her with an I told you so look.

  “Hopefully,” said Brockmeyer, “that adjustment can happen at Vanguard . . . and quickly. If not, the EC school specializes in precisely the kind of attitude adjustment that seems necessary here.”

  Now both her parents looked at Max with I told you so looks.

  “Vanguard is a school that is laser-focused on academic achievement,” said Brockmeyer. “It’s a wonderful school. Just look at these charts of overall see-you-gee performance. But it might not be right for every student. Some students need to try focusing on discipline first. That’s where the EC schools come in.”

  “Ms. Brockmeyer, I really have tried,” Max said, finally able to speak. “I don’t know where all those discipline tags came from. I usually don’t even know I’ve broken a rule until I hear Vice Principal Barbara say it.”

  “Well, yes, my dear, of course. But that’s just it, don’t you see? The EC school would teach you to recognize school rules and understand their importance, so you won’t keep running afoul of them. That would help your citizenship scores, too!”

  “Is there any way we can appeal your decision?” Don Zelaster asked.

  “Well, right now it’s not a decision. It’s a suggestion. In fact, it’s not even a suggestion. It’s an opti
on. However, if Maxine continues to fail tests or accumulate discipline tags, then it will become a mandatory option.”

  “So I can stay in Vanguard Middle School?” Max almost shouted. She was surprised to find out she wanted to stay so badly. She guessed it was a combination of the dread of the EC school and not wanting to lose her friends: Krysti, despite all her teasing, and . . . Fuzzy!

  Ms. Brockmeyer spent a full minute scrolling her qScreen and looking at data.

  “Yes, you can stay at Vanguard for now. But I have to warn you that at the rate you’ve been going lately, you won’t last long. You’ll really need to make some changes . . .” Ms. Brockmeyer’s speech began to fade into a “blah blah blah” recital in Max’s ears.

  Then Ms. Brockmeyer got to the bad part.

  “There is one thing. Since your test scores are part of the problem, you will have to give up any extra school activities or sports. Vice Principal Barbara has made a note here that you’ve been working with the Robot Integration Program team.”

  “Yes, it’s been fascinating for all of—” began her father.

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly the sort of extra activity that can distract a student from their #CUG scores,” interrupted Brockmeyer. “Max will have to give that up.”

  6.1

  HALLWAY B

  Fuzzy froze up.

  He didn’t fall over this time. He just sort of slouched against a wall.

  “Uh, Fuzzy, what’s going on?” said Simeon, who had enthusiastically volunteered to replace Max in escorting Fuzzy to classes. But they hadn’t even made it to the first class.

  “Nice job, Simeon, you already broke it,” said Biggs as he walked up. “You’re as bad as Max!”

  “C’mon, Fuzzy,” Simeon pleaded. He tried pinging Fuzzy in the side. No reaction.

  Then he saw Max down the hall.

  “Max! Can you help me out here?”

  Max, of course, was already upset about being replaced, and she certainly didn’t want to get in more trouble by getting caught helping Fuzzy. But she walked over to make sure he was OK.

  “I’m surprised the technicians aren’t here already,” she said. “Why don’t you text Dr. Jones?”